Put the mayor under house arrest

The state supreme court says the city owes $35 million to people issued illegitimate traffic camera tickets between 2008 and 2010. The ruling is somewhat technical. During those years the money was collected by the Department of Public Works instead of NOPD in violation of the City Charter. A different suit challenging the constitutionality of all camera tickets is still pending in federal court so stay tuned for that.

Stay tuned also to find out if anybody ever sees an actual refund. As we know, the city is often very late paying out judgements when it isn't ignoring them altogether.  However, there was one time, not too long ago in fact, when the courts decided to play hardball. In 2015, Civil District Court judge Kern Reese came very close to placing Mitch Landrieu under house arrest in an effort to force the city to finally make good on its decades old debt of back pay to firefighters. The state supreme court stopped that at the last minute but the circus seems to have served as a catalyst for the mayor to finally arrange a deal to pay the firefighters.

Anyway Cantrell is quoted in this article pledging this and other judgments will be paid "subject to appropriation" which means, as soon as we find the money, whenever that is. But remember theoretically the judges could still arrest Cantrell, or more likely some future mayor, if there comes a time when they think the foot dragging has gone on too long.

The robot cops we needed

Have you ever parked without paying the meter? Have you paid but gone over the time by a few minutes?  What was the reason? Maybe you stopped in front of a meter to run and drop something in the mailbox across the street. Maybe you left the car somewhere for a brief moment to pick up a friend. Maybe you were stuck in a meeting a few minutes longer than you expected.   Sometimes, if you are unlucky that day, the attendant will happen by at exactly the wrong moment and you end up with a ticket. But on most days you get away with it.  Does that seem fair to you?  Most of us would probably say so.

After all, the purpose of metered parking is to dis-incentivize the hoarding of a scarce resource. In highly trafficked areas, such as an urban commercial corridor, there are often too many cars and too little space to put them all at once.  In order to keep things moving, we make it expensive for any one vehicle to occupy a space indefinitely. A parking fine is like a library fine in that its primary function is to encourage people to share a scarce resource. If you've parked your car at a meter for a minute or two without paying, or if you've gone over the limit a smidge, you really aren't violating the spirit of the law.  Technically you can still be ticketed.  But it's probably fair that you aren't always ticketed.

Of course some people have a different understanding of what the law is for.  Certain city officials, for example Ramsey Green and Jay Banks here, want to use it to punish bicyclists for violating traffic laws originally written to apply to motor vehicles. It's difficult to know how much of that comes from the ever-expanding quest for new ways of shaking money out of people vs how much of it is just general hostility.

There's less confusion over what motivates  LaToya Cantrell's decision to fiddle with the school zone cameras.  Emails and memos uncovered by the Daily Georges show that the primary motivation was to grab as much revenue from unsuspecting motorists as possible. The hostility came as a bonus reaction from the mayor once people started to notice.  

Digging in her heels despite public uproar, Mayor LaToya Cantrell this week defended her surprise move to reduce the speeds that prompt traffic camera tickets in New Orleans, saying her goal was to increase safety.  In a 30-minute interview with her own staffers posted online late Wednesday, the mayor said that dropping the allowable speed for cameras in school zones and elsewhere was a way to protect children. She didn't address why drivers weren't told about the change beforehand.

That article does an okay job of relaying the mayor's comments. But you really have to watch the video to get the full experience of her bullying belligerent style. The main thrust of her message that day was New Orleanians are a bunch of slackers and she is not going to tolerate that anymore.

Letting people take a laissez-faire approach to following the rules often leads to larger problems, she added.

"We have to shake this image of being 'the Big Easy' where you can do whatever you want to in the city of New Orleans," Cantrell said.

This isn't the first time a mayor has lectured us about our insufficiently submissive attitude toward the rules. Mitch Landrieu once argued that we should close all the bars in town at 3 because our "culture of permissiveness" was what was causing all the murders. Our mayors love to tell us our problems can be traced to some inherent character flaw. It's almost as if there's something in their culture of authority that drives them to this. Whatever it is, LaToya has certainly taken to it well.

If a motorist enters a school zone and happens to slow down to 25 mph instead of 24 before the camera tags them, well "that's illegal!" Cantrell shrieks in the video. "We can't pick and choose" how we handle something like that. "Cyclists will be ticketed!" she says, pounding the table. Discretionary enforcement in order to uphold the spirit of the law while accounting for the human elements that might lead to its technical violation from time to time has no place here.

Which brings us back to the parking meters. This week we learned they are getting "more efficient."

NEW ORLEANS — New Orleans is testing out a high-tech system to write parking tickets, without you ever seeing a parking enforcement officer. Placed at two different spots downtown, new meters monitoring parking electronically are currently gathering information the city will study.

"There's always room for improvement on trying to make things more efficient," Deputy Director of Operations Josh Hartley said. "We're looking at the vehicle types that park here, looking at the violations that come in, how long people are actually parking here."

So how does it work? After you park your car, you find your spot number and put your money in the meter. If your time runs out, a sensor in the spot will tell a camera nearby to take a picture of your plate and you could get a ticket.

"There's potential with this technology that if there's a violation activated, this system could automatically generate a ticket," Hartley said. "Versus having staff actually have to come walk to this site and issue a paper ticket you'd normally see on a windshield."

The meters are expected to make enforcement easier by adding extra lenses, instead of eyes, to the street.

"We are wanting to make things more efficient," he said. "This does not eliminate jobs, what it actually does is it would allow us to utilize our resources better in other parts of the city that we normally are not monitoring."

