Keep Doing What You're Doing

This is not just Dennis Allen's motto, or even Gayle Benson's apparent marching orders to her coach this offseason.  It's also a favorite creed of city governance. We can change the elected mayors and councilmembers around as many times as we like. We can vote them out of office, put them in jail, threaten to recall them, and we've tried all of these. But as long as there is no popular political movement animating any of this turnover, then, in the words of Joe Biden, nothing will fundamentally change about how the actual business is done. 

For most of the last year, through the exercise of a fraudulent recall movement, among other things, the ruling elite of the city have been playing a game we might call, "This here mayor we created and elected is bad now. Very much unlike the next mayor we will create and elect on very much the same platform."  Something similar happens to all of our second term mayors, lately. It's a kind of blood ritual where our entrenched powers purge themselves of responsibility for the last demon they summoned so that they may move on and call upon the next one. 

Last week, we pointed out the example of Forward Together New Orleans. This is the non-profit created by current sacrificial goat, LaToya Cantrell in order to administer the very large privatized section of city expenditures off budget and as far away from the scrutiny of governmental transparency, accountability or civil service rules as possible.  There was a time when that was the new vehicle created so that a new mayor could pretend to do things differently from the previous one. But now that mayor is being exorcised so we have to pretend something different will replace that too. 

What's replacing it, however, is more of the same. 

New Orleans health director Dr. Jennifer Avegno went before the city council last month to present a vision for a new “public health” driven approach to gun violence — describing the killings in the city, which have reached the highest levels in years, as an epidemic.

She emphasized the need for robust programming to address the underlying conditions of violence, along with targeted interventions to interrupt conflicts before they escalate to violence and provide services to those most likely to be involved.

 “There must be a community-wide, public-private collaborative with real infrastructure and capacity that works solely on a violence reduction strategy and can implement it quickly,” Avegno told the council. “This group should survive political administrations. It should be highly resourced.”

 It was presented as a new approach. But it sounded remarkably similar to the plan Mayor LaToya Cantrell rolled out when she created the now-embattled Office of Gun Violence Prevention just two years ago.

The health language is the trendy branding now, which is why councilmembers have asked the Health Department to come in on this. But really we're just proceeding along the same path as ever. "Ultimately" it won't be the Health Department, or any city department anyway. 

Currently, she said, she is working on a “landscape analysis” of existing public health and intervention programming in the city meant to address violence to determine what should be continued and what could be scrapped — including, ostensibly, those programs previously being run by the Office of Gun Violence Prevention.  

“What programs do we have?” she said. “Who are they serving? How many people are they serving? Do we have evidence to suggest that they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing? Or that they’re effective? What are the gaps?” 

Initially she plans to advocate for several initial allocations of federal funding to get started on “catalytic” programs that she believes already have shown evidence of effectiveness — mostly money from the American Rescue Plan Act. Like past iterations of violence reduction programs in the city, she said that ultimately she anticipates that much of the funding will be routed to independent non-profits to do the work of violence prevention. 

We're just setting up to drop all the public money down to the same old non-profit industrial complex through a slightly different chute.  What will it do when it gets there?  Well, we already know that too.  Same thing it's been doing. 

Perhaps the most robust program included in the report is an initiative launched in Chicago in 2017 called the Rapid Employment and Development Initiative (READI), which uses referrals from community organizations, along with an analytics tool based on law enforcement data to identify individuals with the “highest risk for violence involvement” and provides them with twelve months of programing that includes subsidized employment, cognitive behavioral therapy, skills training, and other support services. According to Asher’s report, participation in READI significantly reduced the likelihood of arrest for homicide or shooting, as well as the possibility of victimization. That program costs around $20,000 per participant.

The READI program claims that the list of individuals they develop is never shared with law enforcement, but the use of similar predictive data analytic tools has proved controversial in New Orleans in the past. 

The "most robust" program involves taking federal money intended to help people suffering the effects of the pandemic economic displacement and not actually doing anything to help them.  Instead of addressing basic needs, instead of working to make people housing and food secure, we're going to put them on a pre-crime list and subject them to "behavioral therapy and skills training."  In other words we're not helping the victims of the disaster so much as we're keeping them from getting out of line or becoming less compliant workers. 

