I wonder who bought up all these properites

Eyebrow raising story here about the Bank Of Louisiana's 97 year old founder and his ongoing dispute with FDIC regulators. 

G. Harrison Scott, chairman and majority shareholder of the Bank of Louisiana, is not fond of his bank’s regulator, the FDIC.

“They’re lying sons of bitches, and you can quote me on that," he said. "They lie, lie, lie, and I’ve caught them in it.”

Yeah it's not really clear from the story that he's actually caught anybody in a lie.  In fact this says his family members and partners have a plan to comply with the FDIC orders but Scott still needs to sign off on it. Basically, it says he's being stubborn and taking things personally and his daughter who is more or less running things now is trying to work around that. 

Anyway what's fascinating here is that we're told this is a case of the old man being out of step with The Way Things Are Done Now.  But I think it's an open question as to whether the "good old days" described here were really that long ago. 

Shannon Scott said that the bank was forced to sell off loans to one customer in particular, Billie Karno, a prominent owner of properties in the French Quarter, including the bars known for their "Huge Ass Beers" trademark. She said the loans were performing fine and it was easy to find another bank to take on some of them to satisfy the regulator.

"It used to be you’d take the FDIC auditor out to lunch and have a couple of cocktails and take him golfing and he’d give you a great review," said Shannon Scott. "It’s just different times, things have moved on and you either adapt and change or you get out of the business."

Attorney Henry Klein, a longtime friend of Harrison Scott and a former bank board member said: “He and Judge Comiskey, when they ran the bank together, were gentleman bankers the way bankers used to be."

I mean if these loans to Karno's businesses didn't raise objections until 2011, then what has really changed?  We can LOL at the golf and cocktails line here but the new COVID relief bill does include a so-called "three martini lunch" deduction. Surely there's still some room in this business climate for a "Huge Ass Beer" clause.  

But forget about that. That's not really what's interesting about these Bank Of Louisiana dealings. What is going on with all these foreclosed properties? 

The main complaint in the FDIC's latest action was the bank's large portfolio of foreclosed properties. It started the year with 53, which had annual carrying costs of $1.5 million annually, according to the FDIC. That's enormous for a bank with revenue through the end of September of barely over $5 million.

Shannon Scott said she has since sold off 26 of those properties and expects to make more progress well before the scheduled hearing next summer.

Would love to see some follow up reporting on what sorts of properties these are and who is buying them.  One of the most disturbing trends in housing since the 2008 financial crisis has been the consolidation of rental properties by national private equity firms. Here is a recent NYT Mag article looking at some of that.  

When credit was tight after the financial crisis, the acquiring firms, led by Blackstone, figured out a way to generate more of it by creating a new financial instrument: a single-family-rental securitization, which was a mix of residential mortgage-backed securities, collateralized by home values, and commercial real estate-backed securities, collateralized by expected rental income. In 2013, a year after Ellingwood’s home was acquired, Blackstone’s Invitation Homes securitized the first bundle of single-family rentals — 3,200 of them for 75 percent of their estimated value: $479 million. Those who bought these bonds received 3 to 5 percent in monthly interest until their principal was returned (generally in five years). Blackstone put some of that $479 million toward repaying the short-term credit lines it took out to buy the houses. Because the value of the portfolio of homes had increased since their acquisition, Blackstone could extract much of the difference as cash and buy more homes. Blackstone issued a second bond package of nearly $1 billion six months later. Other REITs like Colony American Homes quickly began doing the same, rolling homes like Ellingwood’s into a $486 million securitization.

With the securitized homes, the rental income now needed to cover not only the mortgage but also the interest payments distributed to bondholders — creating an incentive to keep occupancy and rents as high as possible. In fact, Invitation Homes’ securitized bond model assumed a 94 percent paying-occupancy rate, putting pressure on the company to evict nonpaying tenants right away.

A lot of people are hanging by a thread right now trying to stay in their homes.  Not sure any of them are going to have much success settling back rent disputes with a corporate absentee landlord over golf and cocktails.

Eddie Rispone: Perpetual outsider

One of the state Republican Party's long time major fundraisers and "kingmakers" who hilariously ran for Governor in 2019 as an "outsider" is going to run for the party charimanship as.. a self-described outsider. 

After successfully electing several candidates to the committee in December, Rispone is now looking to take even more control over the Louisiana GOP, running for chair of the party.

