BGR asks you to reelect the shadow government

During the last week of March, the City Council approved three new Sewerage and Water Board directors. These three were picked from among the names submitted by the unelected committee of business club members and university presidents who the empowers to decide such matters for some reason.

The new board members include Janet Howard, the former president and CEO of the watchdog Bureau of Governmental Research; Dr. Maurice Sholas, a New Orleans-based psychiatrist who runs a clinic consulting firm; and Glen Pilié, an attorney with the firm Adams and Reese who worked as a civil engineer with the U.S. Corps of Engineers in the 1970s.

The three new members were among more than a dozen applicants recommended by a group of local university presidents convened as a selection committee, per state law. Their choices went to Mayor LaToya Cantrell, who the law charges with making Sewerage & Water Board director appointments. The City Council approved her appointments Thursday (March 28).

McBride watched the selection committee meeting, god bless him.  It was about as bad as you might imagine.  The committee members didn't seem to have done much prep.  They relied heavily on the fact of current board incumbency as a qualification in and of itself.  And they deferred to SWB Executive Director Ghassan Korban's opinion on who they should select as his bosses.

And then it got just plain uncomfortable. About ten minutes into the meeting, selection committee member Dr. John Nicklow made a rather surprising inquiry. I have transcribed the exchange as best as I could...

[TRANSCRIPT PORTION BEGINS]

University of New Orleans President Dr. John Nicklow: One other question, and if this is not appropriate, then so be it. If, if [S&WB Executive Director] Ghassan [Korban] would be willing to, um, speak to any applicants? Because some of these are current members, and, um, I, I, I think if you're comfortable doing so, it might be helpful to, uh, give us an indication of who's ... let me turn it around ... the best way to do it is who may be preferred, who you worked well with, who you think is an asset of the current group. But if you're not comfortable doing that, I would understand.

SWBNO Executive Director Ghassan Korban: I would be comfortable if it's in a closed session, not in an open session [crosstalk]. I don't want to, I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings.

Nicklow: Are we permitted to go into a closed session?

Delgado Community College Vice Chancellor for Workforce Development and Institutional Advancement Arlanda Williams: You would have had to notify the public twenty four hours, well, thirty six hours prior to this meeting that we were going to be going into an executive session.

SWBNO Board Relations staffmember Candace Newell: To discuss this, yes.

Nicklow: Okay.

[TRANSCRIPT PORTION ENDS]

So a selection committee member asked the head of the SWBNO staff who he would like to be overseeing him. And the only objection that executive director had was that he was in open session and someone's feelings might get hurt; he'd be more than willing to spill in closed session.

And to clarify, according to state law, even that would not have been cool. Appointments are explicitly excluded from discussion allowed in closed sessions. Also, Ms. Williams was initially correct: the notification period for closed sessions is 24 hours, and the subject of the closed session also has to be notified and allowed to insist on an open session.

And this is the process by which government "watchdog" Janet Howard got appointed to a government oversight board. That and she's clearly close with the mayor. I can't remember the last time the mayor and the Bureau of Governmental Research, which Howard was the head of until recently, disagreed about anything. At least not since Cantrell became mayor, anyway.

Last month they worked together to defeat an emergency plan to shore up funding for senior services. BGR argued and the mayor agreed, we should not trust the "unaccountable" non-profit Council on Aging with dedicated public money even for only five years.  We still don't know how the mayor wants to address the problem of underfunded services for seniors now.  As "Grace notes" here, it's time for her to get to work on that. LaToya still says she loves the seniors, though. Hope that's enough in the meantime.

Now the mayor and the BGR are working together to promote a scheme to keep public money flowing to the private non-profit Audubon Institute by tying its fate to that of City Park, NORD, and the city Parks and Parkways Department. But if we were to take LaToya/BGR's argument against the seniors millage and apply it to the Audubon plan, we'd have to reject that too. By that standard, Parks and Parkways is really the only entity here sufficiently "accountable" to receive dedicated mils. The others are run by quasi-private boards of fundraisers.... many members of which happen to overlap and intermingle with BGR's crowd. Funny how that works. 

The real problem here is we have a network of business insiders and "charitable" non-profits who form a de-facto government in New Orleans.  Sometimes they get to pick who runs the Sewerage and Water Board. But even when it's not that, the daily order of business is an inherently anti-democratic exercise in protecting generational wealth through nepotism and money laundering.

BGR's and Cantrell's criticism of the Council On Aging gets us part of the way to recognizing that problem but they won't extend that criticism to similar non-profits they happen to favor.  Their actual complaint is that they want to pick and choose which unaccountable elites get to play and which ones don't.
 
This is exacerbated by the fact that nobody reporting on this recognizes that BGR is itself another one of these unaccountable anti-democratic insiders' clubs. Instead they're treated as a benign observer from on high.  Here, Uptown Messenger calls them an "independent New Orleans research group." The Advocate refers to them here as a "nonpartisan policy group." Here is NOLA.com naming them a "watchdog group."  This is pretty much routine. BGR is a player in the game just like everybody else.  And because they seem to have the mayor's ear as well as the uncritical eye of the press so often, they're a player with a distinct advantage.

On May 4, Mayor Cantrell and BGR are asking you to vote in favor of perpetuating our governemnt-by-wine-and-cheese-clubs status quo. But the good news is they just made a fair argument against doing that one month ago. So if you are looking for a reason to vote the other way, it's right there.