Gov. Jeff Landry’s adviser is reshaping New Orleans levee authority. ‘Look at Elon Musk’
By Alex Lubben
Source: The Times-Picayune | Nola.com
January 16, 2025
Behind the scenes, an unelected adviser to Gov. Jeff Landry is reshaping the regional levee authority that helps protect the New Orleans area from storm surge flooding.
Shane Guidry, the Metairie businessman who made his fortune supplying the oil and gas industry, is leading a push to restructure the east bank’s levee authority and empower the agency’s roughly 60-officer police force to fight crime rather than only protect the region’s flood infrastructure.
Part of this effort involves expanding the role of the agency’s police chief after the agency’s previous director, Kelli Chandler, resigned last month. Guidry said she clashed with him over the role of the agency’s cops.
The changes at the flood authority raise questions over whether reforms put into place after Hurricane Katrina aimed at professionalizing and depoliticizing the agency are being abandoned. But Guidry takes the opposite view.
“Just because you ran it one way for 30 years doesn’t mean it needs to run that way tomorrow,” Guidry said. “We don’t want anybody’s house to flood. We don’t want anybody shot, murdered, and robbed.”
Guidry appears to be taking a hands-on approach to reform at the regional flood authority, which oversees flood control infrastructure on the east bank. He recruited police superintendent Josh Rondeno to the agency, Rondeno said. When The Times-Picayune requested an interview with board president Roy Carubba this week, Carubba cleared the request with Guidry before meeting with a reporter.
“I am unaware of that kind of influence being exerted by someone who is not a board member,” said Herb Miller, a former president of the agency’s board of commissioners. “It certainly didn’t happen in the eight years I was on the board.”
But to Carubba and Rondeno, Guidry has been an invaluable asset to the agency, which they say is now set up for success.
“Shane Guidry is a brilliant business person,” said Carubba.
“A strategist and a catalyst,” Rondeno added.
Rondeno also called Carubba a “top performing engineer of over 39 years,” while referring to himself as “an accomplished, proven leader in a police superintendent.”
Carubba is president of Carubba Engineering, a civil engineering firm in Metairie that has performed work for Guidry.
Levee board reforms
The Flood Protection Authority-East, established in 2006 after Hurricane Katrina, consolidated the formerly-separate levee boards in Orleans, Jefferson, and St. Bernard parishes into a regional flood control agency. It is tasked with the operation and maintenance of the flood control system built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to protect New Orleans from storm surge.
Those reforms aimed to professionalize and depoliticize the authority after the catastrophic levee failures in 2005. Critics of Landry’s approach to the agency have said he risks undoing those post-Katrina reforms.
“The commitment to keep politics out of this, to work exclusively on what’s in the best interest of flood protection, to not have any compromises, egos, or distractions, that’s going to be on you,” Jay Lapeyre, who oversaw the board’s nominating committee, told the board of commissioners in June of last year.
Lawmakers gave Landry new authority to appoint chairs of 150 state boards and commissions last year.
Rebecca Mowbray, head of the Bureau of Governmental Research, a nonprofit good-government organization, stressed that, regardless of its relationship to the governor’s office, the flood protection authority should be focused on improving the regional levee system.
Rondeno and Carubba said that they have already made strides at the agency. They cited improved morale among the workforce. They purchased body-worn cameras. Officers previously used their personal firearms on the job; the authority is in the process of purchasing service weapons for them.
Rondeno, meanwhile, is taking on a larger role at the agency than prior police superintendents.
The regional director generally oversaw staff at the authority. A job listing for a new regional director has not been posted since Chandler resigned. Carubba and Guidry said that they may advocate for eliminating the position entirely.
Without a director, Carubba is in charge of all the technical aspects of flood control. Rondeno oversees the cops, and handles administrative and human resources responsibilities across the agency’s workforce. He also manages the directors of finance, human resources, the public information office, and information technology.
A regional director at the agency is required by state law to live in southeast Louisiana, have a bachelor’s degree, and a “minimum of ten years senior executive experience in business, engineering or hydrology, or in the performance of public works functions, related to flood and drainage control,” the statute states.
Though he has had a long career in law enforcement, his resume shows, Rondeno has no prior experience in flood control. He emphasized that he is not the regional director, though he has many of the responsibilities typically assigned to a regional director at the agency.
He most recently served as the chief of police for the University of New Orleans from 2022 until he took the job at the levee authority in 2024. From 2007 to 2022, he was a campus police officer at UNO.
“It would be important to know under what authority he’s been given this authority,” said Miller, the former board president and an engineer. “If they don’t appoint people that are qualified, then there’s a problem. If the people are qualified, there’s no problem.”
To Carubba, however, the organization’s bylaws are clear. As board president, he said that he can delegate his duties to a designee, and that he has done so with Rondeno.
‘Look at Elon Musk, right?’
Guidry emphasized that, in addition to flood control, he believes that the authority’s small police force should be performing standard police duties — not just protecting the area’s flood control infrastructure. Guidry previously helped bring the Louisiana State Police’s Troop NOLA patrols to New Orleans.
“We don’t want officers watching grass grow,” protecting levees that don’t need active police protection, he said. He noted that the New Orleans Police Department is facing an officer shortage, so the levee cops should be answering 911 calls and protecting area residents.
Guidry also said that, though he is not elected or appointed to a position in an official capacity, he was providing his services to the governor and the levee authority pro-bono. He donated or raised $3 million to help elect Landry during his gubernatorial campaign.
“Look, I’m best friends with the governor. We talk ten times a day, seven days a week,” Guidry said. “Look at Elon Musk, right? There’s a reason why he’s doing something free for Trump — because he knows he can help him. And Trump wants that. There’s a reason why I do what I do free for Jeff because he knows I have nothing to gain.”
Some of the other board members, Guidry said, “just don’t like the police and they don’t like law enforcement, and that’s it.”
“But at the end of the day,” he added, “they weren’t elected by the people to run the state. The governor was.”
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