“It was never my intention to run but recognizing the substantial challenges we face as a body and as a party, I believe we need someone with major business and large organizational skills to ensure the party can be the most effective in helping elect conservatives in the future,” Rispone said in an email to party officials.

Remarkable that he can keep up that pose. Even now after having "recruited" (i.e. bought and paid for) a number of candidates to turn over seats on the central committee, Rispone continues to insist it was  "never my intention" to run for chair.  Until it was. 

Eddie also complains about having been "outworked and outspent" during the Governor's election. There's actually some truth to that. But it's Rispone's own fault. He and his campaign decided the way to win was to hide behind the President and a barrage of TV ads rather than appear at a runoff debate or god forbid actually talk to any real live people. But now Eddie says he's the guy to change this culture? 

Anthony Ramirez, who ran Rispone’s communications during the 2019 governor’s race, said after reviewing the results of the race, “we saw that the Republican party was clearly outworked on the ground.” And after poring through attendance records, they discovered nearly 40% of the Republican State Central Committee didn’t attend a single meeting last year.

See that? Republicans don't even want to talk to each other.  And who can blame them, really? Read the rest of this article and see how they treat each other.  

After stepping down as party chair in 2018, (Roger) Villere dove into political consulting work through CRV Consulting, who he runs alongside Phil Capitano, the former mayor of Kenner who was arrested this summer after police said he used his vehicle to ram the back of a woman’s car during a dispute over allegedly stolen property. Villere and Capitano also run the Louisiana Conservative Republican Coalition, which is registered as a nonprofit and which doles out endorsements to Republican candidates. It endorsed Capitano in his bid for re-election to the Republican State Central Committee this year, but Capitano was unseated by Keith Conley, a longtime Jefferson Parish government official.

State Rep. Mark Wright, a Covington Republican, said Villere’s group sent a mailer endorsing his opponent for the Republican State Central Committee, using “the Republican party seal or something that looks exactly like it.”

The picture coming into focus here is one of a good old fashioned dispute over territory and patronage.  You wanna run for something in Louisiana as a Republican?  Well here is the list of people you need to hire or bribe or both. Villere and Capitano and  want to be those guys on the one hand.  Rispone is installing his own people on the other. (There are others vying for position as well including Lenar Whitney apparently.  You'll just have to read the article.)  

The Villere faction is backing current chair, New Orleans private security mogul Louis Gurvich, over Rispone.  It doesn't take much reading between the lines here to see why.  Eddie "refused help" from Villere.. which is to say, he didn't pay him for anything.

“I have made up my mind I’m going to be against Ripsone,” Villere said. “I thought he was a poor candidate (for governor) … You need a party chair who can bring people together. Why would you elect a party chair who refused help in the runoff and didn’t bring people together in his own race?”

And, of course, the pro-Rispone side's motivations are just as petty and personal. 

As part of the race for state central committee – typically low-profile, low-wattage affairs that are decided by a few dozen votes – Bayham said he was hit with an “ugly” mailer that attacked his weight, which he says was sent by someone other than his opponent. (Spending on Republican State Central Committee races doesn’t require disclosure under Louisiana’s ethics laws, like other campaign spending.)

“This is what this party does. We cannibalize ourselves because this is about control and contracts and not about defeating the Democrats,” Bayham said. “We have to see who is going to finally change the culture of this party. Is Louis prepared to do it or is an outsider like Rispone prepared to do it.”

Villere said in an interview he had “nothing to do with” the mailer attacking Bayham, calling it “reprehensible.”

There's that "outsider" characterization again, though. It sure is doing an awful lot of work. 

Don't call it a task force

Well certainly this explains everything

The investigative team was created amid the fallout from a June report from the federal monitors overseeing the NOPD’s progress in fulfilling a reform plan. The monitors said that district task forces routinely conducted questionable stops and searches.

Ferguson emphasized that the new “VCAIT” team is not a task force but rather an investigative unit.

Asked about concerns around violent crime, Ferguson said several units announced in the fall are beginning to produce results.

“It is coming to fruition. It may take some time with some of it,” he said. “We hear and we understand the community’s concerns, and that is why we are here today.”

What does the "investigative team" not do that the "task forces" were doing?  Ferguson doesn't say.  This story does say that the Investigative Team includes FBI and State Police among its number. When we learned last week that the city had been lying about NOPD's use of facial recognition technology, it came out that "state and federal partners" were key to enabling that to happen.