And, of course, as the article goes on to explain, this isn't anything new or different from what's been going on for years through successive administrations. 

In 2018, The Verge revealed that Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s administration had been quietly using software developed by the technology company Palantir to produce a list of individuals to target as part of the Group Violence Reduction Strategy — part of his broader NOLA for Life murder reduction effort. Some of those individuals were “called-in” with social service providers and various law-enforcement agencies and given the option to participate in social programs or be subject to “enhanced prosecution.” 

After the agreement with Palantir lapsed in 2018, The Lens obtained emails showing that the Cantrell administration was working to develop another tool utilizing law enforcement data to identify individuals with the help of sociologist Andrew Papachristos — this time to target for “impactful social interventions.” But little was made public about the effort, and civil liberties groups again raised transparency concerns, along with questions about how the information would be used and whether or not it would be shared with law enforcement. 

It is unclear what, if any, new tools might be utilized in the new effort being developed by the health department to identify individuals.

The reason it's unclear what might be new is... none of this is new. We're all just going to keep doing what we're doing: Handing out public money to privatized formations of political cronies create phony "anti-crime" programs that, in reality, only continue to harm people.  If anyone ever starts to get wise to this grift, there's always another mayor to symbolically slaughter so we can start it all over again.

Shutting down FTNO

This is one of those stories that makes me upset I haven't been keeping the blog up as well as I used to.  There are a ton of notes I've got about this very long running story that I just haven't had time to post about.  I do think I'll eventually get to some of it. Anyway here's the thing that's in the news at the moment. 

Forward Together New Orleans, the nonprofit formed by Mayor LaToya Cantrell to pay for some of her signature social welfare programs, has returned more than $1 million in public money as it faces an Inspector General investigation and winds down its operations.

The nonprofit was subpoenaed by the New Orleans Office of Inspector General last year, after the City Council questioned two contracts Cantrell signed with FTNO that sent almost $1.1 million in city money to the charity she founded in 2019.

It looks like a little self-contained matter having only to do with the conduct of this mayor in particular. But really it's more about the permanent bad state of things.  The bad state of things is we live under a regime of neoliberalism,where the dominant philosophy of government is to not have any government and instead farm all of its functions out to "private partners" on an ad-hoc basis. Much easier to spread money around to friends that way. Much harder to know if it's doing anyone any good. 

What's happened most recently is, when the current mayor came in, she represented a slightly different formation of private partnering friends than what had existed. There was still a pile of money meant to be distributed to semi-privatized social services designed to be stolen from. So the people around her wanted to build a new network through which they could better steal it.  In this case, instead of folding the members of the Cantrell "transition team" into official city government positions, they just decided make their own non-profit and administer things from there. Back in the day they used to call this "running government like a business." Except in this case they were running a business instead of a government.

The thing about that, though, is that sometimes with too much reinvention of perfectly fine graft wheels, the inexperienced grifters don't really know what they're doing and make a big mess of things. This story is contains examples of some of those messes. 

In April 2022, Cantrell and FTNO’s executive director at the time, Shaun Randolph, signed a formal agreement granting FTNO $568,000 in city money to run a gun-violence intervention program and $505,310 for the city’s Job 1 Earn and Learn program.

Earn and Learn provided stipends and job training to at-risk youth. The gun-violence program was run on the city’s behalf for years by the Urban League. FTNO was supposed to take over that role in 2023 by paying a crisis-response team to meet with shooting victims at crime scenes and at the hospital in an effort to prevent retaliation. But in October, the city’s finance director, Norman White, asked FTNO to return the money for both programs.

All $1,063,410 was returned to the city on Jan. 30, Chief Administrative Officer Gilbert Montaño said. The city signed a new agreement with Total Community Action to serve as fiscal agent for the Earn and Learn program last week, allowing that program to resume, according to Montaño.

So now they have to close up the new patronage entity they created for stealing the money and the old patronage entities will go back to stealing it like before. 

The story says FTNO "paid back" the money which sounds like a no harm/ no foul situation. But is that really true?  It's difficult to know... and that's kind of the point. 

