In the Shadow of Statues

by Mitch Landrieu

  James, Bill Clinton’s great strategist, and his wife, Mary Matalin, who served in both Bush White Houses, had lucrative careers in political media when they left the Washington, D.C., area in 2008 and moved to New Orleans. They plunged into the life of the city, hosting events for civic causes—model public citizens. We became friends.

  “You can not only win, but win in the primary,” James told me. In New Orleans, all parties compete in one “open” primary, and if anyone wins over 50 percent, there is no need for further voting. Otherwise, the top two candidates go into a runoff, which becomes the general election.

  As part of his professorship at Tulane University, Carville had conducted a survey on the mayor’s race that sampled the views of a thousand people, a large number compared with normal surveys. The poll found voters frustrated with the sluggish recovery and racial divisions; more than two thirds thought the city was moving in the wrong direction. They wanted someone who could unite people and jump-start the rebuilding—not another outsider businessman like Ray Nagin, but a politician with governing experience. That suggested a case of buyers’ remorse in voters who had rejected me the last time. In politics you never take support for granted—you have to earn the base every time, as I knew from my own recent outings. I was sure I could restore a city in severe disrepair, but would I get blindsided and lose again?

  I made a late entry into the 2010 mayor’s race, so late as to surprise close friends and family. I announced at an open event for Café Reconcile, the teaching restaurant founded by, among others, the late Father Harry Tompson, my mentor at Jesuit. Café Reconcile takes youth off the street, mostly out of school and in trouble, puts them through training in cooking, in front-of-the-house work, and in the kitchen—a full immersion for getting a job. The restaurant is on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard, a street in the middle of town that had fallen into blight, named for a prominent civil rights leader of the 1960s. Resurrection and redemption come from unlikely places.

  I won a majority in the primary going away, defeating African American business consultant Troy Henry and local businessman John Georges. They never gained traction in large part because they were perceived to be too much like Nagin. And now, years removed from the traumatic event itself, voters of all races were looking for steady leadership. More important to me than winning was how I won, gaining 66 percent of the overall vote and a majority of both African American and white votes. I lost only one out of the nearly four hundred precincts in New Orleans, and that one by just a single vote. I am still questioning our get-out-the-vote effort in that precinct. My election happened to come on the weekend when the New Orleans Saints won their first Super Bowl; the air was charged with optimism. For me it felt like a fresh start.

  I began reaching out to hundreds of New Orleanians to serve on transition and planning task forces. I also contacted other mayors for advice: Michael Bloomberg of New York, Richard M. Daley of Chicago, Tom Menino of Boston, Michael Nutter of Philadelphia, Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles, Anthony Williams of Washington, D.C., among others. Every city has its own unique concerns, but many issues overlap and I wanted to see how other mayors handled them.

  Mayor Bloomberg, who became a mentor and a friend, told me two simple things I have never forgotten: “Hire a great scheduler because your time is your most valuable asset. And do all of the tough things first.” His advice was superb, though I did not foresee how everything we faced would be tough—all the way to the end. Mike Bloomberg also introduced me to the deputy mayor system, which required hiring professionals with management skills to oversee the government. Having deputy mayors provides a boundary for the mayor’s office, so that you’re not at the beck and call of people who can be helped by high-level staff. This was a management system designed for better and faster results; it has worked.

  Mayor Daley of Chicago advised on how to consolidate various departments to make the bureaucracy work better across silos. Mayor Joseph P. Riley of Charleston, South Carolina, the dean of U.S. mayors, talked about how important city design, architecture, and planning was, which was particularly relevant to our recovery. Mayor Menino showed off his 311 and other technology systems, much of which we would later adopt, to help reform the way New Orleans government worked. Mayor Nutter took me into the daily battle for criminal justice reform.

  My sister Mary, Louisiana’s senior senator, was leading the recovery effort in Washington, D.C., and the whole Louisiana congressional delegation fought hard for our fair share of funding to rebuild schools, housing stock, hospitals, and more. Mary has never been given her due credit for the major work she did in helping the city recover. It took an army to get it done, but there would have been no resurgence without her strong leadership.

  My term would open in the middle of another disaster, with nightly news footage of oil spewing out beneath the Gulf of Mexico at a broken well site. Several weeks before I took office, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded offshore, killing eleven men. As oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico unabated, the world again watched south Louisiana take another hit. The city’s economy and well-being are utterly dependent on tourism, and everyone worried about the fishing industry as a major supplier of seafood to New Orleans restaurants. Would people still come here if they were afraid to eat our food after this? The economy took a hit.

  I cannot overstate how broken our city government was at my inauguration in May 2010. The disarray was numbing; not only was the recovery stalled, but the city was at the brink of bankruptcy and NOPD was under federal investigation, not to mention four other major city agencies under federal consent judgments or management oversight due to poor performance and in some cases abuse.

