Posts In 3/2010
The Office of Inspector General completed 15 of the 22 investigations it opened in 2009, according to an annual report the office submitted to the city Tuesday.
“Most of the investigations concerned relatively minor matters. However, The Crime Surveillance Camera inspection revealed multiple evasions of competitive requirements, and generated suspicions of corruption in contract administration,” reads the March 30 report by Inspector General Edouard Quatrevaux.
Mandated by a city ordinance, the six-page report (.pdf) detailed the accomplishments of the controversial office's second year in operation. By all accounts, including the report's, year two was not easy, beginning with the abrupt…
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The Police Association of New Orleans held a fund-raiser over the weekend supporting Special Operations unit veterans Capt. Jeff Winn and Lt. Dwayne Scheuermann and the police officer union's rapidly depleting legal defense budget. Winn and Scheuermann are under federal investigation in connection with the death of Henry Glover, whose remains were found in the burned shell of the car he was last seen in after being delivered wounded into police custody by civilians. The two SWAT officers are also under investigation for the shooting of Keenon McCann, who was wounded by the officers for threatening officers with a gun…
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After doling out nearly $3 million in loans for an expansion of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club headquarters and an entertainment complex on St. Bernard Avenue, the city of New Orleans has about $9 million left in its Urban Development Action Grant fund for revitalization projects in low-income neighborhoods.
“We have $12 million total in the UDAG fund,” Economic Development Director Ernest Gethers told the council Tuesday. He said that included the $400,000 Zulu loan and a separate $2.5 million loan to Glenn and David Amedee to build Inspire, an ambitious retail and entertainment complex planned near the…
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After doling out nearly $3 million in loans for an expansion of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club headquarters and an entertainment complex on St. Bernard Avenue, the city of New Orleans has about $9 million left in its Urban Development Action Grant fund for revitalization projects in low-income neighborhoods.
“We have $12 million total in the UDAG fund,” Economic Development Director Ernest Gethers told the council Tuesday. He said that included the $400,000 Zulu loan and a separate $2.5 million loan to Glenn and David Amedee to build Inspire, an ambitious retail and entertainment complex planned near the…
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Monday, Danatus King of the New Orleans NAACP resigned from Mayor-elect Mitch Landrieu's transition task force on crime citing transparency concerns. He is dissatisfied with Landrieu's decision to keep from the public the names of all but the handful of finalists for police superintendent.
My colleague Steve Beatty was thinking this could prove problematic last week:
Even before the local NAACP president dropped off of Mayor-elect Mitch Landrieu's team to select a new police superintendent because of a lack of openness with the names of candidates, The Lens was asking how to get the list of applicants, with no luck.…
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Mayor-elect Mitch Landrieu's spokesman said late Monday that the transition team “strives to follow” the state open-meetings statues, “though it is not required to do so by law.”
Spokesman Todd Ragusa was addressing a point raised earlier Monday by Norman Francis, Xavier University president and one of two leaders of Landrieu's task force to vet police superintendent candidates. Francis said the names of those who apply to lead the New Orleans Police Department won't be released and that the task force isn't a public body. As such, Francis said he didn't have to comply with the state Open Records Law.…
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The national shortcomings of the federal stimulus act's weatherization program were detailed in a Sunday Associated Press story, and a fresh look at local numbers show an equally dismal level of success.
The long-running federal weatherization assistance program, financed by the U.S. Department of Energy, pays for low-income households to get home improvements to keep their utility bills low. Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the program got a $5 billion injection, with Louisiana getting $50 million to weatherize homes and create associated jobs.
Under the federal stimulus formula, the state had a monthly target of 260 houses to…
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For all who were wondering who made up the “recovery board” that decided to pull the plug on a contract to develop a long-awaited linear park in New Orleans, The Lens has obtained an answer. Sort of.
According to Mayor Ray Nagin spokesman James Ross, the executive branch board is comprised of “staff members who meet with the Mayor in an effort to provide and receive information, determine progress of projects, provide direction and make decisions.”
Ross did not respond to our question of who specifically made up the board. Given the tight nature of the mayor's inner circle, likely…
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Update: The public isn’t entitled to see all the applicants for the next police superintendent, and Mayor-elect Mitch Landrieu’s transition team screening the applicants isn’t a public body or subject to public records law, its leader said today.
Xavier University president Norman Francis took these positions at a press conference to address the resignation of NAACP President Danatus King from that search team serving Landrieu. Francis is the co-chairman of the search team.
He said the transition team hired the International Association of Chiefs of Police to screen applicants, winnowing the field down to 10 or so, who will be…
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Perhaps you read this lovely article in The Times-Picayune. Over the weekend, the union that represents the NOPD, the Police Association of New Orleans, held a fund-raiser to benefit the legal-defense funds of officers under investigation for violent crimes, conspiracies and cover-ups that occurred in the aftermath of the federal levee failure.
The event was touted on the Facebook social networking site as supporting two officers that federal investigators are looking at to determine their role in the burning of a fatally shot man’s body four days after Katrina.
But another Facebook page and a stand-alone Web site asked people…
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The Gordon Plaza Apartments located in the historically troubled Agriculture Street community are scheduled to be auctioned off after the complex's owner failed to make mortgage payments since Katrina.
The now-vacant development was owned by low-income housing nonprofit Desire Community Housing Corporation. The U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department-subsidized, 128-unit multifamily complex is scheduled to be auctioned on April 12.
The financial arrangement that put the complex in the hands of the housing corporation called for the apartments to become HUD's responsibility if the housing corporation defaulted on its loan.