Well at least it does not eliminate jobs. We like that.



It's this "holding people accountable for their parking" bit that is concerning.  For all of the reasons stated above, it seems to us we're already doing that well enough without adding robots. But, hey, it's a free trial offer so...  

And if all goes well, installation around town could be put into drive, holding people accountable for their parking. The trial is free for the city, it's unclear how much the system would cost if implemented. It's already being used in other cities in the United States.  If the city of New Orleans moves forward with the meters, it's expected they'll first be put into the busy parts of downtown and then into other areas.

Speaking of which, how did the free trial come about? According to a press release this week, the vendor is something called Municipal Parking Services Inc.  The product is called a "Sentry SafetyStick" As the WWLTV article says, it is being used in other cities.  Here is a story from Bridgeport, CT where they were removed last year because people were already tired of being "threatened" by them.

As previously reported, a year after installing the high-tech meters, Mayor Joe Ganim’s administration has cried “uncle” in response to complaints the equipment was too aggressive and hard to operate, poorly publicized, and hurting the local economy.

The meters will be replaced with a different model that offers the same conveniences — like accepting credit cards — without the cameras that caught violations and helped to issue tickets-by-mail.

Ricci and Nkwo on Thursday offered members of the council’s contracts committee additional details about the overhaul.

Ricci said the existing meters, built and installed by Municipal Parking Services out of Minnesota, will be replaced with less “threatening” ones supplied by IPS Group of California and already in use in other municipalities.

As usual, though, New Orleans is jumping on board with a scheme that's already failed elsewhere and calling it a "best practice."  Where do they get these ideas?  Well here is one possibility. About a month ago the mayor attended the US Conference of Mayors get together in Hawaii. There was some grousing on talk radio about that but mayors go to these things all the time.  Mitch was actually the President of the USCM for a time.

Basically, it's a trade show.  The mayors get together and congratulate one another on the fantastic and visionary jobs they are all doing. And, of course, there is ample opportunity for them to receive further flattery from potential "corporate partners" who are there to sell them things. Sponsors and presenters at this year's conference include Verizon, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, AT&T, Interise, Google, Facebook, and our very favorite friend of urban policymakers everywhere, Airbnb. I didn't find Municipal Parking Solutions on the agenda, but it's a fair bet they had a rep or two in the room at one or another discussion on "Smart Cities" or "Intelligent Transit Solutions" and whatnot.

Not that this mayor needs much convincing that her citizens and their "Big Easy" attitudes need to be watched more carefully.  But it's nice to know the market may have provided just the robot cop product she needed.

Now we'll never know whose share was fair

So much lost revenue. What a shame.

For nearly two months after the city quietly reduced the threshold for speeding tickets, New Orleans raked in millions of dollars from tens of thousands of drivers who were unaware there was less margin for error as they drove through school zones.

The extra cash more than made up for the money the city was expected to lose after Cantrell decided to take down 20 traffic cameras in other parts of the city, in line with a campaign pledge when she ran for mayor.

The Advocate's analysis, which looked at publicly available data on the nearly 875,000 camera tickets issued in the last two years, shows that after media reports exposed the new rules and warned people about the policy in April, the number of speeders in school zones dropped by 28% on average.

That raises new questions about Cantrell’s claim that she lowered the thresholds to improve the safety of schoolchildren.

Tiered reentry

After this week, the city is turning off the school zone cameras for the summer. (Yay!)  The trick, though is figuring out when they turn them back on. Because our school system is so badly balkanized with charters, nobody really knows when that is going to happen.

“Because there is no singular Orleans Parish School Board calendar for the 2019-20 school year, all of the individual school calendars will be gathered and a determination made for the Citywide date that school zone cameras will become operational in August," the mayor’s office announced.

"The start date will be selected later this summer. Though school zone cameras will not be operational as traffic control devices over the summer, law enforcement will have access to video from the cameras as needed.”‬

LOL the cops are still watching you.  Good of them to throw that in. When the start date is
"selected" will it be announced?  There isn't a great track record with regard to that.

The Year Of Enforcement

"We have to shake this image of being the Big Easy where you can do anything you want in New Orleans" -- LaToya Cantrell

That isn't all she says in this unhinged rambling video about traffic cameras, bicycle regulations and the "year of enforcement." (By the way, I thought LaToya wanted 2015 to be the Year Of Enforcement.  She really does have a thing for policing people.) LaToya has no tolerance whatsoever for nuance, subtlety or the notion of  discretion in law enforcement.  "We can't pick and choose!" about when and where to drop the hammer, she says. If you are driving even one mile over the speed limit, "That's illegal!" End of discussion. There is only force and it must be applied at maximum to everyone. LaToya pounds the table as she declares, "Cyclists will be ticketed!" 

She sounds an awful lot here like her father-in-law Magistrate Judge Harry Cantrell who has been repeatedly criticized for setting excessive bail in defiance of federal court orders meant to shut down what has amounted to a "debtor's prison."  Judge Cantrell is about as empathetic as LaToya.

Cantrell routinely refuses to set bail below $2,500, regardless of the facts of a case or a defendant’s ability to pay, the suit claims. In most cases, the judge forces defendants to seek the services of a commercial bail bondsman, which in Orleans Parish charge a non-refundable 12-percent or 13-percent fee on the total bond amount.

“We don’t go any lower than $2,500 in this court,” Cantrell told one defendant’s attorney. “This court never goes any lower than $2,500,” he said in another case. “I don’t got any lower than $2,500 on my bonds,” he said in yet another. In one instance, he told a lawyer he was going to set bond at $2,500, regardless of what information the lawyer provided.