  I brought in consultants from the Public Strategies Group to conduct a forensic assessment of the city organization across the board. David Osborne told us that we had inherited “the least competent city government” and “the most corrupt—a really tough experience.” He said plainly, “The city faces more challenges than we have ever seen in an American city.”

  The workforce had taken deep cuts, with many functions outsourced to contractors; payroll staff was down to about 4,000, well below the pre-Katrina 6,300. To save money, Mayor Nagin had moved City Hall to a four-day workweek. During the transition, I was told that the city had a $35 million deficit. When my team got into City Hall, we opened the books and after a thorough audit found that the budget deficit was actually $62 million, then $67 million, before finally settling on a $97-million gap. With only six months left in the year, and zero reserves, with no one-time Katrina funding or borrowing capacity, we had to close the city’s budget gap— more than one fifth of the total general fund. We did so by reducing boards and commissions, reorganizing departments, and changing the delivery of core services. Even in the shrunken government, there was a lot of overlap and waste. We continued privatizing where we could. Instead of providing direct health care, we shut down our city clinics and transitioned the patients to primary-care health clinics with nonprofit operators, which were spread throughout the city. We were able to place nearly all of our employees with those private facilities. We also cut contracts large and small—the most controversial of which were three garbage collection contracts, two of which were the largest public contracts held by African American businesses in the state. It was painful and controversial because it was viewed racially in political circles, but nothing could be sacrosanct, and this was about fiscal waste, not race. I was also forced, reluctantly, to furlough city employees 10 percent of their time, a big hit for an already beleaguered group of public servants. This was a painful task, forcing good people to take personal losses.

  The city’s technology system was on the verge of collapse. Many critical systems—payroll, finance, revenue—all had single points of failure, which means that if one thing went wrong, the entire system stopped working. The city’s Web server for e-mails kept going down. The most visible signs of systemic trouble were the many streets bad
ly in need of repair. Nagin’s recovery czar, Edward Blakely, had promised “cranes in the sky” within a year of his 2007 appointment. Not only had that building boom not materialized, the streets were still completely torn up from flooding.

  Nagin had also outsourced much of the city’s management; highly paid subcontractors were providing basic services like reception and administrative work. Why pay $70 an hour for a clerical staffer performing basic duties at City Hall? Meanwhile, under Nagin, some 655 capital projects had been designed, representing an estimated $1.5 billion in costs. There was only one problem. The city had $1.2 billion to pay for those projects from allotted FEMA funds. This shortfall meant that other important projects could not launch, because the last administration overspent on design without a real budget or bottom line. We had to go back to the drawing board.

  We found waste everywhere—the Nagin administration had paid more than fifty thousand dollars to store seventy thousand dollars’ worth of unused furniture, still in boxes! The city had spent more than a hundred thousand dollars in grant funds on a recovery website that no one knew existed.

  My theory was that by cutting with a scalpel and not a hatchet, as they often do in Washington, we could be positioned to better deliver services when the finances got better. It would also take constant reorganization, looking at what is and is not working to deliver services. At the same time, you have to invest in the things that will help you grow or produce long-term results, like retail stores that generate sales tax and auditors who improve collections. So much had ground to a halt after the storm.

  From my role as lieutenant governor, I knew that Mayor Nagin and his team had failed to access money available in the federal pipeline. We started right away to rebuild the city’s relationship with FEMA and began negotiating for funding streams. President Obama, FEMA administrator Craig Fugate, and HUD secretary and later OMB director Shaun Donovan were nothing short of remarkable. As we began the transition, I asked President Obama if he would lend us some people to help. This was a great benefit, as it allowed us in the transition to put in process what I call “horizontal and vertical integration,” which simply means that the city works cooperatively with state and federal offices on a given dimension of rebuilding. Anything I wanted to do with federal money—whether it be through FEMA, HUD, or the Department of Agriculture—turned on having people from each agency in the room, from start to finish.

  I asked the president to insist his FEMA directors at the regional level meet with me personally once a month; the initial sessions laid the foundation for more funding streams ahead. Beyond those top-level meetings, our teams met as often as necessary. The city of New Orleans owes a lasting debt of gratitude to President Obama for putting the White House behind our rebuilding agenda. FEMA promised to approve anything to which the law said we were entitled, provided we proved it was caused by the flood damage. On one hand, that was no problem: it had been documented quickly that the city flooded on such an epic scale because of man-made error by the Army Corps of Engineers in its design and management of the levee system. On the other hand, because many of the city’s records flooded, it was often hard to prove exactly what was caused by prior neglect and what was caused by the levee failure. After some 750 meetings over eight years, we secured billions more in federal funding for schools, hospitals, parks, playgrounds, and critical infrastructure, particularly streets and drainage.

  I was determined not just to build back the city that was, but to rebuild a stronger, more resilient city for the future. That meant improving all public structures, not just the Old World architecture of the French Quarter, the Greek Revival architecture of the Garden District and Uptown, or the quilt of shotgun and Victorian cottages that give many neighborhoods their character and that visitors think of as “real New Orleans.” There’s more reality beyond that. One example here will suffice.