The New Orleans Police Department has confirmed that it is utilizing facial recognition for its investigations, despite years of assurances that the city wasn’t employing the technology.

In a statement to The Lens last week, a department spokesperson said that although it didn’t own facial recognition software itself, it was granted access to the technology through “state and federal partners.”

The good news is we learned yesterday from the tweets that City Council had passed a new ordinance that supposedly bans facial recognition and "3 other invasive, racially biased surveillance technologies."  But we see no mention of it in today's T-P/Advocate so we aren't quite up to speed on the details yet. Maybe we'll learn more when we are finished digesting the city's argument for ending the NOPD consent decree.  It appears to hinge on having met the exacting requirements set forth by Jeff Sessions. 

The Cantrell administration’s legal argument leans heavily on a 2018 memo from then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, which dramatically limited the scope of police consent decrees. Sessions was forced to resign the same day he issued the memo, and it’s unclear whether President-elect Joe Biden’s Justice Department will adopt the same stance.

Not sure what Jeff's standard for rooting out racially biased surveillance is. Sure hope it's a good one. We should note, though, that according to the Lens, NOPD views the new ordinance more as guidance on how to use the technology rather than a ban. 

Jones told The Lens that the NOPD only used facial recognition for “violent cases,” but that “documentation of frequency of use of Facial Recognition is not currently available.” Asked whether there was any written policy or procedure regarding the technology, Jones responded by saying that NOPD Superintendent Shaun Ferguson “is currently working with Councilman [Jason] Williams on a policy as to when facial recognition tools should be used.”

So we'll see how that shakes out. Of course they could always go right back to lying about it. Or it may be that as long as they can keep coming up with new names for doing the same things, that they don't have to. 

Update: Okay here is the story about what City Council passed this week. I think this is the key point.

However, it does let officers use evidence gained by outside individuals or agencies from any of those technologies as long as no one from the Police Department requested or knew that was the source of the information.

Seems like a pretty big loophole easily exploited by a multi agency investigative team, right?

#Takeemdown

The cameras are already such a tremendous insult to everyone's dignity and general expectation of a reasonable amount of (if not quite privacy)peaceful  anonymity on the streets of their city. But add to that the lying and, it's long past time for them to go. 

New documents obtained by the ACLU of Louisiana through a public records request are shedding more light on how the New Orleans Police Department utilizes facial recognition software — a practice that the NOPD had denied using for years until admitting it last month.

As The Lens reported, the city has justified its previous denials on the basis that it didn’t actually own facial recognition software. Nonetheless, the NOPD has been using facial recognition since at least 2018 by tapping its intelligence partnerships with federal and state agencies, including the FBI and Louisiana State Police.

“After years of assurances from city officials that facial recognition was not used in New Orleans, the ACLU of Louisiana has obtained nearly 50 pages of email requests from New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) to the Louisiana State Police (LSP) Fusion Center asking LSP to use facial recognition on various photos and video stills,” said a Monday press release from the ACLU of Louisiana.

City Council had been considering a ban on facial recognition. But then they learned it was already in use.  Now the ban's sponsor... who was never really serious about it in the first place... has been elected DA. So, likely, nothing will happen. What should happen is the cameras should all come down.  But no one is even going to consider that. 

In other words, he skipped bail

You have to admit it has a certain elegance to it. 

The Louisiana Supreme Court set up new rules this year to quell public criticism over its secretive system for disciplining judges accused of misconduct.

But the first judge to face public charges under those attempts at transparency, Orleans Parish Magistrate Judge Harry Cantrell, is about to run out the clock. He'll be leaving the bench and a stack of ethical complaints behind him -- with no public disciplinary hearing, much less a blot on his judicial record.

Judge Cantrell will leave the bench without having faced any consequences for his overly harsh, obnoxiously so, in fact, treatment of defendants and their lawyers who had the nerve to object to his bail policies even though a federal court found them to be unconstitutional. 

Among other things, Cantrell was accused of “willful misconduct” and “persistent and public conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice that brings the judicial office into disrepute.”

From the bench, he launched or threatened contempt-of-court proceedings against defense attorneys who requested bond for their clients in amounts below a $2,500 floor that he’d adopted. That sparked a federal civil rights lawsuit that forced an overhaul of the court’s funding scheme.

And yet now it is Judge Cantrell who is skipping out on bail.  And that many not even be the biggest irony here.  For that we need to look at the reason the judge was able to postpone his matter past the expiration of his term.

