New Orleans Corrupt 'Down to the Bone,' Former Pol Charges -- GOPUSA

New Orleans Corrupt 'Down to the Bone,' Former Pol Charges
By Jeff Johnson
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
October 17, 2005

(CNSNews.com) -- A former president of the New Orleans City Council and member of the Orleans Levee Board blames corruption "down to the bone" and "unbelievable ineptness" for the loss of life and injuries during and after Hurricane Katrina. The Republican politician also fears the worst for her city if local officials are allowed to manage the federally funded rebuilding efforts.

"The corruption in city hall was horrible, and it was the same thing at the levee board," Peggy Wilson told Cybercast News Service. "The corruption in Louisiana and in the City of New Orleans goes down to the bone."

Wilson was first elected to the New Orleans City Council in 1986 and served through 1998, including two terms as its president. When she lost her re-election bid in 1998, Louisiana Republican Gov. Mike Foster appointed her to the Orleans Levee Board.

As Cybercast News Service previously reported, state lawmakers and the levee board engaged in an ongoing battle between 1996 and 2001 over how the board spent money. Residents of the levee district also defeated a tax increase proposed by the board.

Wilson recalled those battles.

"Nobody was convinced that [the levee board] needed any more money and, of course, they didn't," Wilson charged. Instead of spending money on levee maintenance and improvements, the levee board focused on widening bridges and making other accommodations for riverboat casinos, she said. The casinos are a major source of the levee board's funding since they pay for use of the riverfront property adjacent to their "boats."

Wilson said her frustration over the levee board's priorities spilled out at one of the board's meetings.

"I raised my hand and I said, 'Excuse me, I'd like to ask a question. When are we going to talk about levees?' And they told me that that was not on the agenda," Wilson recalled. "It pretty much never was on the agenda."

Wilson also alleged that some of the levee board members, as well as some of the elected officials with oversight of the board, engaged in nepotism.

"The chairman of the board and [State Sen. Francis Heitmeier] were related to some of the people at the company that provided the insurance," Wilson claimed, "and all the recommendations and the research and the commissions that we paid (to that company) were all absolutely unnecessary."

At the time, Heitmeier -- a Democrat from New Orleans -- chaired the Louisiana Senate's Transportation, Highways and Public Works Committee, the panel that oversaw all of the state's waterways and flood control projects, including the levee districts. He disputes Wilson's claims.

"She's talking about me being related to someone (that did business with the levee board)?" Heitmeier asked Cybercast News Service. "I don't know what she's talking about."

Wilson claims that her intense questioning about the board's activities bothered even fellow Republicans and resulted in her being "fired.

"Eight months (after her appointment), the governor called me to his office and said, 'We don't want all those questions. We don't want to be on the front page of the paper. I know the place is corrupt, but I need Francis Heitmeier's four votes or five votes that he controls,'" Wilson alleged. "I said, 'Thank you, very much. I'll see you later.'"

Asked if such a conversation ever took place, Foster, now a former governor, told Cybercast News Service: "Of course not. That's a total fabrication.

"I put Peggy on (the levee board) because she had a reputation as a crusader," Foster explained. "But she was making personal attacks against all the board members, and they were all getting ready to quit en masse."

Heitmeier recalled the situation similarly.

"I didn't have anything to do with her getting kicked off the board. I think she brought it on herself, and what she's saying there is totally erroneous and wrong," Heitmeier said.

"I think she had made every member of that board mad," Heitmeier said in reference to Wilson. "I don't even remember who they all were at this time, but they all went to the governor and threatened to quit."

Foster, however, admitted that it "would not surprise me" if some of Wilson's charges of corruption on the levee board were true.

"Levee boards are notorious," Foster said, "If you don't watch them, they can very quickly drift into doing things that benefit the members and not the levee district. And, I've got to tell you, the Orleans Levee Board had that reputation for years."

As governor, Foster said he focused on cleaning up the board because of its reputation.

"Quite frankly, the Orleans Levee Board was always a thorn in my side, early on," Foster explained, "in that they really didn't spend as much time as I thought they should, taking care of business."

Foster said he tried to replace board members whose terms had expired with individuals he considered "above reproach," including a nun, a retired four-star general and a retired Corps of Engineers executive who had extensive experience with the management of levees.

