In sweeping reform, Mayor Landrieu appends the suffix "stat" to a bunch of stuff

With an eye toward crime, Landrieu administration starts tracking quality-of-life issues

Basic idea: New Orleans has, for some time, had a lot of potholes, broken streetlights, and abandoned vehicles. Oh and murders too.

So what we're going to do is this. We're going to take all of that stuff and put it down on a spreadsheet. (Except not the murders. Those are kept on a separate spreadsheet so that they can be easily matched to the arrest records of the victims... well usually, anyway.)

Next we'll take that spreadsheet to a meeting where we will frown at it in such a way that "target(s) the ills that (we) think lead indirectly to crime."

While the initiative aims to monitor a slew of matters that create minor headaches for residents -- from potholes to illegal signs to unpruned trees on neutral grounds -- officials plan to target the ills that they think lead indirectly to crime, Chief Administrative Officer Andy Kopplin said.

The strategy aligns with Landrieu's vow to make reducing the city's soaring homicide rate his top priority.

"It's not that we're not going to be focused on potholes all over the city," Kopplin said. "But we're truly going to be trying to prioritize those things that we think are as closely related to the crime-fight as possible."

So, in order to maintain our stance that homicide is our "top priority," we're going to also "prioritize" and "target" but not necessarily physically do anything that we weren't already doing about a set of other public nuisances. We realize this may seem silly at first but keep in mind, and this is the key point, we'll be doing it all "with an eye toward crime." So there. Oh and we're putting a "stat" on the end of it as well just so you'll know how serious we are.

Dubbed QualityofLifeStat, the program becomes the latest effort by Landrieu to set clear performance goals and measure progress toward them. Like the Police Department's ComStat program, QualityofLifeStat will involve regular meetings during which mayoral aides review their progress toward established goals.