Mayor Cantrell seems to be God’s gift to the OTC painkiller industry, because whenever I speak with a member of the New Orleans City Council, it’s evident that to get through the average workday they need a bottle of Advil in each hand just to stave off the unyielding wave of headaches coming from City Hall.
Let's recap what happened this week.
Councilman JP Morrell came on the show to explain that the council is moving to amend the city charter. The reason? The troubling relationship between the mayor and the city attorney.
For clarification, a city attorney’s job is to represent the best interests of the city. That could mean a number of things, including advising the mayor, council, or other city officials on an assortment of legal matters. It could be a court case, an administrative hearing, an ordinance, or a tax code change.
The official page on Nola.gov even outlines the role. It states, “The City Attorney’s Office has a dedicated team of public servants committed to providing aggressive and competent legal representation on behalf of the City of New Orleans for the benefit of all of our citizens.”
For the benefit of all of our citizens. Not for the benefit of all our citizens unless it doesn't benefit the mayor. Not for the benefit of a city councilmember...For the benefit of the citizens.
That’s what it says.
What it doesn’t say is that, in a stand-off between the mayor and the city council, the city attorney acts as the mayor’s personal defense. If it comes down to the mayor vs. the council, that’s what we would call a conflict of interest, and the city attorney should not be involved.
This is why the mayor and council each have their own executive counsel, legal expert(s) that represent each of the parties’ interests.
So that should be it, right? Cantrell can just use her executive counsel? Wrong.
JP Morrell reminds us of something key: “Here’s the problem. The mayor’s executive council is a guy named Clifton (Davis), who's disbarred. She never hired another executive counsel. So, rather than hire another executive counsel... she’s deferred to the city attorney. The attorney should have recused themselves from representing either of us against the other, but just picked the mayor’s side. The problem we have in this city right now is that the mayor has done things that are so bizarre and outside the norm, and yet you have district judges and a city attorney who normalize aberrant behavior.”
Here’s something else a city attorney typically doesn’t do: Support the mayor in a legal battle that results in less income for the city. In other words, exactly what’s happening with the Wisner Trust.
“When it comes to Wisner, we already got 100% of the money,” Morrell explains. “Why is the city attorney fighting with the mayor to get the city less money? That makes no sense. Not even a little bit.”
As things stand, the trust hands New Orleans around 3 million dollars annually. The council fought for and won a deal that would bring in closer to 9 million. The mayor, with the help of the city attorney, has tried to fight against getting more money.
If it seems backward, crooked, and shady, that’s because it is.
Morrell explains how it's benefited Cantrell, saying, “Even under the previous trust that Mitch Landrieu operated under, we were getting closer to 50%. Cantrell negotiated a worse deal, and the exchange in negotiating that worse deal was that she got 100% discretion over 35% (of the trust), rather than (the larger portion) having to be dealt with transparently with the council in a public manner. That 35% in the new trust she was forwarding to the Forward New Orleans that she controlled to do her own slush fund stuff.”
“The sheer audacity of this city attorney and the mayor's office to use city resources to promote her agenda is just nauseating,” says Morrell.
The obvious question on everyone’s mind now is this: Can we somehow stop the mayor and city attorney from being in cahoots?
Thankfully, the council is looking to amend the charter to explicitly outline that the city attorney is not a tool for the mayor to wield in her own best interest.
Morrell tells me, “I filed a charter amendment that will restructure the city attorney's office because this city attorney has shown that our charter is not explicit enough in laying out that the city attorney’s role is to represent the city, not the mayor. There have been so many instances where the law, case law, jurisprudence falls firmly on the side of the city attorney doing their job, but whenever the mayor says ‘Nope, I want ot ignore the law,' they gleefully do it. There’s a direct correlation between how ridiculously broken this office is and that it’s at its lowest staffing levels in modern history.”
I know I might continue to sound like a broken record, but we have an election coming up, folks. And we have no choice: It has to be a realignment election.
We need to realign our focus and move as wise as serpents to elect the person who is competent, committed, and concerned enough to focus on getting us back on track.
I’m not against ribbon-cutting, handshaking, and kissing babies. But what we need above all else is someone who's willing to put aside their own self-interest and self-image to address the massive challenges we face.
We need someone who's looking out for the people, not looking to undermine them.
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