After two courts reject, State Supreme Court grants stay, Mayor Landrieu avoids house arrest

14th September 2015   ·   0 Comments

Although New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu defiantly said he would submit to weekend house arrest rather than offer a settlement offer to firefighters that the City of New Orleans can’t afford, the mayor decided late last week to file emergency court papers to block his house arrest as the deadline loomed for the Landrieu administration and firefighters to reach an agreement in the decades-old dispute over back pay.

On Friday, Judge Kern Reese and the Fourth Circuit of Appeals rejected the mayor’s request to block house arrest. The State Supreme Court however, as the time for the Mayor to commence his sentence neared, granted a stay.

The mayor has said repeatedly that he won’t bankrupt City Hall to pay firefighters what the city owes them in back pay and interest.

The house arrest sentence was set to go into effect at 5 p.m. Friday if Landrieu failed to reach an agreement with the firefighters in the case that spans the administrations of five mayors over the past four decades.

Firefighters say the City of New Orleans owes them $75 million in back pay and an additional $67 million in interest.

The Landrieu administration and the firefighters failed to reach an agreement by Sept. 4, promoting Civil Court Judge Kern Reese to extend the deadline to Sept. 11 and threaded to impose weekend house arrest on the mayor if his administration failed again to reach an agreement with the firefighters.

Just hours before the deadline, Landrieu filed emergency petitions with the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals and the Louisiana Supreme Court seeking to block house arrest.

“While the mayor endures home incarceration, there is no incentive on the part of NOFF to negotiate, in good faith, a resolution of this litigation,” the Landrieu administration asserted in Friday’s court filing.

“The city has not yet received any new updates from the Civil District Court,” City Hall spokesman Brad Howard told WWL News Friday afternoon in a prepared statement. “However, we continue to work with the mediator in hopes that both sides can reach an agreement that would satisfy the judge’s order.”

On Sept. 4 Judge Kern Reese handed down a contempt ruling because the city has failed to come up with a plan to pay New Orleans firefighters $75 million in back pay and an additional $67 million in interest.

Just moments later, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu fired back at Judge Reese.

“We think he is wrong on the law and have every reason to believe on appeal we will be successful,” Landrieu told reporters.

CNO officials and NOFD representatives negotiated with the help of a mediator late into Thursday night, Sept. 3, but when the scheduled 9:30 a.m. court hearing began, there was no resolution.

The city made an offer which an attorney for the firefighters called “ridiculous.”

The judge was not moved by the city’s offer and gave the mayor until Friday, Sept. 11, to reach an agreement both sides could live with.

Afterwards, the mayor made it clear that he was not pleased with Reese’s decision.

“This ruling undermines the very fundamental principle of our constitution, and it disrupts the separation of powers which goes back 200 years in the United States of America,” Landrieu said.

Landrieu added that he was adamant about not allowing the settlement with the firefighters to shut down the city.

“Let me be clear about this, before I decimate our city’s budget, before I stop the street repairs that we’re making, stop filling potholes, turn off your street lights, before I shut down NORD, before I lay off firefighters and police and city employees, I am prepared to stay under house arrest for the next two years of my term because this is too important and too much is at stake for the city of New Orleans,” Landrieu said.

Nick Felton, president of the firefighters union, disagreed with the mayor’s assessment of the situation.

“We have situations out there that can absolutely bring an end to this without hurting the citizens and without breaking the backs of the city budget. It doesn’t have to happen,” Felton told FOX 8.

While the mayor said the city can’t afford what the firefighters are pushing for, Felton said he does not believe the city’s firefighters are making unreasonable demands.

“Anybody getting arrested for anything is just not where we should be going, okay? We just need to strap on the gloves, get in there and do what we gotta do and make this right for the city. My God it’s been 35 years,” Felton said.

In a recent interview with FOX 8 News, Landrieu said the firefighters’ pension fund has been poorly managed and that Judge Reese overstepped his authority in threatening him and others with house arrest.

Although the mayor has said repeatedly that he will not bankrupt City Hall to pay firefighters their back pay, he did acknowledge that the City of New Orleans has a sizable debt to about 400 current and retired firefighters.

FOX 8 News pointed out that Landrieu and Reese had butted heads before, most recently during the 2014 mayoral election when Reese supported then Civil Court Judge Michael Bagneris during his bid for mayor.

Landrieu fought the Civil Court judges tooth and nail to prevent them from building a new Civil Court building anywhere but inside of a yet-to-be-renovated Charity Hospital, effectively blocking funding for a new Civil Court building on Duncan Plaza across from City Hall.

When asked by FOX 8 if his current dispute with Judge Reese is personal, Landrieu said, “I’m going to let you talk to the judge about that. You know the facts, you’ve followed that campaign. You know that the judges wanted a new courthouse; I said no. You know Judge Bagneris was so upset that he stopped and he ran against me. You’re going to have to figure that out yourself. I’m not going to impugn the judge’s motives. But you should ask him that.”

FOX 8 reported that the City of New Orleans faces a long list of unpaid judgments against it, totaling more than $34 million. Although the dispute between the City of New Orleans and firefighters is decades-old, the mayor said Judge Reese has let the firefighters skip to the front of this line of creditors.

“Essentially what the firefighters are asking, for the pension fund, is special treatment,” Landrieu says, “to be put in front of all other citizens who have judgments that the city owes as well. And we’ve never had an instance in this state where a state judge has had the authority to order a municipality to pay a money judgment. It’s never happened in the history of this state. So I don’t think there’s precedent for it.”

The mayor said poor management of the pension fund is the reason for its dire financial straits.

“Unfortunately, people get caught in the middle of bad decisions by their leaders,” the mayor told FOX 8. “The leaders of this pension fund — by the way, which have all been thrown out of office because of malfeasance… They tried to get back on, they got voted off. [They] have put these guys in a position that’s untenable and/or unreasonable, in asking the people of New Orleans to give them something — either that they’re not entitled to or [the city] can’t pay right now, or can only pay in a way that doesn’t debilitate the citizens of New Orleans.

Landrieu didn’t deny that the firefighters are owed money, but questions how much money the city owes them.

“You can’t pay it all at one time to one group of people and shut down everything else,” Landrieu said. “And the firefighter pension guys just found a judge who’s been willing to push the envelope legally and say, ‘No, I’m going to do something that no judge in America has ever done and put the mayor in jail.’

“So, let’s be clear about this,” he continued. “This is not about me. This is the judiciary, securing the executive branch of government. That’s what this is.”

Landrieu said the firefighters’ leadership may have not considered the toll this payment would take on the city’s taxpayers, already burdened with higher Sewerage & Water Bosarad rates and the cost of NOPD and OPP consent decrees.

“What sense does this make?” Landrieu told FOX 8 “Now we’re paying more money out of the city general fund for firefighters’ pension than we are for the entire fire department itself. If we then, in order to pay this judgment, have to invoke layoffs and we have to do across-the-board layoffs, what sense does it make to layoff firefighters, police officers, individuals who work in city government, NORD coaches, et cetera, et cetera? So this is not a game of chicken. It’s a very serious game. And this city has been to hell and back.”

As the Sept. 11 deadline to resolve the dispute loomed, the mayor took his case to the people last week via television and radio ads and an email blast.

“There’s nothing I won’t do to keep our city moving forward,” the mayor told voters in the ad last week. “Too much is at stake for our city and our firefighters.”

This article originally published in the September 14, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.