The year-long comedy of errors regarding Shreveport recycling follies just won’t subside, just in time to allow voters to associate the incompetence displayed throughout with Democrat Mayor Adrian Perkins as qualifying for fall elections looms a week away.
Just over twelve months ago, the Perkins Administration decided to award its curbside recycling contract to a firm headed by Charlette Edwards. A year earlier, the previous contractor – who had insisted it could make money for all off the enterprise – abandoned the money-losing deal, which forced the city to suspend the program and stop collecting the extra fee funding it for which it hit up households.
Although the program over a decade did little to conserve landfill space or to pump up city coffers but certainly squeezed residents, Perkins was sacred and bound to restart it. But only Edwards’ firm bid on it – and won the $9.5 million award over five years despite having no experience in this area, no equipment, no employees, and saying it would haul everything 75 miles away (the old contractor had a facility at the Port of Caddo-Bossier).
Even Perkins’ Democrat allies on the City Council, which had to approve the measure, expressed some skepticism over the deal, and during the next year a back-and-forth ensued, over the main issue of requiring a performance bond as part of the deal, a fairly standard protection for these arrangements. Democrat LeVette Fuller joined the three Republicans then on the Council to create this condition, which later in the year the Council guaranteed the job if the bond were obtained.
Yet over the next six months Edwards made no progress towards fulfilling the requirement. After a year had passed since the initial decision, at the apparent behest of the Perkins Administration the Council was asked to lift the stricture, but that failed, with one vote against ominously enough from Democrat Alan Jackson, a Perkins ally appointed by Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards when the previous GOP councilor had resigned. Moreover, the city’s own risk manager at the previous meeting when the waiver had been introduced had testified the company’s utter lack of infrastructure plus outstanding judgments and liens against it made a performance bond essential.
After this rejection, this week Edwards said she would sue the city for failure to close the deal. She alleged discrimination on race and sex as a prime consideration. She said she didn’t need a bond because of the termination for convenience clause in the contract – about which she had complained when the resolution to remove the bond had been introduced, describing it as an extremely onerous condition.
Her stated rationale echoed with rich irony. Likely the only reason Perkins hung on so long to this fantasy exactly was because Edwards was a black female, besides being the only apparent hope to resume shoving forced recycling onto residents (the fee applies whether a household participates), a demography suited to satisfy the city’s quasi-quota program for contracting that only a month ago had gotten Perkins into warm (pool) water.
And, yet again, Perkins in his managerial role serves another unforced error. Besides halting any progress on resumption of recycling by chasing this unrealistic scenario for so long, his actions have drawn a nuisance suit. Even with voter demographics creating an uphill climb for both of his main announced challengers, misstep after misstep – even now after three-and-a-half years in office – from Perkins makes credible the chances of one of them pulling the upset.
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