Stewart Juneau, owner of the Baton Rouge-based development company LeTriomphe Property Group, was selected last November by Mayor Ray Nagin’s administration to redevelop the Morris F.X. Jeff Sr. Municipal Auditorium in Armstrong Park. At the time, the proposed professional services agreement drew controversy, due to Juneau’s relationship with Nagin (he had hosted the mayor’s much-mocked “Excellence in Recovery Award” gala back in August 2008), as well as for the fact that LeTriomphe was the sole bidder on the project. In December, New Orleans Inspector General Ed Quatrevaux slammed the deal, urging the New Orleans City Council not to approve it. In January, city attorney Penya Moses-Fields slammed right back, saying the IG’s recommendation was premature and that there was “no existing contract.”

This morning, Juneau announced that LeTriomphe was requesting a “temporary suspension of negotiations” on the Municipal Auditorium deal:

LeTriomphe Property Group, LLC (LTPG) announced today that it has requested a temporary suspension of negotiations on a professional services agreement for the redevelopment of the Morris X. F. [sic] Jeff, Sr. Municipal Auditorium.

LTPG remains confident that providing a landmark home for the cultural arts and creative industry in New Orleans in the damaged and unused auditorium is one of the most important projects that will be undertaken in the city in the near future.

The letter gave no reason for requesting a suspension of negotiations, but concluded on an optimistic note:

We look forward to working closely with all segments of our great community on making the mission of providing a landmark home for the cultural arts in New Orleans a reality.

The city’s permitting system is working and available to the public. In a story first broken by The Lens, the technology vendor, Accela Inc., that supplies the system for the city’s Office of Safety and Permits shut it down on Monday because the city failed to pay the company. The system allows contractors and residents to file for permits online and check on their status, and provides an automated format for office staff.

Accela spokesperson Paul Davis said for months the company had repeatedly warned the Nagin administration it would be forced to turn off the system because of back payments. Administration officials finally got the message late Thursday evening.

“We have just received full payment from the city for all outstanding funds for hosting and maintenance fees,” Davis said. He added that Accela has hundreds of contracts with municipalities, and this was the first time it had shut off services because the customer didn’t pay.

Essence’s Michele Norris has an “Exit Interview” with Hizzoner C. Ray Nagin in the March issue of the magazine. It’s brief, but a little doozy it is:

ESSENCE: People in New Orleans are bothered by a sense of corruption hovering over the city. With both the police and technology departments currently under federal investigation, why haven’t you done more to combat these problems?

NAGIN: There was no corruption under my watch. I’ve only had one instance where there was a mention about anything corrupt, and that was an indictment, not a conviction, where a former employee may have improperly used a credit card. But if you’re talking about the previous administration’s indictments, that happened before I got here.

Many more quotable quotes in the interview (including “There’s been a concerted effort to minimize my accomplishments”). Pick up the March issue of Essence for the whole thing, or check the magazine’s Web site in a week or so (not sure if they’ll be posting it online).

The City of New Orleans has withdrawn its request to FEMA for funds to move City Hall to the Chevron Building, according to a source in the New Orleans City Council. FEMA officials were scheduled to hold a meeting this Monday to begin reviewing the city’s plan, but it has been cancelled.

In a letter sent to the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness in Nov., Martin Altman, an administration official, requested the state approve the purchase as an “improved project” because the amount of work deemed eligible by FEMA for storm-damage repairs was not enough “to restore City Hall to its former functional status.” The state office has been serving as an intermediary between FEMA and local municipalities for disaster funds.

The city council had voted against Mayor Nagin’s proposed City Hall relocation in July of last year, and the FEMA request was seen by some council members as a way to make the move without council approval. As reported in a Gambit Scuttlebutt last month (“Ray Nagin’s Chevron Building Dream”), an ordinance had been introduced that would have required council consent on the $8.2 million purchase even if FEMA had approved the project.

City Attorney Penya Moses-Fields told the New Orleans City Council today that the city’s inspector general was premature in condemning a proposed agreement on the Municipal Auditorium. In question was a letter sent by the Office of Inspector General to the council, urging them to oppose a contract between the city and developer Stewart Juneau for consulting work on the renovation and redevelopment of the auditorium.

Moses-Fields said her office has yet to approve any contract with Juneau, and that negotiations were ongoing.

“At this point today, there is no executed contract,” Moses-Fields said.

Controversy has surrounded what should be done with the auditorium since Mayor Nagin announced in early November that Juneau’s firm, Le Triomphe Property Group, in collaboration with trumpeter Irvin Mayfield, had been selected to turn the shuttered building into a musical performance and entertainment production complex at an estimated cost of $80 million. Almost immediately, inspector general Ed Quatrevaux questioned the mayor’s process for awarding the contract, and said the contract showed signs of favoritism on Nagin’s part. Later, all construction components and the leasing of the auditorium were removed from the proposal, and it is now mostly a project management contract, according to assistant city attorney Fred Wild.