Although the fireworks were earlier in the @NOLACityCouncil meeting yesterday. @JPMorrell hits the nail on the head as to why we can't seem to make any progress with youth programs in the city. pic.twitter.com/hJsMMcX876

— Down For Whatever (@dadioonthepatio) January 19, 2023

If they would stop making everything a "signature" program tied to the specific patronage networks of each new mayor and instead just built a city government that did this work through professionalized civil service staff, this stuff wouldn't keep happening.  But then how would anybody get paid?

Let's all cosplay against homelessness

Hope everybody had a good time at the LARP.

On a balmy November night in New Orleans, 230 people filled the rooms and courtyard of Covenant House, a residence for homeless youth on the edge of the French Quarter.

They came from as far away as Texas, Alabama and Mississippi. Starting around 6:30 p.m., they placed large pieces of cardboard on the sidewalk around the building, and later that night they slept shoulder-to-shoulder in sleeping bags on the cardboard for the center’s eighth "sleep-out," an annual event that raises both funds and awareness for the city’s homeless youth.

By dawn the next morning, the event had raised $610,000 in pledges, over 10% of the facility’s $6 million annual operating budget.

I don't know, guys. Seems like the donors could have just mailed in some checks without going through the little demonstration. Better yet, we could just tax these people a bit more so we can fund true public services that aide and house the needy instead of just allowing them to throw their money at a corrupt religious non-profit like Covenant House. But since like 70 percent of the local economy relies on flattering the well off into thinking they are the real heroes anyway, I guess it's a natural fit.

The Bungalows

Maybe you've been reading this WWLTV and Advocate series on Ken Matherne's animal scam in Folsom.  It's not exactly news. Matherne has been running his "attraction" for over two decades during which time many a red flag has been raised with not much consequence. The reasons for this shouldn't be too much of a mystery either.

Matherne owns a for-profit business called Global Resources LLC, which began as an oil-related business. He also owns the north shore property, which he acquired through inheritance and buying out other heirs.

He makes no secret of his wealth. In a 2001 article about the animal park, Matherne said his family's success in the oil business allowed him to retire in his early 30s. Campaign records show he's given six-figure sums to charity and to Republican political candidates, including a $100,000 donation to the Donald Trump Victory PAC in 2016. He also owns a two-story yacht, called The Boardroom, which former employees estimate was a million-dollar purchase.

We're pretty accustomed to letting our land barons do whatever they want in Louisiana, especially the ones who conduct so much oil money into politics.  In Matherne's case, it's best not to even joke about him.  In 2010, he tried to sue a northshore blogger for writing a parody story about "killer giraffes" kept on his grounds.

Usually, though, when someone is that defensive....

The incidents often took place at company parties and crawfish boils held at The Bungalows — Matherne's house on the grounds of the park — or his yacht.

“At Christmas parties, sometimes he would have girls dancing on his yacht bar, throwing money at them,” ex-employee Brett Guillet said.

Another ex-worker, Brad Nethery, said he saw Matherne engage in unwanted physical contact that included “him groping, kissing, grabbing” — behavior that Nethery said happened “at his private parties, at work, at any time.”

Anyway, obscenely weatlhy person lives on a private animal compound in a building he calls "The Bungalows."  Yeah, something creepy is probably going on. 

La banque c'est moi

BIG NEWS today in the BIG federal investigation that everyone has been watching with rapt anticipation.  There is a new indictment in the FNBC scandal.

First NBC Bank's former top lawyer was charged in federal court Friday with conspiracy to defraud the New Orleans bank, which failed two years ago in the biggest U.S. bank collapse since the 2008 financial crisis.

Gregory St. Angelo served as First NBC's general counsel for a decade until 2016, and during that time, he took out loans totaling tens of millions of dollars from the bank, many of which went into default. He is accused of conspiring with two former top First NBC officials to defraud the bank: President and CEO Ashton Ryan, referred to in court documents as "Bank President A," and former Chief Credit Officer Bill Burnell, referred to in the documents as "Bank Officer B."

It says here that St. Angelo is and has been cooperating with prosecutors and is likely to plead and roll, probably on Ryan.  Seems like he's still keeping his spirits up, though. 

Ryan continues to maintain his innocence, according to his lawyer, Eddie Castaing.

“Anyone who committed fraud on the bank also committed fraud on Ashton Ryan and the board, and they should plead guilty," Castaing said Friday. "Ashton had nothing to do with it.”

Ashton Ryan IS the bank. Also he had nothing to do with any of the shady stuff the bank has been involved with. That's pretty good.

