Rats gotta eat

First of all we'd like to thank NOPD Chief Anne Kirkpatrick for choosing to drop this Weed Rats meme on us just after Mardi Gras.  It means that everyone who might have had to scramble for ideas a few weeks ago will now have a full year to really sit with the image and decide whether or not it is truly the costume for them. 

Heavy mold and deteriorating elevators, HVAC units and plumbing are some of the issues that have been plaguing New Orleans Police Department headquarters.

But those aren't the only problems at aging police facilities around the criminal justice complex near Tulane Avenue and South Broad Street. Don't forget the vermin, NOPD Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick told the City Council's Criminal Justice Committee on Monday.

"The rats are eating our marijuana," Kirkpatrick said. "They're all high."

The great thing about the weed rats is everybody immediately loves them. But also nobody actually believes they are a thing. I mean, sure, there are rats at police headquarters. That's easy enough to believe. But, if anything is being stolen from the evidence room there, it's far more likely the culprits are in uniform.*  Even more dubious is Kirkpatrick's claim that the rats are "high." Rats can and do get high. We learn that from this study where rats were observed with increased appetite and laziness after exposure to cannabis vapor.  The key bit, however, is the vapor. Could the rats get high from just eating the raw plants?  I don't think it works like that. 

Anyway, why is this colorful fantasy being brought to our attention now?  Well, you see, NOPD wants a new headquarters. Actually, that's not entirely accurate.  They aren't necessarily asking for a new building. We just know they want to move out of the one they have. 

A plan to relocate New Orleans Police Department headquarters into two floors of a downtown office tower is a large piece of a wider vision to leave behind the city’s crumbling justice complex in Mid-City, said chief administrative officer Gilbert Montaño on Wednesday.

About 400 police department staffers are slated to relocate with the pending move to the 17th and 18th floors of 1615 Poydras Street, called the DXC building, he said. The draft 10-year lease, which awaits City Council approval, calls for a May 1 move-in date.

The plan is to abandon the current HQ located in the (geographic) center of the city with its proximity to the criminal courthouse and central lockup and move, instead, into an office tower downtown with limited public access and practically no parking. Oh and also now the city doesn't control the building and is paying rent to a private landlord for at least 10 years. This is short sighted, minor league city type stuff. The police aren't even "allowed" to do police business in the police office. 

Lahasky said the lease will not allow NOPD to conduct interrogations or make arrests within the office building.

“Our agreement with NOPD is that the offices will be utilized as administrative offices, and that certain uses such as interrogations and lineups and things that outsiders perceive as maybe not the kind of uses you’d like to see in an office building” won't be allowed, he said. “Those particular uses are to be held off-site.”

Nothing about this makes any sense in terms of public service.  It does make sense if you come at it from the point of view that the city government exists solely to facilitate real estate deals that benefit the succession plans of fading oligarchs like Frank Stewart.  Which is precisely the sort of thing you might think if you are Gilbert Montaño. 

Negotiations began in earnest about six months ago, Montaño said, when the building was still owned by businessman and philanthropist Frank Stewart. The Monroe businessmen who bought it at the end of last year, brothers Eddie and Joseph Hakim, also own Orleans Tower, the former Amoco Building a few blocks away. The city leases space in that building for the Department of Safety and Permits, Civil District Court clerk and Civil Service Commission, among others. 

Frank Stewart, for those who need a refresher, is a billionaire investor whose fortune derives from his family's funeral home business.  The "philanthropist" descriptor he gets in articles like the one above is an inevitable result of owning lots of things (downtown office towers, for example) and making use of as many tax write-offs as possible.  In recent years, his "charity" work garnering the most attention was his leadership of the Monumental Task Force's attempts to maintain the city's Confederate statues. In 2017, he took out a full page ad in the newspaper denouncing Mitch Landrieu's efforts to have them removed.  Mitch was on his way out of office and working on his national profile at the time.  Because of this, he could afford to ignore Stewart's provincial concerns.  The same could not be said for Stewart's ambitious local ally in the monumental "lost cause," Councilwoman and soon to be Mayor LaToya Cantrell.

