Oops! We're running for judge!

Who woulda thought we'd all end up here.

When candidates qualified for a vacant 1st City Court judgeship in January, there was no way to foresee the campaign turning into one of the strangest and most protracted local races on record.

Back then, Joe Biden was duking it out with Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination, the coronavirus was not yet a global pandemic and the U.S. was enjoying a historic period of economic growth.

Fast forward seven months: the contagion has prompted Louisiana to postpone the election twice and thousands of New Orleans tenants are struggling to pay their rent.

Actually, this is a bad lede. The eviction rate in New Orleans was twice the national average before the pandemic hit. Housing advocates concerned with the plight of renters in this city have had their eyes on this election since before the COVID business arrived.

Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative recently published this report (PDF) based on six months of monitoring evictions in the City Courts.  Among the findings JPNSI highlights on their website, we see that 82 percent of tenants facing eviction were black. 56 percent were black women.  JPNSI's site also points to a critical disparity in legal representation.  "65.4% of tenants with no legal representation were evicted, while only 14.6% of tenants with legal representations were evicted," it says.  They extrapolate that out to suggest that, with proper legal assistance, the number of evictions could have been reduced by more than three hundred.

With the courts reopening in the midst of a pandemic-depression, New Orleans is facing an evictions crisis. But we cannot say that it's a problem that just fell into the lap of these judicial candidates.  The inequities the winner of this seat will confront are systemic and longstanding. Let's see what they plan to do about it.

In this article Aylin Acikalin says,

“I understand in great depth the forces that have created this situation. When someone comes to court because they can’t pay their rent ... there’s a whole system of laws and government and policies that have put that person in that position,”

What she means is she has spent her career to this point working to put that whole system of laws and govenrment and policies in place herself as a staffer for Mary Landrieu and as legislative director for former City Councilperson Nadine Ramsey.  When we last saw Ramsey in that capacity, she was trying to sneak a zoning variance in that would have permitted Acikalin's father to operate an Airbnb in the building attached to his business on Frenchmen Street. So, it is true what she says about understanding housing policy in great depth.

Ramsey, by the way, is currently holding this judgeship on an interim basis. Small world, right? This will mark the second time Acikalin has run for a seat on a body just as Ramsey was leaving. She ran and lost a city council race in District A in 2017. Anyway the important thing to know here is that Aylin may know a lot of people but she is definitely not Illuminati or whatever such.

“I’m not part of a political machine,” she says. “I’ve run for office before, because I believe that I have something to offer, but I’m not part of an organization.”

If you do happen to know any machines that are hiring, though, please pass her resume along. She seems like she might appreciate that.

Schalyece Harrison has experience ruling on matters that affect renters. This says she has worked as a hearings officer for Sewerage and Water Board.  It doesn't say if she has ever decided whether or not to cut someone's water off the way the mayor was asking S&WB to do a few years ago.  As a city administrative hearings officer, she's also been in position to review code enforcement matters and short term rental permits as well as a few other things that might weigh on the availability and quality of housing.

All of which is why, to hear her talk about it, it sounds as if she is running for this judgeship so that she can have less power over anything that happens.

A landlord herself, Harrison says she was concerned about housing affordability and homelessness before the pandemic began, and she foresees an eviction crisis developing in the months to come. However, she says that in many cases judges have limited leeway to stop a landlord who is dead-set on evicting a non-paying tenant.

“We can always try and work with the landlords. They don’t have to cooperate, but at least you can ask them to work with you and the tenant so they’re not put out on the street,” she says. “If I do have to evict someone, at least we can provide them with resources, if there are any kind of programs or transitional housing they can seek.”

Harrison "foresees an eviction crisis," and her plan is to, "at least ask" the landlords to go easy on us if they can.

To be fair, all of these candidates seem to be saying some version of that. In fact, Louisiana's landlord/tenant laws are pretty heavily stacked against renters.  So it's true that the judges can only do so much.  At the same time, a lot of these statements sound either like buck-passing or, more likely, just the kind of thing most people assume they have to say in order to get elected judge.

So even when someone like Marissa Hutabarat here declares herself a "people's judge,"  she still can't be too clear about what she is offering to do for the people besides just "exhibit compassion." 

Hutabarat said she hopes to be a “people’s judge” who will help unrepresented litigants.

“It is the part of the judge to ensure that they exhibit compassion to them, to make them feel that they’re welcome,” she says. “It’s the part of the judge to decipher what it is that they are getting at, or ask the right questions to get to the base of the problem.”