The bail is the bail.  You can't pick and choose, right?  The law is the law and it has got to be enforced.  If you tried to slow down in the school zone but only made it down to 25 mph  instead of 24 by the time the camera saw you, well it's nice that you tried but also that's too bad. We have to enforce it. If you are playing music in the street for a crowd during a music festival, well that's nice but also "That's illegal!" LaToya's cops are gonna come and shut you down. Here's Kevin Allman on why that's a problem.

Was the street band in violation of some ordinance? Maybe. But doesn't the city have something, anything better to do than to attempt to shut down the next generation of musicians who are trying to make a buck — and making a lot of people happy in the process?

New Orleans' music culture isn't restricted to symphony halls, nightclubs or festivals sponsored by Acura and Shell. It's more organic than that, or it should be. And it's a bad look for a city that pays lip service to "culture bearers" to shut down actual culture bearers outside a multi-million dollar festival where Pitbull and Katy Perry are pulling down huge salaries.

The #CityOfYes official twitter put out some nonsense about how the police acted appropriately by eventually allowing the band to continue playing in somebody's yard because this is how you make "balance" happen or something.   But in reality all that was accomplished was pointless intimidation supposedly on behalf of a neighbor's complaint. Here's Jarvis DeBerry on why that's absurd.

Seriously, the solution that was worked out Friday night is as absurd as the decision of those unnamed residents to complain and is as absurd as the decision from the police to intervene and make the music stop. If the neighbors were bothered by the noise, then how would they be any less bothered by the noise after the band moved from a position in front of the yard to a position in the yard itself? And if they were bothered by something other than the noise, well, then, the police should have just told them to mind their business and that the band was fine.

NOPD shutting down live music in New Orleans, especially during Jazzfest, is always going to draw attention. But this goes beyond the typical NolierThanThou concern olympics over the fate of "culture bearers" whatever they are. The larger issue here is the city's increasingly authoritarian administration and law enforcement regime being brought to bear on its poorer and more vulnerable populations for what often appears to be the mere convenience of officials looking for the easiest and/or most revenue friendly cop-out solution to the problems of municipal governance.  LaToya explicitly says the problem is this "image of being the Big Easy" where people can do what they want to do. So the solution is we have to stop people from doing things.... unless they can afford to pay. Thus the Year of Enforcement also promises to be the Year of Collections. 

Why the party busses?

The city of New Orleans, like a lot of American cities, is hard up for money.  State and federal budgets don't offer as much support to cities for infrastructure or transit or social services as they once did. Even the $2 billion in FEMA road work assistance we've been sitting on is insufficient to meet the need.

We're apparently not allowed to take the money we need from the tourism cabal.  We aren't about to stop handing out tax breaks to real estate developers or to movie productions or to industrial concerns in "opportunity zones."  We're definitley not going to tax any property held by any politically important local non-profits.   Instead, we're going to see if we can squeeze more out of poor people and those who aren't on the ball enough to defend themselves.

This is why we're sending your name to a collection agency over your water bill even if we still don't know how to make that bill accurate.  It's why we're playing games with traffic cameras to see how many people we can entrap. It's why we're still saddling defendants with excessive bail even if we have to defy a federal judge's order to do it.  It's why we're taking advantage of legitimate concerns with motorists who obstruct bike lanes by jacking the fine for that up to an absurd $300.  And it's why we're in the process of exploring other concerns over bicycle safety to find excuses for police to also write tickets to bicyclists.

In short, we are governed according to which policy choices are most likely to generate the highest amount of revenue in the shortest amount of time from sources least likely to fight back.  Which is how it came to be that we suddenly wake up one day and discover that "not a single New Orleans party bus in in legal status."

Smith said there are some party buses that could obtain the certificates with proof of proper insurance, registration and “minimal modifications.” According to rules the city issued in 2017, party buses are considered “Charter Party Carriers" and must have working fire extinguishers and display the CPNC number on the back of the vehicle.

No doubt quite a few of these fly by night operators could stand for a little more scrutiny.  But let's not pretend your city leaders are primarily concerned with anybody's safety and well being here.  If that is the motivation in this case, it would certainly be unique.

Mostly this is about punitive enforcement for the sake of revenue generation. To some degree it is also a chance for the mayor and our more right-leaning councilmembers to exercise a favorite hobby horse and pander to the neighborhood association busybodies who comprise a large part of their base.  But, again, mostly it's about making money... not by taking it from those who can spare it but from those who are most vulnerable to coersion.  The party bus operators are one such opportunity. But one among several.

Chaos Mayor

Gill isn't wrong to write about this, exactly. It's just that his premise is a bit off.

It cannot be said that LaToya Cantrell was elected mayor of New Orleans just because voters believed she would get rid of traffic cameras, but her stance sure was wildly popular.

Cantrell is hardly the first politician to abandon her principles on election, or to resort to dirty tricks. But it requires a special talent to do both at the same time.

The problem is Cantrell never really had a stance to reverse herself on in the first place.  From the very beginning of her campaign, she was impossible to pin down on the question even though she raised it herself in her opening speech.

In the course of less than 24 hours, New Orleans controversial traffic cameras came down, went back up, and then came down again. They did, at least, in the context of mayoral candidate LaToya Cantrell's campaign promises, which were laid out, taken back and then reaffirmed.

Maybe it's just a function of the prevailing political zeitgeist but I've been interested in the way our mayor's style tracks with that of whoever is President during their term. Nagin and Bush were possessed of an avuncular goofiness you might mistake for charm if it weren't in service to naked corruption and incompetence. Mitch and Obama were more professional and polished and dangerously adept at masking predatory capitalist policy choices with woke sounding platitudes.

