Mayor Ray Nagin defends his proposed contract policy which helps New Orleans spend money without public oversight. The sad part of all this is that he was once a pretty good mayor, and even when he was re-elected after Katrina, he was a better, less corrupt choice than the other runoff survivor, Mitch Landrieu.
Saying he has been a “good steward of the city’s money” and runs City Hall in an open and transparent fashion, Mayor Ray Nagin on Wednesday defended his proposal to disband citizen committees that review certain public contracts rather than comply with a unanimously approved ordinance requiring the panels to meet in public.
Candidate Ray Nagin, in 2002:
“I say this with the deepest and the most solemn respect: The money that goes out to fund these things that are carried in the personal-services contracts, that is not the mayor’s money. It is not the City Council’s money. It is the citizens’ money and they should have the right, should they so choose, to observe the spending of every public penny.”
This was written in 1879, and since then… plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose:
Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under a lava flood of taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become only a study for archaeologists. …But it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes, than to own the whole state of Ohio. – Lafcadio Hearn, 1879