Councilwoman Stacy Head made the comment during the hearing that the lease section of the proposal was removed so that the mayor wouldn’t need council approval on the deal. Up until February 2009 when Nagin suspended them, the city used selection review panels to evaluate professional services contracts. Moses-Fields said the proposal is now a professional services contract.

Bill Chrisman, director of capital projects, said the contract that Quatrevaux was responding to was only a draft that Chrisman had put on the city’s electronic contract routing system (ECRS).

“It was never meant for public view,” Chrisman told the council. “It was a working document.” Chrisman admitted Juneau’s signature was on that contract, but he said that was only to show Juneau’s approval on the outline of the proposal. Moses-Fields said when Chrisman first put the proposal into the ECRS, her office had yet to review it.

Following the meeting, Quatrevaux said he thought there had been a healthy discussion, but that it also showed the need for reinstituting the selection panels for professional service contracts.

As for Chrisman saying the proposal was a working document when he inputted it into ECRS and not meant for public view, Janet Werkman, head of the OIG’s inspection and evaluation department, disagreed with the director’s comment.

“It was in the system to begin the process of approval, and, obviously, that’s a public record,” Werkman said.

Calling blight “a crime breeder,” the New Orleans City Council’s Recovery Committee met this morning to discuss Mayor Nagin’s recent cut of blight hearings from the city’s 2010 budget, and how to restore them. Council President Arnie Fielkow said the Council hopes to negotiate with the mayor to put the administrative hearings back into the budget, but if that doesn’t happen, the council should pay for the hearings through its own funds.

In order to avoid the appearance of partiality — the city cites and prosecutes property owners for blight — the city attorney’s office has hired outside legal firms to conduct administrative hearings to determine whether or not a property should be declared legally blighted. Through October of last year, the firms had conducted more than 11,000 blight hearings.

“I think it’s an incredible leverage tool for the city,” said attorney Carl Butler of LeBlanc/Butler, one of the three law firms the New Orleans City Attorney’s Office hired in 2009 to conduct the hearings. Butler explained that the hearings allowed the city to encourage property owners to get their properties up to code, and levy fines against offenders.

Council Vice President Jackie Clarkson chaired the committee, and said the blight hearings was the top issue that residents want to see put back into the city budget. Nagin cut out the hearings on Dec. 11, after the council passed a budget in December, reducing funding to a number of city departments, including $1 million from the city attorney’s office. Ceon Quiett, director of the mayor’s office of communication, said there wasn’t enough money left in the law department’s budget for 2010 to pay for a 12-month contract, which Quiett says the city charter requires.

“So that’s why the city attorney’s office had to make the cuts they made,” Quiett said. “They didn’t have the money in their budget for the lifetime of these services.” Quiett says the city spent $215,000 in 2009 for the administrative hearings, and, City Attorney Penya Moses Fields estimated the total cost to continue the hearings would be $250,000 in 2010.

Councilmember Stacy Head, holding up a copy of the law department’s 2010 proposed professional services and consulting contracts, said that only $80,000 was needed to continue the blight hearings, and that this was a miniscule amount compared to the city’s overall general fund budget of $455 million.

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State Sen. Ed Murray’s withdrawal from the mayor’s race was the latest — and biggest — surprise in a contest that already has had more than its share of unexpected twists and turns. Here’s my take on what happened, why, who benefits, what’s next, and what it means in the long run:

What Happened

Murray’s campaign team had a meeting last Wednesday (Dec. 30) to review fresh poll numbers by Silas Lee and to discuss finances and strategy. The poll had Murray in low double digits but with potential to grow among black voters, most of whom (around 55 percent) were voting for frontrunner Mitch Landrieu. The lieutenant governor’s numbers in this poll showed him ahead by a large margin, with nearly 50 percent of the vote. When you account for the fact that “undecided” respondents in a poll tend not to vote, Landrieu already has a majority of the decided vote. Of course, that could change, but that’s where things stood last week.

The feeling among some of Murray’s top advisers was that, while much of Landrieu’s black support was rooted in a genuine sense of “buyers’ remorse” after Ray Nagin’s dismal performance over the past four years, a lot of that support was “soft” and could be peeled off Landrieu. It would require, however, that Murray attack Landrieu. It also would require Murray to raise another $400,000 to $700,000 to position himself to make a March 6 runoff. Murray already had loaned his campaign several hundred thousand dollars, and the message to him was that he might have to put more of his personal funds into the effort.