On Dec. 17, 2015, the day the City Council voted to remove the monuments, Cantrell, then a council member, gave a speech that must have been music to the ears of the pro-monument crowd, chastising then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu for bringing the issue to light. Amazingly, within the same hour she joined the majority of the council in voting for removal.

In early 2018, within a few months of being elected mayor, Cantrell empowered a secretive working group of Confederate monument supporters to decide the future location of the warehoused monuments. One of her spokesmen stated, “She believes that the future of the former monuments belongs in the hands of those who care about them.”

It’s highly likely that the only reason the mayor didn’t go through with the group’s relocation plan, moving them to another prominent location, was the exposure she received in an article by Kevin Litten published in The Times-Picayune. The article exposed Cantrell’s willingness to placate the side of the argument endorsed by some of the most moneyed and powerful people in the city — the side she voted against as a City Council member.

None of that was surprising. Both mayors (and a number of other state and local politicians) have done plenty of favors for Stewart over the years. In 2017, the same year the monuments controversy came to a head, they all helped swing the deal that gave Stewart's building its "DXC" moniker. That $120 million deal committed the city and the state to a package of subsidies and incentives including an agreement to rebate the payroll of software company DXC in exchange for its promise to occupy ten floors of Stewart's tower. The company and the politicians promised as many as 2,000 new "tech" jobs.

Of course, there were those of us who, just days after the announcement, observed that DXC appeared to be taking advantage of the state's generous corporate welfare offerings in order to facilitate its own global downsizing and outsourcing scheme to cut jobs and wages. But nobody ever listens to those of us who say such things. Anyway as time went on, it became clear that DXC was never committed to hiring locally. Over the following years, they would repeatedly miss the goals set forth in the original agreement. As of 2022, they had nearly scuttled the entire thing and were looking to sub-lease much of their office space in the tower.

In the meantime, The Cantrell Administration has spent plenty of time and energy trying to figure out ways to plug the hole in Stewart's revenue stream.  At one point they even considered moving City Hall into the building.  Which brings us up to last year when we find an aging Stewart trying to liquidate his asset portfolio in a slow market for downtown office space. At the time of the sale, the building was roughly 50 percent vacant. But its buyers, Eddie and Joseph Hakim were strangely bullish on its prospects. Likely the, by then, well underway negotiations over a guaranteed NOPD tenant had something to do with that.

All of this is typical New Orleans cronyism. But it also reflects the conservative ideology at the heart of the Cantrell administration. Gilbert Montano said recently that "the future" of city government should rely more on regressive user fee-based budgeting rather than a reliable tax base for dependable services. Under that kind of regime, there can be no real investment in social or physical infrastructure. City services will exist under continual threat of cuts. City departments won't own their own buildings.  Not even the police.  The only dependable revenue streams created go the other direction. Out of the public coffers and into the hands of corporate landlords.

For his part, (potential mayoral candidate) Oliver Thomas wants to put a pause on the NOPD lease because he doesn't feel adequately communicated toward.

“Not only was there a lack of communication about this viable move, but it seems like there was not a lot of thought put into multiple locations that would provide the best access to the men and women that utilize the headquarters, as well as the citizens to whom access is extremely important,” Councilmember Thomas said in his letter to Montano and Chief Kirkpatrick.

Thomas wants to “take a step back” to review other possible locations for the new NOPD headquarters.

He says he’d like to see the new NOPD headquarters be in a location that is more “community-oriented” with easier parking and that could become a more permanent spot that would add “value to the community.” He also says he’d like to see the new NOPD headquarters be in a location that would add overall access to residents in the city.

The kids are already joking that maybe Thomas will suggest putting the new HQ at the Six Flags site his friend Troy Henry is supposed to be redeveloping. But it occurs to us that this would put us a step closer to the New Orleans Cop City we've already speculated that Mayor OT might build one day. So maybe it's not that funny. In any case, it wouldn't represent a change in governing philosophy so much as a slight adjustment in the direction of the spoils.  It's never really a question of whether the rats are going to get a piece of the stash so much as it is which rats in particular.

 *That link references an evidence room scandal from 15 years ago.  When I started writing this post, I hadn't yet seen the latest one out just today.  Interesting that after the weed rats got their fifteen minutes of fame, NOPD has moved right along to blaming the conveniently deceased for what is clearly a systemic issue.