My Storm: Managing the Recovery of New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina

7. Putting My Team on the Field: Recovery Administration

64 7. PUTTING MY TEAM ON THE FIELD: RECOVERY ADMINISTRATION THE MAyOR STARTED HIS SECOND TERM WITH ROUGHLy twenty senior staff, including those I’ve just described as his “cocoon,” reporting directly to him. When I arrived, there were three direct line officers: myself, as director of recovery management, with a small team of 20; Brenda Hatfield, CAO, with several thousand employees; and Donna Addkison, chief development officer and head of economic development and housing, with about 200. As I’ve indicated, Addkison and I couldn’t get on the same page from the outset. We had only one meeting during my first six months, and that one at the mayor’s insistence. He was apparently frustrated with her, too. After nearly a year, the entire executive team could see that Addkison’s days were numbered, and the cocoon seemed to be plotting her demise. After one executive meeting in which the mayor hammered her, I ran into Brenda, his right-hand woman, and Penya, the city attorney, getting on the elevator. They knew Donna was on her way out. After I arrived in New Orleans, I was ready to interview staff for my new Office of Recovery Management, the title the mayor had put before the city council for approval and funding. The organization chart included a deputy and key staff for four functions: ■ Resources—to find additional funding from nongovernmental sources for the recovery and coordinate all forms of outside help and resources, including volunteers; putting My Team on the Field 65 ■ Planning—to develop and monitor the recovery plan; ■ Infrastructure and environment—to deal with the massive problems of prioritizing water and power restoration, and developing basic infrastructure resilience against future disasters; ■ Settlement—to assist in housing, resettlement, and community development issues. Among the first things I had to do as recovery czar was to try to begin retooling government, to pare down the number of different municipal operating boards and committees in the city, each with its own authority. We faced an unusual and difficult situation: there was no central governmental apparatus to direct the recovery. That was, and remains, New Orleans, and it was to make my job a lot harder, because the mayor, for whom I was working, did not control all the central institutions of government across the city/parish. New Orleans is an inordinately complicated bureaucracy. Every new job has to go to the Civil Service Commission for approval. The commissioners wanted all the jobs to be paid at the salary of current city staff, even though these salaries were too low to attract competent staff. In fact, some positions, like architects, were vacant for years. Not only did they protect outdated salaries , they also had a bizarre practice of setting a single salary based on the last salary paid to the occupant of the post. So, if the last person’s salary was high when you took the job, you got a good start. But if you wanted to transfer from another job into a new office, you might be told that the salary for the job was lower than the salary you were leaving, and that it couldn’t be changed. I spent far too much time negotiating this system, and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to contract out many of the better jobs for the recovery. The Office of Recovery and Development—my group—had twenty staff, only five of them on the city payroll. I organized my own staff with the youngest qualified people I could find on the city payroll. In case there were any layoffs, I didn’t want the young people to suffer. The rest of the staff drew grant salaries from a nonprofit we had to set up to bypass the byzantine city rules that couldn’t accommodate new employees unless they were taken from the layoff list, and paid salaries insufficient for the qualified people we needed to attract. As it happened, staff who weren’t on the city payroll worked for almost two months with no salaries, until the foundation grants arrived, and we put them on foundation funding that would only last two years. If the city didn’t pick up these people’s salaries after that, their jobs would disappear. Among other staff, I brought aboard Jessie Smallwood, a colleague from 66 Chapter 7 my antipoverty days in California. She was close to people at...