After Wednesday’s meeting, several of Murray’s top campaign folks began raising money and devising a strategy to go after Landrieu. There was even some hope that Orleans DA Leon Cannizzaro might endorse Murray, and soon, which would give his campaign a boost.

Murray himself, however, was not comfortable turning the race into another contest about race. He spent the next few days doing a gut check and decided on Saturday that he wasn’t going to play a race card just to get elected. Once he made up his mind about that, he moved quickly to get out — surprising even some of his closest friends and supporters. He did not consult with his top campaign strategists before making up his mind to get out.

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The Louisiana Justice Institute (LIJ) says that Mayor Nagin’s recent decision to close City Hall on Fridays due to budget restraints will affect voter turnout in the upcoming Municipal Primary Election, which includes the mayoral and City Council ballots.

“By closing City Hall on Friday and Saturday, the mayor is cutting out 3 of the 7 early voting days at the primary early voting location,” says Jacques Morial, co-director of LIJ, a civil rights advocacy organization. Early voting for the primary election runs from Jan. 23-Jan. 30.

Morial says that this is a substantive change in voting procedure, and that, according to the federal Voting Rights Act, an alteration like this must be pre-cleared by the U.S. Department of Justice. Morial says that his institute has been in contact with DOJ officials regarding this, and that neither the city nor the state has requested the required pre-clearance.

LIJ has filed a letter of complaint with DOJ. Morial says that under the Voting Rights Act, DOJ can order that City Hall be open, so that voting is not disrupted.

“It’s just typical of City Hall,” Morial says. “They just don’t consider the consequences at all of what they do.”

There never seems to be a recession in Louisiana political hijinks, as 2009 proved many times over. This was a year of tectonic shifts in the local political paradigm, and the coming year promises to bring more big changes. Herewith, our annual list of the Top 10 Political Stories:

1. Bill Jefferson’s Continued Slide — The former congressman’s misfortunes continued to pile up. He was convicted on 11 of 16 federal felony counts in August after a long-delayed trial in Virginia. Ironically, Jefferson was acquitted of the charge most closely related to the infamous $90,000 in cash that the feds retrieved from his freezer in 2005 — but jurors concluded that his congressional office was an ongoing criminal enterprise under the RICO statute. The trial judge sentenced him to 13 years but let him stay out of jail pending his appeal. In another twist, the U.S. Supreme Court is considering other cases that could overturn some of Jefferson’s convictions. Locally, Dollar Bill’s brother (and political muscle) Mose Jefferson was convicted of bribing a school board member in an unrelated case. Mose and Assessor Betty Jefferson (another Jefferson sibling) face still more federal charges with Mose’s gal pal (and Dollar Bill protégé) Renee Gill-Pratt. Politically, Jefferson’s once-dominant political machine, the Progressive Democrats, is in shambles. The Feb. 6 citywide elections will be the first in three decades in which Dollar Bill is not a factor.

2. The City Hall Scandals — There’s no telling how many separate criminal investigations are underway at City Hall. Former technology chief Greg Meffert was indicted on several dozen criminal counts, along with his wife Linda and former business partner Mark St. Pierre. St. Pierre is the city contractor who paid for the Mefferts and the Nagins to vacation in Hawaii in 2004 and for the Nagins to unwind — first class — in Jamaica shortly after Katrina (while the rest of us were still trying to get back home to New Orleans). On another front, the feds seized various City Hall computers after the mayor’s emails and 2008 calendar mysteriously disappeared (following a WWL-TV request for them under the state Public Records Act). Ironically, tons of City Council emails were produced by the Nagin Administration in response to an unrelated public records request — and some of those emails proved to be cautionary tales against writing things down. More recently, veteran Sewerage and Water Board member Ben Edwards was indicted on 33 counts of corruption, including alleged kickbacks. Edwards spent more than $250,000 “independently” helping Mayor Ray Nagin win re-election in 2006. As the clock winds down on Ray Nagin’s tenure in City Hall, the feds appear to be tightening the circle of suspicion around him.

3. The Mayor’s Race — For a while it seemed that nobody wanted Ray Nagin’s job — then everybody seemed to want it. After a yawner of a preseason, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu lit up the field with his eleventh-hour decision to run. The fallout came quickly as school reformer Leslie Jacobs dropped out a week later. Landrieu, who is making his third bid for the mayor’s office, is once again the early frontrunner. The race for the City Council’s two at-large seats promises to be filled with intrigue as well. Incumbent Arnie Fielkow waited until the last day to qualify, prompting former at-large Councilman Eddie Sapir to jump in. Assessor Darren Mire was another late entry, which seemed to guarantee a scrambled field. Then both Sapir and Mire dropped out on the same day, right before Christmas. State Rep. Austin Badon, who was the first to announce for mayor, was among the first to drop out of that contest, opting instead to run for the council from District E, where he is the early favorite.