LaToya has characteristics in common with Donald Trump. She can be loud and a bit of a bully sometimes. For example, here she is screaming at the news media that they are trying to "screw the city."  Also, like Trump, she campaigns and governs in a state of chaos.  She just says things and then just as quickly says the opposite. The audience can take whatever they want from whatever part of what she says and then become excited or outraged according to whatever interpretation they like. It doesn't matter if that's confusing. The news cycle doesn't last long enough to sort stuff out anyway.

But what we can't say about it is that Cantrell "abandoned her principles" with regard to the traffic cameras.  She never applied any discernible principle to the issue to begin with. She just said things and immediately contradicted herself.  Her position never reached a level where it was a credible enough promise for anyone to put any real stock in. You could call it a transparent lie but it's not even that.

Anyway, the cameras are still there. And now they have lowered the threshold for error at which the robots will issue tickets. They say they're doing this because they want to "reduce fatality rates" but nobody believes that either. Or rather nobody is actually meant to believe it unless they want to. And, as it happens, one or two online fanatics seem to have decided they want to. So now everybody is yelling again but not enough people are yelling directly at the mayor. Because if nobody knows what side she's on today, nobody knows what to yell at her about. That's how the chaos works. Is it political genius or is it an accident?  It's the question of the moment in New Orleans and in Washington.

Being poor is very expensive

During his time overseeing the annual city budget process, Mitch Landrieu used to talk about the drying up of state and federal aid to cities by telling us "the cavalry was no longer coming" from Baton Rouge and Washington. Because we've spent several decades now dismantling federal policies intended to help cities house, feed, and educate and care for their populations, our cities have undergone a bloody cycle of deterioration, privatization, and, finally, reclamation as places that only the wealthy can afford to live comfortably.  Of course, Mitch's policy response was mainly focused on conforming to rather than resisting these circumstances but at least he understood the problem.

Not that that was ever much help to the non-wealthy people of New Orleans who, over the course of what we euphemistically refer to as this city's "recovery" from the Katrina disaster, faced the hardships of diminished services, increased cost of living, the privatization of their schools, and the selling off of their neighborhoods to predatory investors.  All the while this was going on, Mitch continually warned of a time when even the federal disaster aid would run out and the city would be on the hook to cover the costs of repairing and maintaining its vital infrastructure.

The main part of Mitch's strategy for dealing with this was to do everything he could to encourage the rapid gentrification of New Orleans. Never mind that this necessarily meant the city would have to become a glorified resort where nobody actually lives. Anything to keep inflating those property values, and hopefully, the potential tax revenue along with them. Outside of this, the strategy in New Orleans has been little different from what cities all over the country have done to fill their growing budget gaps.  Namely, they've gotten more and more aggressive about shaking down the poor. 

In areas hit by recession or falling tax revenue, fines and fees help pay the bills. (The costs of housing and feeding inmates can be subsidized by the state.) As the Fines and Fees Justice Center, an advocacy organization based in New York, has documented, financial penalties on the poor are now a leading source of revenue for municipalities around the country. In Alabama, for example, the Southern Poverty Law Center took up the case of a woman who was jailed for missing a court date related to an unpaid utility bill. In Oregon, courts have issued hefty fines to the parents of truant schoolchildren. Many counties around the country engage in civil forfeiture, the seizure of vehicles and cash from people suspected (but not necessarily proven in court) of having broken the law. In Louisiana, pretrial diversion laws empower the police to offer traffic offenders a choice: Pay up quickly, and the ticket won’t go on your record; fight the ticket in court, and you’ll face additional fees.

As that Times article shows us, poor people in cities all over the country can be sucked into a suffocating spiral of imprisonment and legal fees by something as simple as an expired brake tag. But perhaps the tide is turning. 

Late last year, a federal judge ruled that Orleans Criminal Court's fee structure was tantamount to the operation of an unconstitutional "debtor's prison." Presumably steps are being taken to rectify this. But a lasting solution has not yet become evident. Mayor Cantrell ran on a promise to take down the city's hated traffic cameras which she herself criticized for "nickel and diming" the citizenry. But, as we've seen, she's really only partially lived up to that promise. Basically the money still has to come from somewhere. And while we appear to be getting better at recognizing it shouldn't come from those least able to pay, we've only just begun to where it probably ought to come from instead. And that is still going to be a fight.

Who watches who and why

Here is a map to all of the traffic cameras in New Orleans that are no longer active as of the new year. It's the mayor's way of.. almost.. keeping a campaign promise.

As of Jan. 1, 20 of 31 cameras outside of school zones, including the one southbound one in front of Scoggin’s home, were shut off, in a boon for motorists who have long complained about being ticketed on their way to work or school.

Left up are the city's most lucrative non-school-zone cameras. Also still rolling are dozens of cameras in about 50 school zones, though the devices have been adjusted to only issue tickets during school zone hours.

The changes balance the need for motorists' safety with the mayor’s desire to remove a financial burden on the city’s residents, said Cantrell’s Chief Administrative Officer Gilbert Montaño.

“We took the cameras that were providing the least amount of tickets and turned those off,” he said in a Friday interview. “The 11 that remain on were ones where we still need a little bit of help from the public.”

Montano's phrasing is rich.  A different way of putting it would be they deactivated the cameras that were providing the least about of revenue and kept the 11 that enable the public to "help" keep the city budget in balance by graciously continuing to be "nickel-and-dimed" as the mayor once put it.

