Stacy Head - Mayor's Outlook and Jefferson Factor

Mayor's Outlook and Jefferson Factor

In a mid-March 2009 interview on WVUE-TV New Orleans Channel 8 (Fox), Nagin said, with regard to the councilmembers' e-mail messages, that White had "followed the policy"; Nagin declined, however, to rule out disciplinary action in either White's case or that of the city's Chief Technology Officer, Harrison Boyd, who supplied the e-mail messages to her. But simultaneously, in another proceeding, Nagin had been defending his own e-mails from disclosure, whereupon Times-Picayune columnist Stephanie Grace accused him of "inconsistency" and noted a similar behavior with respect to New Orleans Katrina-recovery czar Ed Blakely; Grace wrote:

The fact that many of the mayor's records had been purged didn't come to light until WWL went to court. In a separate suit . . . outgoing Recovery Director Ed Blakely said in an affidavit that he deleted most of his e-mails after being told that his inbox had exceeded its space limit. The message came two months after the newspaper requested the records.

On 2009 May 22, James Gill posited a network of individuals tied to former congressman Jefferson (whom Mayor Nagin had endorsed for reelection) as out to get Head’s head. Gill noted that Gill Pratt had been Jefferson’s aide when Jefferson served two terms in the Louisiana Senate a generation earlier, from which position she advanced to the state House of Representatives and then to the New Orleans City Council, all the while, according to Gill, steering "vast sums of money to non-profits established by Jefferson’s brother, Mose Jefferson, and his sister, Property Tax Assessor Betty Jefferson"; then "the Jeffersons just helped themselves to the money" until Mose was "charged with bribing" the Orleans Parish School Board. Head was a fly in the Jeffersons’ ointment as she upended Gill Pratt from reelection to the City Council. Renée Gill Pratt, the columnist said, was at the "Celebration of Service" staged for Jefferson two weeks prior to the start of his 2009 June 2 trial on 16 felony counts. As Gill Pratt—after Head defeated her for reelection—was appointed director of one of the Jeffersons’ non-profits, Tracie Washington came on the scene, organizing a "Justice for Jefferson Steering Committee" in which she, as chairwoman, said that the "Machiavellian twisting of Karl Rove and his Brownshirts" had been directed, in league with the press, at Jefferson as victim. Head provided additional effrontery by endorsing Joseph Cao, the Republican who ousted Jefferson from Congress. On 2009 August 5, virtually 7 months after the day when Cao defeated him, William J. Jefferson was convicted on 11 felony counts; two weeks later Mose Jefferson was convicted on four counts involving bribery.

In the meantime Head had continued assaulting the garbage-collection fees, on 2009 July 30 proposing to eliminate general-fund subsidies to the fees so that residents, irrespective of neighborhood, would face the actual costs on their bills. Councilwoman Cynthia Hedge-Morrell countered that "I don't think that will pass" whereupon Head responded:

We always want to get something for nothing in government. . . ; our job . . . is to get people to the harsh reality that we have to pay for services.