4. Suburban Scandals — The feds have been busy all over southeast Louisiana. They indicted and convicted St. John Parish President Bill Hubbard on extortion and money laundering charges, St. Bernard Judge Wayne Cresap on bribery charges, and Mandeville Mayor Eddie Price on tax evasion and depriving citizens of honest services via mail fraud. Meanwhile, FBI agents are looking into Jefferson Parish Chief Administrative Officer Tim Whitmer’s insurance commission-splitting deals in connection with insurance business at West Jefferson General Hospital and among various parish contractors. Some big names are said to be involved, and this could be the beginning of another round of “Jefferson Scandals.” Look for some fireworks to start in the Jefferson Parish scandal before Mardi Gras, my sources say.

5. Ray Nagin’s Unraveling — Could he possibly be more obtuse, more detached, more disengaged — and less effective as a mayor? While in Cuba (on a junket), he praised Castro’s evacuation plans. That came after he failed to convince the City Council to buy the nondescript Chevron Building and make it the new City Hall. Earlier in the year, he thumbed his nose at the courts and the state Public Records Act when his calendar and emails somehow disappeared. When an outside contractor said that the emails were deleted deliberately by someone who knew what they where doing, he fired the contractor. Meanwhile, a growing list of people who once were close to him are under federal indictment. Here’s the good news: he’ll be gone in 18 weeks.

6. Bobby Jindal’s Minus Touch — The Boy Governor started 2009 as the Wunderkind of the national GOP. Then came his disastrous response to Barack Obama’s first national address and his failure to show any coattails in three separate special elections — including a bid by his former executive counsel for the state Supreme Court in northeast Louisiana (which is supposed to be a Jindal stronghold). As he continues to raise millions nationally for his campaign war chest, the state faces major budget problems.

7. State and City Budget Woes — Bobby Jindal told a state cost-cutting commission to “be bold” in their recommendations. Gee, wasn’t that what we elected him to do as governor? Lawmakers anguished over cutting about $1 billion in operating funds this year, but it only gets worse in the next two years. Locally, Mayor Ray Nagin announced a $68 million deficit, then took a taxpayer-paid trip to Mexico to sign a feel-good sister city agreement. When the City Council revised his proposed budget, Hizzoner retaliated by slashing key services — and then blamed it all on the council. Plus ça change.

8. David Vitter’s Run-up to 2010 — The Biggest Hypocrite in America remains an early favorite to win back his U.S. Senate seat, but not without a fight. He initially drew a potential rival in porn star Stormy Daniels of Baton Rouge, but now he will have a real opponent in Democratic Congressman Charlie Melancon. Vitter continues to poll below 50 percent but remains 10 points or more above his main opponents. His infamous bad temper flared up again during an incident at Reagan National Airport when he tried to board a plane late, and all the national attention he’s gets every time there’s another sex scandal anywhere sure makes Louisiana (if not Vitter himself) look bad. Not that he cares.

9. The Saints Deal — For the first time since the state started subsidizing the city’s NFL franchise in 1985, a deal to keep the beloved Saints in New Orleans did not tear the Legislature apart and cost the city valuable political capital. Maybe it’s because Gov. Bobby Jindal also wanted lawmakers to approve $50 million to bail out a north Louisiana chicken processing plant. South Louisiana leges immediately said, “Deal!” Cluck, cluck! Go Saints!

10. The City’s New Master Plan — Like everything else worthwhile that happens here, the city’s new master plan has endured a rough birthing process, but the end results will hopefully be worth it. Don’t let the fact that I’ve listed this as No. 10 fool you. This will be a very important story for decades if we get it right.

A final note: I left former Recovery Chief Ed Blakely off my list of most important political stories. That’s because, even when he was here, Blakely was largely irrelevant. His ridiculous, self-serving comments after his departure proved that.

Here’s hoping 2010 brings better news.

Several sources have confirmed that Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu will announce tomorrow (Tuesday) that he is running for mayor after all. Why the back-and-forth Hamlet routine — again? That’s probably the first thing Landrieu will have to explain. What’s certain is that Landrieu’s entry into the race will turn it upside down. He probably enters as the frontrunner. The big question is, can he close this time?

Another big question: Will any other candidates bow out? Most adversely affected by Landrieu’s decision will be all the white candidates except Rob Couhig, the race’s only Republican. Leslie Jacobs and John Georges have both said privately that they would not run if Landrieu were in the race. That he waited this long is not going to play well with their top supporters, but that’s show biz … and politics.

I have it from several sources very close to Landrieu, including some who actually heard it from him, that he called all the candidates today to let them know, after telling Gov. Bobby Jindal as well. Which means, of course, that this news won’t stay bottled up for long.

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