In The News › Contracting

Janet Howard, president and CEO of the Bureau of Governmental Research, said the city’s “calcified and byzantine” civil service system has hampered the effort further.

A New Orleans non-profit group that researches government issues has won an award for recommendations it made to overhaul the way the City of New Orleans awards professional services contracts.

The Bureau of Governmental Research, an independent watchdog group, has long called for eliminating politics from the way New Orleans awards contracts for professional services.

“There is no way grass cutting is a professional service,” Janet Howard of the Bureau of Governmental Research said.

Howard says Professional Services Contracts are supposed to only be used for work that requires skill or expertise like an attorney or architect.

But a review of 2009 contracts by the Bureau of Governmental Research found the city’s contracting problems were more pervasive. The review calls for City Hall to reform how it decides what services to outsource and how it manages vendors — and Mayor Mitch Landrieu should pursue reforms in those areas.

Tucked far back in a report on New Orleans’ contracting policies is a chart full of eye-popping statistics.

City Hall has done a poor job of contracting for services, vastly expanding the size and scope of many contracts without seeking competitive bids and using private companies to do many jobs that could have been done in-house, according to an analysis of 2009 contracts by the watchdog Bureau of Governmental Research.

The inspector general’s comments come on the heels of a report from the Bureau of Governmental Research, also criticizing the city’s contracting process under the Nagin administration and blasting contracts for websites that no longer work, wasting tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars.

More allegations of inefficiency and waste at City Hall under the Nagin Administration.
It’s all detailed in a scathing report by the Bureau of Governmental Research, which says in a city facing serious financial problems, there’s no place for waste in government.

A new report by the Bureau of Governmental Research highlights questionable spending by the city, mismanagement of public records, as well as inefficiency and waste at New Orleans City Hall. After reviewing hundreds of city contracts from 2009, BGR now questions why the city hired certain companies, without ever giving other businesses a shot at applying for the same job. The group’s findings, released Monday, also point to a number of city projects that, despite being funded by tax payers, went absolutely nowhere.

A new report by the Bureau of Governmental Research finds major flaws with the contracting process for the city of New Orleans, including examples where it says the city wasted tax money on some contracts, ignored its competitive selection process on others and mislabeled some contracts as professional services contracts to skirt the law.

Janet Howard with the Bureau of Governmental Research couldn’t talk about the legality of renegotiating contracts, but said Mayor Landrieu is doing the right thing in reviewing all contracts. “An outgoing administration has no business redoing contracts before the next administration comes in. It’s just a wrong practice to engage in beyond that. The last
administration also entered into a lot of very expensive contracts for unnecessary things,” said Howard.

Sales tax collection has been “identified as an area of weakness” in city government, Bureau of Governmental Research CEO Janet Howard said. An upcoming BGR report on city contracts shows that Nagin, before he left office, invested $225,000 in 115 additional audits that obtained an additional $2.1 million in sales tax revenues, Howard said.

Sales tax collection has been “identified as an area of weakness” in city government, said Bureau of Governmental Research CEO Janet Howard. An upcoming BGR report on city contracts shows that Nagin, before he left office, invested $225,000 in 115 additional audits. That resulted in an additional $2.1 million, Howard said.

Even before Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on New Orleans, activists and businesses charged that the city had an opaque and cronyism-ridden system for awarding building and contracting deals — a major hurdle for local firms. The Bureau of Governmental Research, a private, independent research organization released a major report entitled “Contracting with Confidence” to call attention to the matter and make recommendations in March.

The Bureau of Governmental Research believed that restricting city councils’ and mayors’ role would help lead to more objective selection decisions and would “benefit both the mayor and prospective contractors by reducing pressure on prospective contractors to contribute to political campaigns and alleviating pressure on the mayor to reward contributors with contracts,” stated the 2002 report that targeted New Orleans.

On Thursday, June 4, 2010, Mayor Mitch Landrieu signed Executive Orders that enact sweeping reforms of city contracting procedures. In doing so, the newly inaugurated Chief Executive attempts to weigh transparency reforms long advocated by good government groups like the Bureau of Governmental Research and critics in the African-American community that worry such changes might exclude minority contractors from the bidding process.

Mr. Quatrevaux gave his stamp of approval to the new contracting plan. And Janet Howard, executive director of the nonprofit Bureau of Governmental Research, described the new rules as “big, big steps forward.”

Since Landrieu’s election, BGR has jumped back into the fray, with a new slate of recommendations that align closely with the new policy.

The first test will come from the battle to end the city’s haphazard, Persian bazaar method of awarding professional service contracts. In an interview with The Louisiana Weekly on the eve of his inauguration, Landrieu explained that he hoped to have a reform that would satisfy both the Bureau of Governmental Research and the Black community. That is a tall order, but one that is eminently possible.

WWL-TV: …do you think the BGR’s report is a good start that the (Mitch) Landrieu administration and City Council can take a look at?

EQ: Yes, I think the BGR report is an excellent report. I don’t disagree with anything in it. I think the recommendations do move this city to a better system.

Its previous calls for eliminating politics from the way New Orleans awards contracts for professional services seemed to fall on mostly deaf ears, but the Bureau of Governmental Research is not giving up.

“The need for reform is clear,” BGR says in a press release, citing “numerous problems with the city’s process for awarding professional services contracts,” including “bloated contracts for political allies, an alleged kickback scheme, poor monitoring of contractor performance and an expanding definition of ‘professional service’ to avoid low-bid requirements.”

“Contracts are in some ways, when misused, the new form of patronage,” said Janet Howard, president/CEO of the Bureau of Governmental Research.

Bishop Paul Morton of Greater St. Stephen Full Gospel Baptist Church was angry with Nagin’s pledge to sign contract reform proposed by the Bureau of Governmental Research. Morton publicly called it a “slave contract” and sent the mayor-elect a letter claiming “that the majority of the African-Americans in this city are disappointed because our candidate of choice did not win.”

Forward New Orleans, a coalition of 30 civic and business groups, has released the results of its push to get all of the candidates for City Council to sign onto its seven-part reform agenda for the city.

Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s new executive order regarding professional services contracts goes into effect Wednesday, and one particularly frightening detail for City Council Vice President Arnie Fielkow is the potential absence of a paper trail in the awarding process.

After nearly two hours of often racially charged debate about the desirability and implications of government transparency, the New Orleans City Council failed Thursday to override Mayor Ray Nagin’s veto of an ordinance requiring committees that rank would-be city vendors to meet in public.

Rather than comply with a unanimously approved ordinance requiring committees that recommend firms for certain city contracts to meet in public, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has announced plans to suspend the panels and give himself sole authority to evaluate such deals.

Attorney General Buddy Caldwell has once again ruled that the New Orleans City Council is within its rights to demand Mayor C. Ray Nagin open the administration’s professional service contract review to public scrutiny.

Despite Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell’s Oct. 15 opinion that the City Council is well within its rights to create greater transparency in city contracting by opening the professional services procurement process to Open Meetings Law, Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s administration continues to fight that effort by asking the AG for a reconsideration.

New Orleans City Council members and government watchdogs continue to search for greater transparency in professional services contracts in spite of Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s most recent and comprehensive executive order on the process issued in April.