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55 6. INSIDE THE MAYOR’S “COCOON” My FIRST TWO WEEKS IN CITy HALL WERE ILLUMINATING. Although I hadn’t expected a big welcoming party, I was surprised at simply being put out to sea with almost no contact with anyone, including the mayor. I spent my first two weeks reviewing resumes, finding office space, and getting an office up and running with the help of the mayor’s personnel assistant. But no one called to see what I was doing. No one seemed to want to know. In January 2007, the city work force was less than half its pre-Katrina size of over 5,000. Mayor Nagin had been forced to cut the city payroll to meet the budget. Except for police and fire, the staff was significantly downsized. This downsizing was a blessing, Nagin told me, because he felt that a smaller, more technically proficient staff was more efficient to manage. But adding technology , he found, didn’t generate the organizational efficiency he’d expected, because old staff traditions lingered. The city was the first organization I’d worked in that had no written staff manual for employees or website of standard operating procedures. I asked for the city operating manuals so I could familiarize myself with systems in case they required modifications for the post-Katrina effort. I requested an early space in the new-employee induction program, so I could fathom how the city was run and who was responsible for the various units. When little resulted, I finally asked Becca O’Brien and others for these basic tools. Word got back to the mayor about all that. And when I next saw him, he was upset with me for asking for such small things when we had a recovery to run. I knew this wasn’t an issue to push. However, I also knew that the absence of these fundamentals signaled a longer and deeper set of problems. So I set about developing my own ori- 56 Chapter 6 entation for myself. And when I found a dearth of public assets records that would indicate how much property the city owned and where it was, I realized that I had come to a city that was technologically advanced but administratively broken. The mayor had spent his first term just getting the city computerized and replacing old-fashioned paper processes with digital records. I later discovered that he had been burned by his director of technology Greg Meffert, who used his post not only to modernize the city but also to create an empire for himself within the bureaucracy. It soon appeared, through 63 federal indictments , that Meffert had done well for more than the city. His alleged abuses made the mayor wary of aggressive senior staff, and strengthened his inclination to make loyalty the first test for those working for him. Nagin did have a good, loyal executive cabinet of seven chief executive officers . We worked well for him in many ways. But the group members all felt they could be the supreme leader, much like the cabinet described in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. Some of those “rivals,” like Salmon P. Chase, worked hard to show why they, not Lincoln, should have been president. In New Orleans, that attitude extended to me as well as the mayor: most of the time, I felt that several of Nagin’s executive team thought, and tried to demonstrate, that they could run the recovery better than I could. As a result, teamwork was discussed but not practiced. Nagin’s cabinet had an inside team, or “cocoon,” as my deputy Ezra Rapport called it. I wasn’t part of this group of very close personal advisors. They met with the mayor informally and frequently, to steer him in directions they felt were in the best interests of the city. In the group were chief administrative officer (CAO) Brenda Hatfield, city attorney Penya Moses-Fields, righthand deputy Kenya Smith, and head of communications Ceeon Quiett. It was an invisible, extra decision-making layer that could (and did) undercut or overturn cabinet decisions. It became clear to me that I needed the cocoon’s support for any major step I wanted to take. And I learned to seek its members’ endorsements before taking matters to the mayor or making an important presentation to the cabinet. Each Tuesday at 9 or 10 a.m., our executive team assembled in the mayor’s...

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