Glimmer of hope for NO, but clowns still in charge

While East Baton Rouge Parish’s metropolitan government is trying to right a ship taking on water, New Orleans elected officials and voters are showing at least a few signs they are halting the rearranging of deck chairs and actually want finally to do something about reversing the protracted agony of their sinking ship, events culminating in last week’s elections demonstrate.

Mismanagement has been a historical feature, not bug, of ruling New Orleans, but since the late 20^th century this has gone onto steroids. Most of the 21^st has featured all of a male hustler who misplayed an unfortunate but unanticipated chance to make major headway in arresting the city’s demographic and economic decline into using his influence corruptly to earn an orange jumpsuit, a lackey legacy more concerned about making symbolic political statements than in trying to reverse the decline, and a female hustler who checked out long ago concerning city governance to live high off the hog on taxpayer expense that may earn her an orange jumpsuit as well. City councilors for their part, if not getting convicted, either actively have participated in benign neglect or gone along with digging the hole deeper.

A month ago, the city found itself in its worst human-caused disaster ever, fiscal in nature. Democrat Mayor LaToya Cantrell, who gives the appearance that she can’t wait to get out of office and work on her criminal defense, spent Wuhan coronavirus money like a drunken sailor and budgeted entirely unrealistically in watching revenues evaporate and expenses mount to send the city calling on the state to bail it out. After various state officials demanded real accountability, it hesitated as if its officials – now really led by incoming Democrat mayor and current City Councilor Helena Moreno – thought they could get a better deal. Reality intruded and instead they struck a face-saving deal essentially the same as the one they had tried to reject: oversight by a state official, Legislative Auditor Mike Waguespack’s office, in exchange for a $125 million bridge loan for a narrow range of authorized expenditures, at a lower rate than first proposed.

Moreno pledged to use the money, using words seldom heard around the city if not at complete odds with the political careers of the policy-makers involved, to “right-size” city government. One obvious source of penny-pinching is the amount of overtime paid out, in large part to public safety employees because of a police officer shortage triggered by flushing out substandard officers (that could include those raking in rampant overtime pay who appear not to be working it actually) and losing others who don’t want to work in a jurisdiction where a progressive prosecutor ramps up the difficulty of their jobs, reflected in the city’s extraordinarily high crime rate. Stupidly, Cantrell budgeted, despite recent past trends of the city paying tens of millions a year in overtime, small amounts for overtime to create an illusion of a balanced budget that technically the city charter demands.

And this stupidity extends to Moreno and the other warm bodies serving on the Council, who year after year went along with the charade. This lack of credibility extends to the fact that this panel also approved of an amendment to the Charter that voters assented to this weekend, which would bust the budget further by pouring $45 million into a rathole the Council created chasing the fantasy of “affordable” housing that relied upon the impossible task of repealing the laws of supply and demand.

But that was only part of a $510 million bond package that, outside of the use of the $45 million in debt to pay for non-capital items, represents the wages of past sins. With the remaining $465 million perhaps even necessary, the total will cause overall indebtedness to explode by five-eighths again upwards to $1.323 billion. This means the city will be on the hook for an extra $25 million annually for the next 30 years to pay it off. Voters approved all three such measures, even the housing trust fund sink.

Not that they exactly distinguished themselves with the few elections left on the ballot as runoffs. Given sub-mediocre choices in District A, Democrat Aimee McCarron won, and with even less stellar choices left in District E, they put jn the worse of the pair Democrat state Rep. Jason Hughes. All in all, including the general election victors, it’s hard to argue the incoming Council will be any better than the underwhelming outgoing version.

Yet there was one ray of sunshine, if only symbolic, for the largely ceremonially post of clerk of court. Democrat incumbent Darren Lombard saw the end of his family dynasty in office when voters unceremoniously dumped him in favor of lawyer Calvin Duncan, who famously had his murder conviction overturned upon evidence of police misconduct (whether technically legally exonerated criminal activity related to that charge remains in dispute). Duncan ran on the office’s inefficiencies that Lombard only slowly had tried to address, and Lombard did himself no favors when this year his office incompetently discarded paper documents it needed to keep.

Summing it all up, maybe Moreno and the new Council will go against well-established type (and their own past performances) and, spurred by the deal with the state, actually demand efficiency, spend wisely, and stop the leftist economic and social nonsense that discourages serious economic development. But it’s not something upon which you should place a bet.