Oh also, this doesn't mean they're actually getting rid of all 31 deactivated cameras.  Some of them are just getting moved. 

Meanwhile, non-school zone cameras deactivated under the rules will likely be relocated to school zones, Montaño said. Although those locations haven’t been determined, he said the city is considering placing more cameras near high schools since most cameras now are located near schools with younger children.

Whatever part of this qualifies as LaToya keeping her campaign's founding promise is getting more and more difficult to see. But there probably isn't going to a be a political price to pay. The traffic cameras are unpopular, generally. But the public seems to be grudgingly ok with the ones in the school zones.

What is the public's feeling on mass police surveillance, though?  I'm sure there's some depressing poll out there that says everybody is for it. I just haven't seen it yet. No doubt our councilmembers have, though, since they're all gung-ho about reviving Mitch Landrieu's failed camera-in-every-corner-bar ordinance this month. It doesn't have to be a poll, actually. It's really just a matter of the right feedback from the right money to get them to move even on something as morally objectionable as this.

It's an interesting contrast, though. Generally speaking we hate the cameras pointed at our cars in case we run a few miles over the speed limit. But we love the cameras pointed at other people in case they... happen to be hanging out on the corner in a way that makes us uncomfortable. What do you think the major distinction is?

"It became clear she was not open..."

Interesting that the strongest public statement from the mayor on moving City Hall to Charity Hospital comes second hand via Jay Dardenne.

There are also open questions about who would be an anchor tenant in the building. According to the 1532 Tulane Partners' proposal, developers had multiple discussions with Mayor LaToya Cantrell's office, and it became clear that she was not open to city becoming a tenant at a revamped Charity.

It never "became clear" from LaToya's own statements, though. All we had to go on in that regard was her suggestion to BGR that she was working out a plan to move to the Municipal Auditorium.  Only that was walked back almost immediately by her CAO. 

But Montano said an interview later in the day that the administration hasn't even begun researching the space it would need to move City Hall. In the past two weeks, the city has requested proposals from consultants to help determine those needs. Its current 10-story City Hall on Perdido Street has 330,000 square feet of office space, and it leases another 118,000 square feet at 1340 Poydras St.

Montano went on to say that Charity was "still on the table" along with a number of options. Dardenne also says he hopes LSU will continue pursuing the City Hall deal.  But only he seems to have gotten a solid bead on her position on it this week.

Anyway it's hard to pin LaToya down on anything.  This trend goes back to her very first day as a mayoral candidate when she took several positions at once on the city's traffic cameras.  We still don't know what her position is on that. We also haven't heard from her on the short term rental question now advancing to City Council.  Recently it seems she is even wavering on her campaign promise to support a $15 minimum wage for city workers.  A lot of people voted for this mayor. Does anybody know what she actually stands for?

Today might be a good time to ask her that yourself, actually.  You may remember that Cantrell has decided to compress the previous administration's series of community budget townhall meetings into just two phone-in sessions.  The first of those happens today.

These live, interactive budget sessions will allow the Mayor to hear directly from constituents.

The schedule is as follows:

Thursday, Oct. 4, 5:30 p.m. -- Districts A, B, and C 
Wednesday, Oct. 10, 5:30 p.m. -- Districts D and E 

To participate, call 866-785-1533 or visit the website vekeo.com/cityofnola/#event-23837 to register. Once registered, you will be notified when the session is about to begin.

The public is invited to take part.

Not sure how many people will actually call in to these, or if the answers they get will make any sense. But it's a good opportunity to at least let them know what kinds of questions you have.  

Bringing in the best

Just going to put the reminder up here that Cantrell's CFO was hired as the result of a national search. 

Mayor-elect LaToya Cantrell’s pick as chief financial officer of New Orleans once held the same position under disgraced former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who is now serving a 28-year sentence in federal prison on corruption charges.

At that time the best the  Advocate could do to reassure us about White with regard to Kilpatrick's scandals was to say,  "Those controversies in many cases followed a pattern that began before White's tenure as chief financial officer, and it’s not entirely clear what role he played in continuing them."

So, okay. Keep an open mind.  Here's what that gets us so far.

In an interview, Brossett said he was disappointed with city Chief Financial Officer Norman White's lack of preparation and his failure to give the committee any idea of what the budget impact would be if changes were made to the traffic camera program.

Instead of a long-term budget outlook for 2019, White provided the council with data on traffic cameras mounted in school zones. They are among the biggest revenue generators because they have a lower trigger point for issuing tickets -- vehicles 6 mph or faster over the limit are ticketed during school hours versus 10 mph for cameras in non-school zones. The school zone cameras are also placed along some of the city's most traveled thoroughfares.

Council members questioned some of White's numbers because they conflicted with a report they received given in July during a revenue estimating conference, where officials get an update on tax receipts and other sources of city income. School zone cameras are projected to generate $12 million during non-school hours in 2018, according to the July report. White's presentation put the amount at $7.1 million.

Well, alright.  Maybe give him some time, though.  It says here he has a considerable amount of experience figuring out how best to maximize revenue from drivers. 

The plaintiffs are Kayla Friess, 25, of Detroit, who has received numerous parking violations by the city of Detroit over the years. At least one of the tickets was for $45. She paid the fine within 10 days, but was still charged the full amount.

Issa Haddad, 40. of West Bloomfield is the other plaintiff. He also has received numerous parking tickets in Detroit, including at least one for $45. 