Similarly, Sarah Lewis, described in this article as such a tough rhetorical disputant that her parents used to call her “Lawyer Lewis,” (adorable story, that) is also not convinced  a "Judge Lewis" would have a lot of power to actually affect anything. 

However, like other candidates, she didn't endorse advocates’ calls for local judges to extend an eviction moratorium.

“The judiciary branch has no authority under the State Constitution, where all elected officials' authority derives, to extend the moratorium on evictions,” Lewis said.

We're not sure this is exactly true. The judges may very well have the power to extend the moratorium if they decide it's not safe to open the courts. It might not be!

Robbins Graham is here also. I actually thought he had dropped out of the race until I got a mailer from his campaign last week. Unfortunately the information on that flier was nothing quite so useful as this.

His Facebook page includes false remedies for preventing coronavirus infections like drinking warm liquids or gargling with vinegar or lemon. In an interview, Graham said he wasn’t aware of the postings and blamed them on a campaign staffer.

We assume Ms. Paltrow is no longer with the campaign.

Home remedies aside, we're not able to determine much of any interest about the candidates from their public communications.  They all seem to agree that evictions are bad but landlords need to be considered also and that the judges don't really have much power or discretion over any of this in the first place. It's a wonder any of them even wants this job at all.

So, in order to handicap the race, we need to look, instead, at their endorsements and donors. And that is where we learn that, in all likelihood we are looking at a Hutabarat and Lewis runoff. Those are the only two candidates whose fundraising extends much beyond their own personal resources and immediate connections.

Hutabarat is endorsed by the Orleans Parish Democratic Executive Committee and carries the individual endorsement of several elected Democrats as well. This is probably not an exhaustive list but councilmembers Cyndi Nguyen, Joe Giarrusso, and Kristin Palmer have put their names in her corner as have State Reps Royce Duplessis and Jason Hughes. She is also backed by the Greater New Orleans AFL-CIO.  Lewis has, in her orbit, a more affluent circle of New Orleans liberal-ish politicos and donors from non-profit world. We see Sandra Herman's and Scott Sternberg's names among her contributors, for example. Also we see former school board member Seth Bloom in there along with some OPDEC candidates whose names you might have seen together on one of those "DAT" mailers.

Now you may ask, what is a "DAT?" I've never heard of dat before this election.  Well, it stands for "Democrats Align Today" but it's really not much of anything besides a slate of candidates. Candidates who, according to the website,"pledge to build a stronger, more viable Orleans Parish Democratic Executive Committee (OPDEC) and change the future." Sounds ambitious.

Who are these heroes, then?  The website doesn't say!  The only way you will know is if you find yourself the recipient of one of their targeted fliers. This is the one that came to me uptown.

You may also learn their names through their relentless social media advertisements (Democrats All over your Timeline?) but it's still hard to get a look at all of them. You could try driving all over town and checking your Facebook app once in each council district to see if you can collect the full roster.  That might take a while, though.  Another thing you can do is look them up in Facebook's ad library like so.

So, you know, you can start to piece it together. According to that, they've spent almost $10,000 just on Facebook ads.  That, plus the mailers (some of which are very large) seems like an awful lot to dump into an OPDEC election.  Who has that kind of money to throw around on something like this?  We can't say for certain. But given the particular candidates being promoted, we might look either at either the mayor's PAC (although I think they'd probably put their name on it) or at some of the other groups and individuals who are known to have the expertise and capacity to launch this sort of campaign.

Anyway, where was I going with this?  Oh yeah, so these things are always imprecise, but generally speaking, it looks like this DAT campaign aligns toward the professional class wing of the New Orleans Democratic Party. In other words, we may have a bit of a yuppie coup on our hands at OPDEC.  Something to watch.

In the judicial race, Sarah Lewis appears more closely aligned with the DAT people while Hutabarat's support comes from more of the traditional old guard of labor plus the current OPDEC. Lewis's financials also show a $5,000 in-kind consulting contribution from Kristine Breithaupt who is herself a DAT candidate for OPDEC and who works for Cantell's PAC. Probably Lewis and Hutabarat will end up in a runoff so all of this is To Be Continued in August.

For more on the OPDEC races, please see the always informative and entertaining Antigravity guide.  This year they're the only publication to try and cover every candidate on this sprawling ballot. God bless them for that.