New Orleans City Council ready to hire back blight officers fired by mayor

By David Hammer, The Times-Picayune
January 04, 2010, 1:25PM

Saying that restoring blight enforcement hearings is their top remaining priority, a City Council committee suggested that the full council take the unique step of hiring back administrative hearing officers recently fired by Mayor Ray Nagin.

Meanwhile, council Budget Chairwoman Cynthia Hedge-Morrell reported that negotiations with the mayor to get him to restore certain spending programs have not borne fruit.

City Attorney Penya Moses-Fields forced the shutdown of blight hearings when she fired private attorneys who dole out fines and determine if derelict homeowners have legitimate hardships that prevent them from cleaning up their properties.

Moses-Fields said she had to fire the hearing officers after the City Council cut $1 million out of her operating budget. But several council members said the cutting of hearing officers along with other outside attorneys was unnecessary, especially given how relatively little they cost.

There were two remaining contracts for hearing officers totaling $80,000.

But Moses-Fields made it clear it wasn't that simple and the council didn't appear to understand how untenable their cuts to her budget were. The council cut $1 million from a specific pot of money in the Law Department's budget called "other operating" costs, expecting that it would be used to cut high-priced lawyers that seemed superfluous.

But administration spokeswoman Ceeon Quiett said Moses-Fields couldn't fire attorneys the courts had ordered the city to hire, such as the ones making $200,000 for a case involving the Youth Study Center. Quiett said that cutting those contracts would have resulted in contempt-of-court rulings against the city.

Council President Arnie Fielkow suggested Monday that the council put out its own request for proposals to law firms and spend $80,000 from its own budget to rehire blight officers.

"Just doing some quick math, if we have 500 hearings at $200 a pop (in daily fines on properties found derelict), that's $100,000 right there, and you already have a significant return on investment on the $80,000," Fielkow said.

Now, the idea of rehiring the attorneys using $80,000 from the council's budget -- or, as suggested by Jennifer Farwell, president of the Mid-City Neighborhood Organization, spending $20,000 to cover the first quarter of the year -- may give the council some leverage as it negotiates with the mayor over changes he wants to the budget the council passed Dec. 1.

The council adopted a $455 million spending plan with what some consider conservative revenue projections. The mayor wanted a $462 million budget, which some council members said was based on unreasonable income expectations.

Fielkow contended the mayor's stoppage of blight hearings was not needed to make the council's adopted budget work.

"This is a cut being made as political payback to the council for passing a budget the mayor didn't like, and the ultimate losers are the citizens of New Orleans," Fielkow said.

Hedge-Morrell said her negotiations with Nagin will continue this week, but "we are not as close as we once thought on some of the issues." It appears they were close to a deal last week but the council could not get four members to commit to pass it.

At Monday's committee hearing, Fielkow urged Hedge-Morrell to press the mayor to simply restore the money for the blight officers. But failing that, he said, the council should look to act on its own.

Councilwoman Jackie Clarkson said the council has the right to rehire the blight officers, but doesn't have the power to administer the resulting contract. In other words, the Nagin administration would have to OK and oversee work by any council-hired hearing officers.

Susan Guidry, a Democrat running for the open City Council District A seat, accused Nagin of playing "political football with the blight issue."

But Quiett said the council and its allies don't understand how much Nagin wanted to avoid any cuts to the blight fighting process. The administration has clearly signaled its dedication to improving blight hearings. In November, a top aide traveled to Detroit to study how that city conducts its so-called "blight court."

"The mayor is dedicated to getting a more efficient process for attacking blight," Quiett said. "We were finally at a place where we were able to move forward and get heavy on code enforcement. It was the last thing we wanted to cut, but we had to keep the court-ordered lawyers."

Quiett said the administration looked at several alternatives, including pro bono lawyers and federal grants to cover the costs, but none of them worked out.

Detroit is known for its blight problem, and New Orleans seems to be eradicating blight more quickly, having reduced the total number of blighted properties by 9,000 in the last year. A lot of that has to do with Katrina recovery and active community groups who pressure derelict owners to fix up or sell their blighted properties.

But Detroit has been able, at least, to bring more owners to enforcement hearings than New Orleans has. Detroit held 45,000 administrative hearings in its "blight court" in 2008, according to the Detroit News. By contrast, New Orleans has managed only 11,000 hearings since the middle of 2008.

Connie Uddo of Beacon of Hope, a community group that promotes rebuilding in Lakeview and Gentilly, said that even when blight hearings don't yield fines, they can help nonprofits get information to derelict homeowners about how to hire grass-cutters or do other things to bring their properties into compliance.