The lawsuit, filed by attorney Shaun Godwin, is seeking class-action status.  The defendants  are the city, Wisconsin-based parking meter contractor Duncan Solutions; Detroit parking director Norman White; and James Canty, manager of the city's parking violations bureau.

Maybe they should let him look at S&WB. 

Moving in the direction of looking

So here is some more math for you.  If you stare really hard at $25 million does it start to get any smaller at some point?

On Thursday, here's what council members wanted to know.

"Are you moving in the direction of removing cameras?" asked Councilwoman Helena Moreno.

"We are moving in the direction of just looking at the data, so clearly we are looking at this," said White.

 We're getting into budget season. Pretty soon they're going to have to decide whether or not they can afford to keep the founding promise of their mayoral campaign. (They can't)

Are you sure we have the technology to make this work?

LaToya has a "compromise" idea for the traffic cameras. The Advocate calls it a compromise, anyway. Is that really the term for what this is, though? I mean  the person she is compromising with in this case is herself.

Although she once pledged to remove all of the scores of cameras along the city's major thoroughfares, Cantrell said she now wants to retain them in school zones but only during the hours when reduced speeds are enforced to protect students on their way to and from school.

The rest of the cameras could be removed in phases, so that the millions of dollars the city derives each year from camera traffic tickets won't fall off the books all at once.

It's also not clear if Cantrell ever came to a "compromise" estimate the actual amount of revenue the cameras produce. During the campaign she often diluted the Landrieu administration's figure as overinflated. In any case, this article says the new scheme would still mean an overall loss of $15.8 million next year. I assume the plan is to make that up by writing more thousand dollar tickets to bicyclists.

But the other question that hasn't been asked yet is, how can we be sure the cameras will actually limit themselves to ticketing vehicles during school zone hours. After all, we still aren't sure we can even get the warning lights to flash at the right times. Could end up having to reach a lot of compromises over disputed tickets.

"Detailed look"

On the very first official day of her campaign for mayor, LaToya Cantrell's very first campaign promise was about traffic cameras.  It was a confusing promise even then.

On Tuesday evening (July 18), Cantrell delivered a wide-ranging speech on her platform as one of 18 mayoral candidates. Here's what the City Councilwoman said in that speech.

"We don't know if traffic cameras are making our streets safer," Cantrell said. "As your mayor, I will suspend the use of the cameras until it can be proven that they actually work as intended."

But then, The Advocate reported that Cantrell said after the speech she only wanted to suspend part of the traffic camera program. Mayor Mitch Landrieu expanded enforcement by 50 cameras earlier this year.

The significance of that statement apparently hadn't become apparent to her campaign, however, because spokesman David Winkler-Schmit on Wednesday morning spoke to NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune about how the program's suspension could affect the budget. Tickets issued through traffic cameras are projected to generate about $24 million for the city this year.

After further prodding, the campaign decided that, yes, in fact, the promise would apply to all of the cameras.  Still, after the election, the transition team recommended that she leave them in place taking the position that $24 million in revenue is not something we should just let go of.

 But this argument had already come up during the campaign. At the time, Cantrell said that she doubted the figure.  Today, her CAO says they're going to take a "detailed look" at it.

In a statement, Cantrell's spokesman Beau Tidwell said the Mayor's stance on the traffic cameras remains unchanged.

"As you know, the revenue was built into the 2018 budget," Tidwell said, which is why Cantrell couldn't remove traffic cameras upon taking office. "We have to make any changes responsibly and with a full understanding of what the fiscal impact would be. So yes -- the CAO is taking a detailed look at the issue before we proceed."

Couldn't take them offline when she got there. But I guess this means there is a possibility that the next fiscal year could begin with the cameras suspended until we can figure out what is going on.

If so, they'd better have an idea in place as to how they're going to handle that NOPD deficit. That thing just keeps growing.

The New Orleans Police Department is already projecting a need for at least $9.2 million in new city spending in 2019 due to police pay raises and other factors. For City Councilman Joe Giarruso, that expansion in police spending is leading to questions about how much removing all traffic cameras could cost. On Thursday, he said the cameras were projected to generate as much as $25.2 million.

Highwaymen

Gill's column today  is about an ethics complaint the Southern Poverty Law Center has lodged against Louisiana DAs  pretrial diversion programs. The Advocate reported on the complaint earlier this week.

There are several problems here beginning with the establishment of a de-facto tiered system of justice that allows a relatively convenient way to avoid prosecution for those who can afford to pay for it.  It also allows the DAs to vacuum money out of local courts and public defender's offices who (perhaps unwisely) are dependent on fines for operating funds.

But the most egregious element is the DAs' use of off-duty traffic officers to shake down motorists with what are basically the "fake subpoenas" of traffic tickets.  Gill writes,

Some district attorneys make sure the money keeps rolling in by hiring off-duty cops just to pull drivers over. They even have their own tickets printed up with instructions on how to pay. It makes a lot of sense to do so; that keeps insurance companies out of it.

Those special tickets also include a warning that, if you sign up for diversion and fail to pay, your driver's license will be suspended, which is a lie. Prosecutors have no authority to impose penalties, but then they have no authority to issue subpoenas either and that has not always stopped them.

SPLC's complaint doesn't name Orleans Parish. Of course we have a system that allows a private contractor to profit off of traffic enforcement by deploying robots all over town.  Hey, LaToya campaigned on taking those down.  What's going on with that? 

Don't ever fight City Hall

Hey guess what. Amidst all the other crazy crap going on, the 2018 city budget was passed today.  We can barely remember the hearings. The public meetings were all cancelled what with the elections and all.  Wonder if those will ever come back.

