The New Orleans Saints opened training camp last week. And the question on everyone's mind is, who is paying for Mayor Cantrell's tickets?
At the National Urban League press conference, Cantrell was all smiles despite the legal troubles surrounding her. Once she was on stage, she stayed on the theme, pointing to the political moment the nation is in and the challenges that may arise.
WWL Louisiana reporter Alyssa Curtis tried to ask Cantrell about the investigation as she hurried away.
"Mayor Cantrell, did you attend the 2019 NFC championship, and who paid for the ticket?" Curtis asked.
Cantrell's team responded, "We’re not going to do that. I told you all that this morning. We’re going to keep moving."
All credit to Alyssa Curtis, of course, for at least trying. But I do have to say that this is very similar to the question I said I wanted to ask the mayor at the budget townhall last Monday. It turns out they cancelled that anyway.
Mayor LaToya Cantrell's office has cancelled a town hall meeting scheduled for Monday night, citing the death over the weekend of longtime political consultant Bill Rouselle.
The meeting, where city officials were set to brief residents on the city's plans for its 2025 budget and take input on how tax dollars should be spent, was scheduled to take place at the University of New Orleans. The city cancelled the event late Sunday "due to the integral role" Rouselle's firm, Bright Moments, played in planning the budget presentation, a city spokesperson said.
The city will announce a new date for the town hall "in the near future," the spokesperson said.
No doubt, the passing of a monumental figure like Rouselle is worthy of remembrance. But it's difficult to understand why a basic public information function, like these budget sessions, would be so reliant on one private PR contractor. Or if we take that much for granted, does the unfortunate passing of the firm's founder leave its staff incapable of going ahead with what surely had to have been a fully prepared presentation by that time? Or was Bright Moments always just Rouselle? This really raises more questions than it answers. So why did they cancel the townhall? As that WWL story suggests, it probably has more to do with not wanting to face difficult questions from reporters and the public about various overlapping controversies surrounding the mayor right now.
I have to say I'm at least a little sympathetic with the mayor about some of that. The celebrity gossip nature of the way local TV has handled the Vappie affair should be beneath all of us. And the way the media has made a hero out of this politically connected wealthy socialite who involved herself in it is regrettable as well. At the same time, though, the mayor's did react to her with the familiar clumsy and bullying abuse of power that has become one of the hallmarks of her time in office.
Remember, also, that if we look past the soap opera stuff, some of the allegations are actually serious. They just haven't been named in any indictment... yet. But this story strongly suggests that the mayor moved to fire a city permits official in order to protect a crooked contractor. Yes, the one who gave her the football tickets. Even though he doesn't know how to spell her name.
In a recording that WWL obtained of a meeting held Aug. 19, 2019, Chan complained to Cantrell that Cecil was “charging me with things” and creating a “hostile work environment.” Cantrell responded by praising Chan and asking, “Do you believe that we have what we need internally to fill leadership gaps should they become open? So, like running OneStop, that sort of thing?”
In an interview in March of this year, Cantrell denied having discussed Cecil with anyone else before firing her. She also denied that Cecil’s firing was a “favor” to anyone.
But Farrell claimed at least some credit. Last September, the TV station reported, Farrell wrote in an email to current Safety and Permits Director Tammie Jackson that “I had asked Mrs. Lotoya (sic) Cantrel (sic) to Look into Jennifer Cecil's Toxic environment at Safety and Permits and she chose to remove her.”
Adding to the intrigue is the appearance, once again, of controversial businessman Fouad Zeton who has shown up as a comic relief character in several Cantrell episodes.
Farrell may have been introduced to Cantrell by Fouad Zeton, a friend and business partner of his who boasted of relationships to many politicians, including Cantrell. One of Zeton’s businesses was raided by the FBI in 2021; in addition to a series of paintings, the government seized his phone, which contained communications with Cantrell and others.
Zeton has pleaded guilty to falsely reporting a dozen or so paintings as stolen and then inflating their value – with the help of a New Orleans cop – in order to land a big insurance settlement. He is set to be sentenced Sept. 19.
Adding to the irony in this case is the fact that the tickets Farrell allegedly got for Cantrell were to the Saints-Rams NFC Championship game now infamous for its "no-call" pass interference ending which should remind us all that there really is no justice anywhere. After all, the Supreme Court tells us that municipal bribery is basically legal now anyway. So maybe none of this matters. Still it sure would have been fun to go to the budget meeting and ask the mayor how many football tickets it would cost a person to be named the next Night Mayor. But now we don't get to ask about that. Or about anything. Which is not good because, as it limps into the final year of its term, the Cantrell Administration looks to be falling apart.
Take STR enforcement, for example. On second thought, maybe that's a bad example since there hasn't been a time when STR enforcement was actually functional. In any case, the regime such as it is, appears to be in complete disarray now. The process for handling cases is toothless. The department doesn't want to assign lawyers to attend hearings. Oh and also the whole Zoning Department just up and quit for some reason.