Heitmeier, a Democrat, praised the former Republican governor's efforts.

"They went from a $6 million deficit to a surplus," Heitmeier said. "They brought the legislative auditor in to work with them every day to go over everything they did to make sure that they met all the rules and requirements."

Heitmeier also credited Jim Huey, the selection of Foster to be the new board president, for his dedication to integrity. Huey did not return calls to his office seeking comment. Calls to the levee board office were not answered.

Wilson and the many other critics of the levee board may not understand the group's purpose, Heitmeier said. "The levee board does not build the levees down here. The Corps of Engineers builds the levees. The Corps of Engineers inspects the levees. The levee board cuts the grass," Heitmeier said. "That's what they do. They cut the grass."

'They don't care and they don't want to know'

Wilson told Cybercast News Service that her experiences on the levee board were not unique. She also spent 12 years on the New Orleans City Council.

"The problem that we have in New Orleans has never been (lack of) money, never," Wilson said. "It's always been the misspending of the money that we have, so that we don't get the results that we want to get."

As an example, she described a $250,000 federal grant the city received to operate summer camps for children. The program was designed to deter drug use and participation in gangs by providing alternative activities.

"About halfway through the summer, I decided to go visit the ten places that had received the money. I never found a single child," Wilson recalled. "I found churches that were boarded up. I found printing stacked from floor to ceiling. I found vans. I never found anybody playing baseball or soccer or drinking Kool-Aid, nothing."

Wilson said that when she reported her findings to fellow council members, she was branded a racist and someone who did not care about children "because I didn't like the way this money was being spent."

The widespread corruption Wilson claims she witnessed seldom required the kind of detective work she used in discovering the alleged fraud in the summer camp program.

"I was never 'Dick Tracy.' I never had to get my magnifying glass out or lift up the corner of a rug," Wilson said. "It was all blatant to a degree that you cannot even imagine."

Wilson claims the problems were most prevalent when federal funding was involved, such as with the summer camp grant.

"The farther away the money comes from, the worse the corruption and the easier the corruption. So, when the money comes from the federal government, there is nobody at the federal level who ever watches it. And if you call them and say, 'I just found out that this is going on,' they don't care and they don't want to know," Wilson said.

Despite her many allegations of corruption, Wilson was quick to defend the current New Orleans mayor's integrity.

"I don't think Ray Nagin himself is personally corrupt," Wilson said. "I think he's inept, and he didn't know anything about city government or how to run a city." She added, "It's not that Nagin wanted those people to suffer. It's just the most unbelievable ineptness. Unbelievable."

Multiple calls to Nagin's office and to the mayor's communications department seeking comment on Wilson's allegations were not returned.

Katrina lifted up a rock

Wilson argues that the alleged corruption and ineptness are responsible for more that just the failures of the local government to properly respond to Hurricane Katrina and the resulting flooding.

"When you have a corrupt government that never tends to its business, you have a school system that doesn't educate, you have drug rehabilitation programs that don't rehabilitate ... It's like the dominos are all falling," Wilson said. "What happened is, Katrina lifted up a rock and revealed the horrible circumstances under which people have been living."

The GOP politician believes those educational failures have encouraged some New Orleans residents to develop an unhealthy dependence on government.

"The generations of corruption and welfare contributed to making people feel so dependent on the government that they were willing to sit in the Superdome in the filth and the chaos that was there," Wilson alleged. "It's a vicious cycle. The more ignorant their constituents are, the more power (the politicians) have, so they can run out on Election Day and load a bunch of people on a bus and take them to vote."

Wilson said she cannot understand why the city did not use its fleet of buses to effectively evacuate residents. "We had 500 buses, and they were picking people up at home and bringing them to the [Superdome]. Why didn't they just take them out of town?" Wilson asked. "There never was a shortage of buses when it came to Election Day. Why was there a shortage of buses when it came to getting the heck out of town?"

Based on her experiences with both the levee board and the city council, Wilson hopes President Bush breaks his promise to have local officials control the federal funding dedicated to rebuilding New Orleans and the surrounding areas.

"I just hope that they don't give us the money without giving us the kind of checks and balances to make sure that it's properly spent," Wilson said. "These greedy people are going to cut it up into pieces, and God only knows what we'll have at the other end."