Anyway among the interesting items in here are some cryptic comments for LaToya about the $16 million worth of traffic camera revenue that maybe they'll look at replacing, you know, next year or something.

Also there's this regarding the mountain of money the city owed to various people due to court judgements over the years.

Among the other budget highlights is a $2 million allocation for the city's judgments fund, which can be used to pay the city's huge backlog of unpaid judgments. The city owes a total of $41 million to people who have obtained court judgments against the city, some of which have gone unpaid since the 1990s. The $2 million allocation adds to $4 million already being set aside for the judgments.

Deputy Mayor Ryan Berni said that the city attorney's office is preparing to make offers to people with judgments on the list to settle the debt at 50 cents on the dollar, or to receive a 10 percent payment up front and remain on the list.

Yeah well good luck to the "winners" in those cases. Don't ever fight City Hall. Especially if you plan on winning.

"Better than I ever imagined"

Remember back in January when Mitch got the convention center to pay for a bunch of "anti-crime" stuff in the Quarter?  There were a number of controversial points to that plan. Among these were restricted access to Bourbon Street, a 3 AM closing time for bars, and a requirement that all bars equip themselves with cameras feeding into NOPD's panopticon.

After some public outcry, the mayor's people walked back the 3AM thing. And they said they weren't interested in doing the interior cameras. But it turns out, today, they're still working on getting that to happen.

Landrieu said his administration is working with the City Council to write legislation that would require bars to install surveillance cameras that will feed into the center.

“It’s better and better than I ever imagined,” said Mayor-elect LaToya Cantrell. “This is the right step in the right direction at the right time.”

Nice of LaToya to throw in her two cents there. Just so we know what side she's on.  Not that we had much doubt from the beginning.

The department won’t specify where the cameras will be located, but said they would be stationed first in high-traffic areas and crime hot spots.

“Crime is out of control, shootings are up,” said Councilwoman LaToya Cantrell. “We need to be proactive in terms of catching criminals and deterring crime.”

Cantrell stresses that the readers are not for profiling or harassing people on the street, but for tracking vehicles used in crimes.

“It has nothing to do with profiling at all,” she said. “It doesn’t show you who’s in the vehicle, what they’re wearing, their skin color. It’s totally focused on that license plate as well as the make and model of the car.”

Cantrell said it will be a tool in the crime-fighting arsenal that the city so badly needs.

“My constituents are saying that crime is their number one issue. They not only want to feel safe, they want to be safe.”

LaToya is exactly the sort of bullying simple thinker who shouldn't be anywhere near police powers. But even our supposed liberals are pretty fascist these days so it's no surprise we elected her mayor. Anyway the surveillance state is "better than she could have imagined."

Meanwhile, speaking of keeping the public under constant uncomfortable surveillance, this came out during today's press conference.

Cantrell will evaluate traffic camera system during transition period.

— The_GambitLIVE (@The_GambitLIVE) November 21, 2017

Well that's different.  Just a few days ago, she was a definite "Y" on dumping the cameras altogether. Wonder what happened.

LaToya and traffic cameras has been a long and interesting saga.  It's pretty funny that she spent so much time talking about her vast "experience" in city government when it turns out her experience as a camera opponent only began when the campaign kicked off. Also, even at that point, nobody on the campaign, including the candidate seemed to know what their actual position was. 

On Tuesday evening (July 18), Cantrell delivered a wide-ranging speech on her platform as one of 18 mayoral candidates. Here's what the City Councilwoman said in that speech.
"We don't know if traffic cameras are making our streets safer," Cantrell said. "As your mayor, I will suspend the use of the cameras until it can be proven that they actually work as intended."

But then, The Advocate reported that Cantrell said after the speech she only wanted to suspend part of the traffic camera program. Mayor Mitch Landrieu expanded enforcement by 50 cameras earlier this year.

The significance of that statement apparently hadn't become apparent to her campaign, however, because spokesman David Winkler-Schmit on Wednesday morning spoke to NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune about how the program's suspension could affect the budget. Tickets issued through traffic cameras are projected to generate about $24 million for the city this year.

During the debates she was adamant in saying the city's estimate of $24 million in traffic camera revenue is wrong.  Is she going to "evaluate" that again now too?  When she does that, will she take into account the contributions of camera contractor American Traffic Solutions to her campaign?  If she does that would be incredibly disappointing.  I mean, Boysie Bollinger and Leslie Jacobs put together a whole PAC to warn us that the other candidate was the corrupt one.  You don't think they were being less than up front with us about that, do you?  Why would they do that?

Politically bankrupt

Here's a new ProPublica report on racial disparities embedded in the bankruptcy process. Even the American debt relief system is largely segregated. Typically, black debtors are much more likely than whites to be shunted into Chapter 13 bankruptcy than into Chapter 7. Here's why that's important.

Under federal bankruptcy law, people overwhelmed by debt have a choice: They can either file under Chapter 7, which wipes out debts and, since most filers lack significant assets, allows them to keep what little they have. Or they can choose Chapter 13, which usually requires five years of payments to creditors before any debts are eliminated, but blocks foreclosures and car repossessions as long as debtors can keep up. In most of the country, Chapter 7 is the overwhelming choice. Only in the South, in a band of states stretching from North Carolina to Texas, is Chapter 13 predominant.

The responsibility of knowing which path to pick falls to those seeking relief. In Memphis, about three-quarters of filings are under Chapter 13. That’s how Miller filed. She thought the two chapters were “the same,” she told me.