At the same time, Morrell told Mulligan in his July 17 letter that he was concerned Mulligan was now pushing hearings at a pace the understaffed STR office can’t handle.
Mulligan mentioned in his letter that the Zoning Division, which is supposed to be conducting STR hearings, hasn’t been able to have any “because its entire staff left earlier this year.” Mulligan doesn’t explain why the entire staff left.
As a result, Code Enforcement has been handling them in the meantime, while the Cantrell administration works to create a new office that handles hearings across nine city departments.
As of May 31, there were only 14 employees in the STR office, despite the office having a budget for 26 positions. According to Morrell, the 14 employees are now supposed to handle 40 hearings in two weeks.
Compare that with the 50 hearings per month previous memos estimated a staff of 23 employees could handle, and staffers now have more than twice that workload.
“When understaffed officers are forced to rush adjudications, mistakes are inevitable,” Morrell wrote. “There is a difference between quality and quantity of enforcement.”
Driving staff to quit en masse and overworking those who remain while refusing to fill the open positions sounds bad. But consider, also, that this phenomenon is hardly isolated to a single department. In June, we read about the similar (arguably far worse) situation at Public Works; the department responsible (for now, anyway) for keeping your streets un-flooded by clogged catch basins. You may think that's pretty essential work. The city, though, has purposefully made it less and less a priority.
It’s work that requires manpower, usually three to four to a crew. Two operate the equipment and at least one person for the manual labor that Casby was doing on a recent afternoon.
The problem for New Orleans is: There’s not many employees like Casby left.
An Algiers native, Casby, 58, joined the public works department in the late 1980s, when its maintenance yard on Norman C. Francis Parkway — then named for Confederate president Jefferson Davis — had more than 400 employees like him.
Today there are fewer than 30.
The city used to have its own rock crusher that ground asphalt that an army of frontline workers used to patch roadways. Now the city is down to just one pothole crew.
Because of the lack of staff, the city can only operate three of its four vacuum trucks full-time. In a good month, the in-house crews can only clear around two-thirds of the amount of catch basins needed to meet a benchmark previously set by the city.
“They just started cutting back,” Casby said about the late 1990s, when the city began outsourcing a lot of its work. “And everyone started moving out.”
Every story about the city's failing infrastructure can trace back to the 80s and 90s advent of austerity, privatization and outsourcing. This is not merely a New Orleans issue. Rather it is a long running policy regime that has emaciated public services in cities across the country. The turn against support for urban governance began with neoliberal technocrats in the 1970s and was put into practice by reactionary conservatives in the 1980s who passed billions of dollars worth of cuts in federal aid to cities. During the 1990s, cynical Democrats regained and held onto political power by fully adopting the reactionary rhetoric and consultant-driven policy grifts around notions of "reinventing government."
It's worse now. Over time, what might have once been dismissed as disingenuous Clintonite triangulation, metastasized into basic conventional wisdom. Anyone who had ambitions to become anyone in politics, especially at the local level in cities, had to learn to parrot tropes like "run government like a business," which was what our CEO Mayor Ray Nagin promised to do, or "do more with less," which became a frequent mantra during the Mitch Landrieu years. But those were just the poseurs.
The current generation of politicians and administrators, like our Gen-X Mayor Cantrell, grew up as true believers in this stuff. The ideology was baked into the firmament of their careers before they even arrived. It's the world they were trained for. No one in city administration actually believes in hiring people to do jobs. They're just looking to become conduits for outsourcing public funds to "private partners." And so it was inevitable that the Cantrell administration, from the first day it took office, could only have been ideologically opposed to governing. No one in charge there believes in the basic function of hiring staff to provide services to citizens. They don't think that is something a city should do.
There are real consequences for that. The understaffed and overwhelmed zoning and public works departments are just two examples of what happens when those who are charged with conducting the people's business do not take that task seriously. Even the things that they clearly want to do, such as, collect money from motorists via robotic cameras, can't get done in time to comply with new laws. Last month, a key rental assistance program ran out of money because the administration didn't bother to request a renewal from the feds.
Nor did they bother to answer reporters' questions about why.
Monet Brignac-Sullivan, a spokesperson for council member JP Morrell, said the Cantrell administration didn't inform the council about the depleted funds or request more money in its mid-year budget adjustment.
"The Council is ready and willing to help solve problems when program administrators alert us there is one," wrote Brignac-Sullivan. "To date, there has been no communication from the program."
The Cantrell administration did not respond to a request for comment on why no additional funding was requested.
Nobody seems to be answering the phone at all over there anymore. According to this Axios story, that's a deliberate choice. We just hope the last whole department to resign remembers to turn out the lights before they go.
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