New Orleans levee board’s closed-door discussion may have violated state law, lawyers say

By Alex Lubben

Source: The Times-Picayune | NOLA.com

June 18, 2026

A New Orleans area levee board met behind closed doors this week to discuss an investigation by the state attorney general, a move open-government lawyers say may have violated state law.

The board voted at a May 12 meeting to request that Attorney General Liz Murrill make public an investigative report within 30 days into alleged wrongdoing at the flood protection agency, officially called the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East. Those 30 days came and went, and the report has not been made public. 

Murrill says the flood protection authority, responsible for overseeing much of the metro area’s $14.5 billion flood control system, is holding up the report. Board members at the flood agency say Murrill has delayed releasing it. 

For more than a year, Gov. Jeff Landry’s allies have repeatedly suggested that the investigation would reveal former board members’ wrongdoings.

Shane Guidry, a Landry adviser who has been carrying out changes at the agency though he holds no government office, has upended the board, overseeing an effort that has removed or led to the resignation of every member appointed before the governor took office. He has repeatedly alleged that the agency, prior to Landry, was rife with “waste, fraud and abuse” — allegations that have so far not been substantiated.

Murrill has previously said that her office’s investigation did not find any criminal conduct, but “some pretty severe dysfunction.”

The delay appears related to the investigation into Superintendent of Police Joshua Rondeno. As police chief, he oversaw a dramatic increase in the flood agency’s focus on policing, and was placed on paid leave earlier this month after lawmakers questioned his self-drafted employment contract, a version of which would have granted him up to $910,000 in severance pay had he been fired without cause.

“The Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East’s board has requested that we continue investigating certain new complaints regarding operations,” Murrill said in a statement. “Because those matters overlap and may have an impact on the report the board requested, I will follow the instructions of the board regarding when it wishes to release the prior report.”

Murrill and the board appear to disagree over who asked whom to delay the report. At Wednesday’s meeting, board president Peter Vicari flatly contradicted Murrill, saying it was she who told the board to hold it.

“That’s not correct,” Vicari said of Murrill’s statement. “We were ready to give it to y’all and this other thing happened. So that’s why she said, ‘Stop, don’t release anything until this one is done.’”

Behind closed doors

Board members convened in a closed-door session Wednesday to “discuss” making the investigation public. The meeting’s agenda was amended after a reporter noted that holding a closed-door meeting to talk about “a legal matter in anticipation of litigation,” as the first version of the agenda read, appeared to violate the state’s open meetings law.

The board reworded that item and added a second — a closed-door “discussion of the release of the Attorney General’s investigative report.”

But that also may not be permissible under Louisiana’s open meetings law, according to Bruce Hamilton, director of the First Amendment Clinic at Tulane University’s law school.

“The body can go into executive session for an investigative proceeding, not a discussion of a report,” Hamilton said.

Virginia Hamrick, a staff attorney with the Reporter’s Committee for the Freedom of the Press, agreed.

“The open meetings law is supposed to be interpreted strictly and the exceptions are narrowly construed,” she said. “It doesn’t include discussions.”

The agency did not respond to an inquiry about what exemption to the law it relied on to justify the closed-door session, saying only that the “executive session complied with Louisiana law” and that the agenda was reviewed by outside counsel. 

“When a public body goes into executive session, it should be able to point to the specific exemption in the law that allows it and explain why that exemption fits,” said Rebecca Mowbray, the president and CEO of the Bureau for Governmental Research, a New Orleans government watchdog group. “That matters all the more for a body whose recent decisions are under public scrutiny.”

The agency has discussed the attorney general’s report in closed-door meetings on three other occasions over the course of the last year.

Blair duQuesnay, the chair of Citizens for One Greater New Orleans, a group that advocated for levee board reforms in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina’s levee failures, asked board members at Wednesday’s meeting to release the report.

She noted that the report was first disclosed publicly in March of last year by former board president Roy Carubba, who resigned from the board this month. She said that Carubba had “commented in the media and to the public that it is a smoking gun, that it will show that all of the former board members who he coerced to resign … were guilty of fraud, waste, and abuse.”

“I just don’t understand the continued political interference with flood protection,” duQuesnay said. “The public deserves to know what is in that report.”

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