It's also a good sign. The further up this goes, the better it's going to be when someone like Ryan actually goes to court.  There are a lot more people and institutions that could get named in this thing.  One example, among many, is the soon-to-reopen African American Museum.

In 2012 the museum cut expenses by eliminating its executive director position. At the time, a board member said that NOAAM’s yearly income had fallen to $200,000, less than half the ideal $500,000 operating income. In March 2013 the museum announced it had closed to complete renovations and never reopened.

According to a report by WWL-TV, the museum’s troubles continued when Trumpeter Irvin Mayfield briefly became a board member. Mayfield had served as chairman of the New Orleans Public Library Foundation, and was accused of unlawfully steering nearly $1.4 million from that organization to the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra. He left the African American Museum board in 2016 after reportedly incurring a $1 million bank loan on behalf of the museum. The loan had been granted by First NBC bank, which dissolved in 2017.

According to WWL, a philanthropic group called Treme Guardian led by businessman John Cummings assumed the bank loan in the interest of the museum. In 2014, Cummings, an attorney, opened the Whitney Plantation in Wallace, La., an institution designed to confront the history of slavery. But in 2018, Treme Guardian sued the NOAAM in Orleans Parish Civil District Court, alleging the museum had failed to make payments on the $1 million loan, continued to allow it historic properties to deteriorate and neglected to carry proper insurance.

There are more than just that, of course.  Hopefully this keeps going. 

Billy and the redeemers

Nungesser told a bunch of  "tourism and cultural preservation officials" yesterday that he's going to put all the Jim Crow monuments back on public display soon.  That should go over really well.

I notice here, also, that Billy implies Mayor Cantrell is cooperating with him in this task.   That also should go over really well.  Even so he can't help but show a little ass toward her city even as the negotiations are ongoing.

“I’ve met with her several times. I really believe in my heart she wants it resolved in a way that satisfies -- as much as we can – everyone," he said. The event was hosted by the Robert E. Lee Monumental Association.

Attendees cheered Nungesser’s promise that public input will be taken on all proposals. He said he personally favors building a replica of Lee Circle in Mandeville’s Fontainebleau State Park, which his office oversees.

He says the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee would be back on top of his pedestal, with his back side facing New Orleans.

So... yeah... that ought to go over super well too.

Maybe somebody can follow up with the mayor on this.  When they do, I hope they would also ask her about the folks in Nungesser's cheering audience.  WWNO doesn't name any of them but describes them as "tourism and preservation officials" so you have to figure there are some prominent individuals among them.  The hosting "R.E. Lee Monumental Association" is listed on the Sec of State's website. Its president is William Mason.  His name does not appear on the organization's website. Nor does anyone else's.  It says here on the membership page that donations and members will remain anonymous.  I don't think Billy's audience was masked, though.  Mardi Gras is over and most of them have put their hoods away..... we think, anyway.

Of course the anonymous donations to the white supremacist organization are tax deductible.  That's in keeping with the standard practice for culture and tourism oriented non-profits in New Orleans.  Take plantation owner, Joe Jaeger's proposed hotel for example.  It says here, Jaeger and his partners want to configure their development as a non-profit also in order to aquire a property tax exemption.  Assessor Erroll Williams is not so keen on that at the moment.

The tourism cabal is also seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in additional rebates and subsidies beyond just the propety tax exemption.

The proposed deal calls for $41 million in upfront cash from the Convention Center, a free 50-year land lease with four optional 10-year extensions, and a 40-year break on property taxes. It also would include complete rebates of a 10 percent hotel-occupancy tax and a 4 percent sales tax on all hotel revenue from sources other than room rentals.

Besides the $330 million value identified by BGR, the proposed plan also calls for other subsidies from the Convention Center: $26 million to perform “site prep” to remediate any hazardous soil and to install utilities on the site, and $20 million to connect the hotel to the Convention Center at Henderson Street

All of this, the wealthiest developers in town insist, is absolutely necessary for them to finance their surefire money making project on some of the most desirable real estate in the city.   If they need that much help, the tourism economy in New Orleans must be in a lot worse shape than they say it is. Either that or they're just not very good businessmen.