Initially, they are. Upon filing, debtors are shielded from garnishments and debt collectors. But whereas under Chapter 7 those protections are generally made permanent after a few months, under Chapter 13 they last only as long as payments are made. Most Chapter 13 filers in Memphis don’t last a year, let alone five.

As efficiently as cases are opened, they are closed — usually because debtors fail to keep up with payments, according to a ProPublica analysis of court data. In 2015, over 9,000 cases in the district were dismissed — more cases than were filed in 22 other states that year. Less than a third of Chapter 13 cases in the district result in a discharge of debts. And when their cases are dismissed, debtors are often in worse straits, because as they struggled to make payments, the interest on their unpaid debts continued to mount. Once the refuge of bankruptcy is gone, the debt floods back larger than ever. They’ve borne the costs of bankruptcy — attorney and filing fees, a seven-year flag on their credit reports — without receiving its primary benefit. A system that is supposed to eliminate debt instead serves to magnify it.

There are in-depth analyses here that focus on Memphis and on Chicago where the reporters hit on a common contributing factor to the disparity.

Court debt: In our sample, 29 percent of debtors from black tracts had this kind of debt (compared to 9 percent of debtors from white tracts), and for 6 percent of cases, it was the largest debt. The vast majority of this debt came from Shelby County’s General Sessions Criminal Court, which handles traffic cases and misdemeanors. In interviews, bankruptcy attorneys said this was generally related to driver’s license issues. Nonpayment of a court debt can lead to suspension of a driver’s license, and debtors often file under Chapter 13 either to prevent suspension of a license or to have their licenses reinstated. Debtors’ driver’s licenses are generally reinstated upon confirmation of their cases. This type of debt is not dischargeable in a Chapter 7.

The racial disparity for this kind of debt in bankruptcy cases is reflective of a disparity in the suspension of driver’s licenses. We obtained data on driver’s license suspensions in Shelby County and found that suspensions stemming from traffic infractions (the most common source of a suspension) were six times more common among black residents than white residents.

Terrible harm is being done to the most vulnerable people in the country because municipalities have become ever more aggressive in their efforts to squeeze revenue out of such people. The predictable result is spiraling debt, unstable communities, and violence. In particular it has meant police violence against black people. Municipal fees were at the heart of the tensions with police preceding the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. This John Oliver segment from two years ago on municipal violations and poverty still holds up. A national debate over civil asset forfeiture is still ongoing despite suffering a setback this year thanks to the stubborn bigotry of US Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

In New Orleans, we're struggling with these problems just like every other city.  At the same time we hand out special tax break "incentives" to for profit developers, we fund essential public functions such as the basic right to a due process defense with traffic camera revenues.

The compound absurdities of this show up in our current election cycle where all of the major mayoral candidates have pledged to take down at least some traffic cameras. No doubt the cameras are unpopular with voters. But even as they try to make hay of this on the campaign trail, the candidates aren't instilling any confidence that they can make good on their promises. LaToya had to go through several rounds of clarification where her position changed from taking down all cameras, to only the "newer" cameras, and then back to all the cameras before what's lately become all except for the school zone cameras. There was one forum where Desiree said she would take them all down"if we can afford it."  When the entire system is rigged to make the cameras fiscally essential, that's going to prove a difficult qualifier to meet.

All of which indicates those cameras aren't going anywhere.  A candidate who is serious about removing them would first have to be serious about upending the status quo of systemic violence against poor people and especially poor people of color upon which the fortunes of its privileged classes is built. None among this group fits such a description. Is there a chapter in the code that covers political bankruptcy?

Budget Day

Mitch Landrieu will present his final budget proposal as Mayor of New Orleans today at 10:00.  Remember there weren't any community meetings this year and the mayor just took a few phone calls instead. Less entertaining.

Anyway I wonder what it will say about the traffic cameras. Allegedly all the major candidates want to phase them out but none has any idea how to make up the $20 million plus in revenue they supposedly produce.

Highwaymen

We live in a weird echo of the Ancien Regime where law enforcement agencies and courts fund themselves directly though funds raised by stopping and fining people.  District Attorneys have a lot of leverage in such a system. They're finding new ways to make it work for them.

The Lens asked seven district attorneys, covering 11 parishes, for records on their traffic diversion programs. Those DAs are diverting as many as half of their traffic tickets, according to the records. Several said their programs are growing.

Meanwhile, the courts in most of those judicial districts are handling fewer tickets. Statewide, there has been a 30 percent drop in tickets processed by courts over the past five years, according to data collected by the state Supreme Court.

In East and West Feliciana parishes, the number of traffic tickets processed in court has fallen 35 percent in the last five years.

The local district attorney has diverted about half of all tickets since 2013, according to public records.

District Attorney Sam D’Aquilla acknowledged his program keeps money out of the court system, but he said he needs it. For instance, one program requires his office to pay officers overtime for working extra hours to write traffic tickets.

“And that’s kind of why we started the diversion program, we just weren’t making the money,” he said.

Across the state, it appears that more tickets are being written even as fewer tickets are being processed through the courts which means, more money is going directly to the DAs. The Lens notes that we don't see this exact issue in Jefferson or in Orleans Parish. 

The district attorneys in Orleans and Jefferson parishes don’t run traffic diversion programs, although tickets have dropped significantly. In New Orleans, that’s due to the police department’s decision to move officers from traffic enforcement as it deals with understaffing.

In New Orleans, of course, we are filling the gap with cameras which may not fund the courts or the DAs directly but do account for an estimated $24 million in revenue to the city (after American Traffic Solutions takes its 30% cut) so everybody is subject to some version of this.