Cantrell requested, and received, an extension to this week, saying that COVID-19 concerns had slowed depositions and subpoena returns. A new hearing date was set over three days to begin Monday. Recently, it was recently “continued without date.”

In and of itself, that seems proper.  But consider the judge's lack of consideration for accused persons in his own courtroom and it seems less like justice. Makes one wonder what his daughter-in-law might say.

She has stoutly resisted more recent pressure from advocacy groups urging that police release nonviolent suspects from custody. “You’re worried about criminals catching coronavirus? Tell them to stop breaking the damn law,” snaps Cantrell, a streetwise woman known for her salty tongue.

How big is the Six Flags site?

Over the years I've seen it reported differently a few times. Is it 140 acres or 220 acres or 227 acres or 224 acres or 150 acres?  Today the city's latest RFQ lists it as separate parcels of 162 and 65 acres.  Is that right?  What is happening? 

Under the latest request for qualifications, developers have from this Wednesday, Dec. 16, through to Feb. 9, 2021 to demonstrate their interest and ability to revitalize the area.

Schwartz said the city then hopes to winnow those bidders down to a short-list of potential master developers who will be asked to submit fully-fledged proposals.

He said the city is aiming to choose an exclusive developer, which can be a joint venture, and to have worked out a redevelopment plan by the end of June.

"We're going to do everything we can to stick to that with no more delays," he said.

The city is asking for proposals that include both the 162-acre main site where the abandoned amusement park is located as well as a nearly-adjacent 65-acre site located to the northeast, closer to Bayou Sauvage, between Interstate 10 and Michoud Boulevard and abutting two residential areas that contain several hundred houses.

Guess we'll find out soon enough.  This reclamation project has attracted some truly remarkable ideas from some fascinating people over the years.  Can't wait to see what is in the next exciting batch of presentations.

Fast pass

Kudos to the Times-Picayune/Advocate for polling its stable of "influencers" on the... well.. the kind of things the influencers might think about.  This question, for example, is just not the sort of thing the ordinary non-influential Joe or Jane might have to consider. 

We also asked a speculative question: If allowed, how much would respondents pay to be one of the first people vaccinated? More than half wouldn't bite.

Just this week the Governor laid out the state's plan to administer as many as 159,000 vaccinations by the end of the month. That number may be optimistic depending on how many doses become available and when.  The first batch of 39,000 injections could happen as early as this weekend.  But it will take many more months to get the vaccine out to everyone so we have had to prioritize health care workers. 

Between 200,000 and 215,000 people are estimated to be in the first priority group for the vaccines, according to state Health Department figures. That includes 75,000 to 80,000 residents and staff of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities and between 125,000 and 135,000 health workers.

The T-P Power Poll question doesn't only presuppose that the blessed elect should have the option of skipping this line. It goes straight on past that and asks them how much would they pay to have that privilege validated.  Turns out that's extremely valuable to some of them!

Byron LeBlanc, president of LeBlanc & Schuster Public Relations, said he'd consider it: "I'd probably be willing to pay more than $100 for the vaccine if it meant I could get a wrist band or something that would let me do away with the masks and resume normal behavior and travel."

What is this, Disney World? I just want to ride on the planes again.  Please let me buy a fast pass. Actually, going super-early would not allow you to "do away with masks and resume normal behavior."  Because vaccinations, much like masks and social distance precautions, are only effective when everyone has them.  Until that happens, early vaccine recipients who aren't being careful around others could be even more dangerous. 

Only people who have virus teeming in their nose and throat would be expected to transmit the virus, and the lack of symptoms in the immunized people who became infected suggests that the vaccine may have kept the virus levels in check.

But some studies have suggested that even people with no symptoms can have high amounts of coronavirus in their nose, noted Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, who represents the American Academy of Pediatrics at meetings of the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. The first person confirmed to be reinfected with the coronavirus, a 33-year-old man in Hong Kong, also did not have symptoms, but harbored enough virus to infect others.

Vaccinated people who have a high viral load but don’t have symptoms “would actually be, in some ways, even worse spreaders because they may be under a false sense of security,” Dr. Maldonado said.

As with so many human problems, no one is really safe from COVID until we all are safe from COVID.  Elites such as those identified by the Times-Picayune as "influencers" tend to think they can buy their way out of that social contract. A lot of the time this makes them suckers.  But mostly it just makes things difficult for the rest of us.