Edwin Shorty, the Desire group's attorney, blamed a dispute with…
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After unexpectedly throwing out a hard-won contract for the development of a grand linear park through the heart of New Orleans, the city has reopened bidding. But this time, the urban planners who won the first contract say the question is not how to win the contract with City Hall, but whether they want to.
“It's only been one day since the new RFP (pdf) was released. We are weighing it in the office, said Steven Spears, a principal at Design Workshop. “It's such an amazing project to be a part of, yet it's become something of a roller coaster.”…
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On Thursday, the top civil rights prosecutor for the U.S. Department of Justice, Assistant Attorney General Tommy Perez, came to New Orleans and basically said what we all already knew:
* The NOPD is a mess
The NOPD has drawn just about the most scrutiny in the country
The NOPD has shown little progress since the last time the feds put it under the microscope
In fact, Perez is no stranger to New Orleans' joke of a criminal justice system:
New Orleans is familiar territory for Perez, who spent a decade as a civil-rights prosecutor and supervisor in the Justice…
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Healthcare overhaul had been iffy in the polls throughout the past year's arduous negotiations on Capitol Hill. But now that it has passed, Democrats are banking that as the public learns what is actually in the law and what gets implemented in the first year of the law, the public quickly will warm to it.
Gallup released some preliminary numbers Tuesday: 49 percent of Americans think the health care bill is a good thing; 40 percent think it's a bad thing.
Though we shouldn't read too much into the results of a single poll, the numbers illustrate the perilous political…
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Developer John Cummings had plans for an eastern New Orleans neighborhood that involved building better levees. For the nearby residents, that was fine – they just wanted them built with someone else's dirt. The residents prevailed Tuesday with the city's Planning Commission, which denied Cummings a permit for a borrow pit, where clay would have been dug from an area between Chef Menteur Highway and Lagoon Maxent.
At a Planning Commission public hearing Tuesday, Cummings defended his proposal for the borrow pit, which he said would be used for levees around eastern New Orleans. He said he planned to leave…
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I saw this quote from Mayor C. Ray Nagin's interview with CNN:
We have this kind of idealism that at some point people are going to understand what we’ve been doing. It’s almost like an underground movement. We’ve been working underground to make sure that this city can fully recover with the hope that at some point people will recognize the good work that we have done.
And I was all set to poke fun and then make a serious point about who is really responsible for the progress you see in terms of home rebuilding and population recovery before…
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The proposal calls for the former Liberty Hardware Store to become retail on the ground level and a members-only club upstairs.
Update: The Thursday City Council meeting where these loans were to be considered has been postponed. The matters likely will be taken up by the council Tuesday at 10 a.m.
The oversized check Mayor Ray Nagin handed Zulu on Lundi Gras may have sparked noisy debate, but a far less sensational loan from the same City Hall source likely will have a louder legacy.
When Nagin approved the $400,000 Zulu loan, he also approved a $2.5 million loan for…
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Great news, everybody! After delighting in last night's historic vote to extend healthcare coverage to nearly all Americans while simultaneously lowering the long-term deficit, I put my Democratic voter registration card under my pillow and went to bed.
Lo and behold, I woke up this morning to find that my acne had cleared, my seasonal allergies had vanished, and eight weeks worth of male enhancement pills ordered over the Internet were waiting for me on the front stoop.
Jokes aside, the passage of healthcare reform really will change lives for the better and will do so in short order. I…
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The Lake Terrace Shopping Center has found its way back before city officials again.
When The Lens and our partners at Fox 8 News first reported on the gutted and stagnant strip mall two months ago, developer DMK Acquisitions had taken $162,500 in taxpayer money but had nothing to show for it. Owner and sole employee Kenneth Charity declined to comment, but a city official overseeing the grant said Charity was waiting for a building permit from the city.
Charity wants to add a second story, nearly doubling the size of the building on Paris Avenue at Robert E. Lee…
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The city gave $50,000 in federal grant money in part to help support sexual abstinence education done by a Christian organization, according to a spending report presented Monday to members of the City Council.
The grant also financed tutoring and day camps for more than 100 kids.
The money came out of an $800,000 pool of Community Development Block Grant cash given away by the Office of Community Development in 2009 for “youth enhancement services,” according to documents handed out at Monday's meeting of the council's Housing and Human Needs committee.
The recipient of the award was Trinity Christian Community,…
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The federal government gave New Orleans more than $6.5 million to build or repair affordable housing last year, resulting in 63 rental rehabs and 150 blighted property renovations, according to the draft of a federal report released for public review this week.
Another 81 blighted properties were expropriated using the federal grant money, according to the Consolidated Annual Performance and Evaluation Draft Report released for public review Monday.
The city is accepting comments on the report through March 30. Here’s the report for you to download as a Word document.
The annual performance and evaluation report does not provide details…
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The push to “shrink the footprint” in New Orleans — to slowly shut down badly blighted or hurricane damaged neighborhoods by banning development and rolling back public services — fell apart under howls of resident protest against the 2005-2006 Bring New Orleans Back plan.
In the New York Times, Harvard Economics Professor Edward Glaeser described the scenario facing Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, who hopes to implement a radical plan to reverse the decades of decline in his city.
Detroit has a large number of communities that are dominated by empty lots and vacant homes. Mayor Bing has spoken of providing…
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It's been a rough few weeks for the vice president of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club. First, Naaman Stewart was the public face of the group as it struggled to explain how and why it got an award of $800,000 in taxpayer money from the city. Now the sheriff is auctioning off his personal property near the Zulu headquarters because he hasn't made a mortgage payment in the past six months.
His property at 2813-15 Orleans Ave. is to be sold April 15 in an effort to settle his $91,654 debt to U.S. Bank, National Association, plus interest…
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