Telephone

This may seem like a tired point but it's worth considering again that there was a six month transition period before this administration took over.

City leaders in New Orleans have roughly three months to fashion next year's budget, and interests who have followed the process closely in years past are concerned over how much input the public will have in setting spending priorities.

Mayor LaToya Cantrell is considering whether to hold a series of telephone town halls to gather input on the 2019 budget, which her spokesman Beau Tidwell said was a "model used successfully last year." The mayor will begin engaging with residents on budget priorities "this fall," and plans for the telephone town halls are still being finalized, he said.

Sure, there was plenty of reasons to criticize Mitch's budget town halls.  It was never clear how anything that happened there actually plugged into the budget proposal the mayor produced. Sometimes they even happened after the document had been published.  Still, the telephone calls aren't an improvement. If anything they're a step backward. Which is exactly what Kelsey Foster says here.

Kelsey Foster, budget campaign manager for the Committee for Better New Orleans, said it was "disappointing" and "frustrating" to hear that Cantrell's administration is continuing Landrieu's one-time use of telephone town halls last year. The  nonprofit good government group had pushed for improving education ahead of Landrieu's seven annual in-person town halls that began in 2010, and its leadership sharply criticized the move to telephone town halls last year.

"The telephone town halls are what should be a much larger input opportunity. By themselves, they're kind of a step backward," Foster said.

But more importantly, the phone calls were a one-off choice by a Landrieu Administration on its way out the door last year at a time when public meetings were likely to have conflicted with.. or perhaps found themselves co-opted into.. campaign events during the concurrent election season. Maybe a spectacle like that might have been fun for some of us. But it probably would not have been for Mitch. So they just blew everything off with a conference call.

Cantrell has been a city council person for more than one term so she has plenty experience with all of this. Her transition team had six months lead time to put an administration together. The administration had all year to figure out how they wanted to do the budget. And it looks like what they've decided is... eh... whatever happened last year is fine.. maybe.