Another possibility is that's just how business is done around here. The Advocate points out that the World War II Museum, another of our celebrated tourism and cultural non-profits, is looking to build its own tax-exempt hotel.

Williams said he also isn’t inclined to grant a property tax exemption sought by officials at the National World War II Museum for the hotel they are building across Magazine Street from the museum. The officials say the hotel would be an “educational” facility, according to Williams. No one from the museum was available for comment.

Maybe if they hadn't spent their endowment on the Bollinger Canopy Of Peace they wouldn't have to ask for stuff like this, I dunno.  Anyway, they need more public money now.  And even though Williams is leaning away from giving them more, it isn't clear he's made a final decision yet.

Which is why, as this process goes on, he, and the mayor, may wish to consider the very likely overlapping rosters of individuals involved in the Convention Center project, the World War II Museum, AND the members of Nungesser's audience who cheered when he suggested we could all kiss General Lee's ass for him yesterday.  Can't imagine that's going to win them much favor.  But one never knows. 

Something something Ponzi something

This is a touchy conversation to have in New Orleans. It comes too close to threatening a perpetual scam run by some Very Important people.

“Audubon Institute is not a park; it’s a large organization that runs a park,” said Mike Moffitt, a former commissioner of City Park. “It seems to me very confusing to have funding so broadly distributed, because it doesn’t get any focus. If the city needs to fund insectariums and aquariums and other projects, then they should fund them, but they shouldn’t fund them thinking they’re funding a park.”

The need for funding drives initiatives for park leaders to create “amusements” that charge admission, the panelists said, but every new amusement takes away from land that was previously open to the public, a concept described as “We pave our parks in order to save them.” Debra Howell of Save Audubon Park said that these projects often end up losing money anyway, and become part of the larger system that needs financial support, rather than contributing to it.

“Every new facility loses money rather than raises money, and the next thing you hear is yet another plan for a new facility,” Howell said. “At some point when does it become obvious that none of these new facilities are going to raise money?”

The "next facility" is the fundraising pitch that keeps everything going. When your non-profit launches a new campaign to the donor base, it's helpful to say you're raising the money for a shiny new thing. That works better than just begging for money to stay afloat.   It's sort of like the way firms like Uber leverage piles of venture capital to hide their massively unprofitable business models. Which is why Ron Forman can pull down a six figure salary running a public-private "non profit."

Of course, a park is not a start-up. It is a public resource. It isn't supposed to turn a profit. But because we like to pretend that everything is better if it is run like a business through "public-private-partnerships" we create all sorts of byzantine opportunities for socialites and oligarchs to pass public money around to each other.

Justin Kray of “City Park for Everyone” noted that City Park is also likely to begin looking for tax support from voters, and that he too thinks a single citywide system would be a better approach. He noted that while individual parks such as Audubon and City Park have conducted surveys of their users, he’s not aware of any survey of recreation of the entire city.

“We’re continuing to perpetuate bad solutions to a problem that’s structural about how parks are funded,” Kray said. “I’d like to contemplate a future where we have a unified parks governance and operational strategy citywide. All these things are related, and the health of the city is in large part related to the health of the parks system.”

Ideally, all of this would fall under one unified NORD/Parks and Parkways department with its own dedicated funding and a mandate to provide free open and equal access to facilities in each and every neighborhood.  But that would be horning in on too many rackets.

It all moves in a circle

I think I see the problem here.

NOJO Chairman Ron Forman, the broadly respected head of the Audubon Institute, told WWL-TV on May 12 that the NOJO board had agreed to pay all of the Library Foundation money back, as soon as they can raise the money from private donors.

Brown said none of that money has arrived yet, but he is working to craft a written agreement with Forman and NOJO as soon as possible to memorialize the Jazz Orchestra's commitment to pay back the money and so the Library Foundation can budget for a specific amount.

Just a stab in the dark here but it seems like if NOJO could raise the money through only its own donors, they never would have had to raid the library foundation in the first place. Also, there is the problem of this being a small town where the pool of possible donors to any of these non-profits is pretty tight.  Odds are if you're giving to one, you are at least getting pitched to by all of the others.

Sometimes you end up in one of these funny situations where the organization you are donating to this year needs your money to pay back what it stole from the one you gave to last year.  And the odds are Ron Forman is on both boards anyway so that saves a lot of work. It's very convenient.