  The blandly named Youth Study Center was a prison for juvenile offenders, and had become a nightmare of scandals before the 2005 flood. The facility was beaten to death in Katrina. The juvenile court judge wanted to rebuild it as it had been. I said, “No. We’re not building back something that the city did not get right the first time.” I insisted that the detention facility—our new Juvenile Justice Center—have a wraparound service center so that the juvenile inmates would meet judges, prosecutors, and police, demonstrating to them that the adults who incarcerated them were not abandoning them, but offering their time to try to help them restructure their lives. We put in space to bring the public school system inside, behind the gates. An initial $7 million budget ballooned to $42 million through a series of negotiations with FEMA.

  As we drew up the plan to rebuild the many schools trashed in the flood, we went back to FEMA over and over, basically saying, Look, you cannot give us just a little bit of money. We have to build smarter for the future, with building codes that afford resilience in the event of future flooding. This is an issue that many cities within coastal zones are facing in the age of sea rise. We also pointed out that the United States of America itself needs a coherent, forward-thinking national policy, and we were part of that process. In 2015, ten years after the storm, we secured $2.4 billion just to cover the most extensive street and water system repair in the city’s history; unfortunately, the funding cannot always get to the ground soon enough. In the summer of 2017, we experienced major disruptions to our water, sewerage, and drainage systems’ power plant, causing flooding and a boil water advisory. The long timeline of the Katrina funding and repairs had caught up with us. Nonetheless, I knew that this funding was something that would make a material difference in everyone’s life every day.

  Early on, I instituted the deputy mayor system, with lines of authority and a more manageable organizational chart that allowed us to rebuild the work force with a $1 billion total budget. I began recruiting professionals in fields of expertise that cities require to thrive. I also ensured that we had a diverse team, led by women and African Americans, young and experienced. Many of the brightest minds in urban planning were attracted to the idea of helping rebuild a major American city. We worked on integrating data and technology in our policy decision making. Our data analytics unit and performance management team put New Orleans on the map for government innovation. We also wanted to have a bottom-up and not a top-down government, so we created a team of neighborhood engagement officers who were assigned to work with neighborhood leaders and associations across the city, many of whom were leading the recovery in their neighborhoods in absence of the formal government.

  My primary challenge was to rebuild public trust, to restore credibility, and to heal a city that was broken—economically, spiritually, racially. To clean up corruption and restore trust, I signed a series of executive orders to change the city’s system of awarding contracts by creating a chief procurement officer and a new contracting process in which selection committees would meet in public. Contracts with the city of New Orleans would now be awarded based on proven expertise in the field, rather than on knowing the right people in government. We also opened doors of opportunity with the Disadvantaged Business Enterprises initiative, giving dozens more local and minority-owned companies a level playing field by requiring some subcontractor participation of small and minority firms on contracts. Many groups had pushed for these reforms for years. We instituted them in the first thirty days.

  Heartbreakingly, many of the city’s recreation facilities were in shambles—empty swimming pools, broken restrooms and lighting, flood-damaged ball fields. No one could even tell which playgrounds and camps were open; there was no list. NORD—the New Orleans Recreation Department—with its baseball parks and Carrollton Boosters games—was fundamental to my coming of age. I made an absolute priority of bringing that system back.

  The condition of one playground and camp was particularly dispiriting. Raised in the Seventh Ward neighborhood of Tremé (now famous from the HBO television series), Jerome Smith was a legendar
y civil rights activist and Freedom Rider in the 1960s in Mississippi. When he moved back to the Tremé neighborhood, he founded the Tambourine and Fan Club, an education and recreation program for youngsters with a summer camp at a place called Hunter’s Field. A commanding role model with a gentle touch, Jerome Smith created a safe haven for kids who needed one—a place to laugh and learn, a respite from the unforgiving streets. Jerome Smith was a frontline leader in the battle for the soul of our city. Addicts and pushers learned to avoid Hunter’s Field.

  After Katrina, Mr. Smith had bad dealings with the Nagin people and some members of the City Council; the bureaucracy botched his request for basic supplies for the summer camp—no board games, no crayons, no Hula-Hoops. He still didn’t close his doors or turn kids away. The heat index exceeded 100 degrees many days, and Mr. Smith’s building did not have air-conditioning. So he brought in fans and kept the doors open; the kids kept coming. There was a raggedy bus to take the kids to a rundown old pool. For many kids, that was the only ride they’d take to someplace else, that pool their only escape from hot summer streets. The camp gave them a choice—and more than that, it gave them hope. Despite the city’s many challenges, we committed early on to rebuilding NORD by doubling the funds even as we worked through hard deficits. We made sure Tambourine and Fan received the supplies and funding it needed. We also rebuilt the Tremé Center, which now stands as a beacon of hope and a place of safe-haven in this historic neighborhood.