NORD director Vic Richard, Councilwoman-at-Large Jackie Clarkson, District B Councilwoman Stacy Head and Councilman-at-Large Arnold Fielkow describe proposed reforms to the city's recreation programs at a Wednesday evening meeting at the Dryades YMCA.
Depending on how voters cast their ballots Oct. 2, the New Orleans Recreation Department may face significant restructuring in the coming year. Based on questions at a Wednesday night forum at the Dryades YMCA, voters are still struggling to understand exactly how it will work.
Under the proposal, NORD could shift from its current status as a department of the City of New Orleans into a public-private entity, with a superintendent, a thirteen-member board, and a foundation devoted to fundraising and development for the new agency.
Eight of the thirteen seats on the board would be allocated to various city officials: a deputy mayor, a City Council member, and the chair of the City Planning Commission among others. These officials would be accompanied by five members of the general public, one for each of the city’s five districts, who would bring expertise and resources from the private sector to the agency, city officials said Wednesday night. The board would then undertake a nationwide search for a superintendent of recreation answerable directly to the Mayor.
The proposal would also create a public foundation dedicated to bolstering the operational funding of the department, improving not just its accounting practices but over time increasing its working budget above the approximately $5 million per year that NORD currently receives.
Calling NORD a “flawed and dysfunctional system,” Councilman-at-Large Arnold Fielkow blamed the current state of affairs not on any of its employees or facilities in particular but on a deeper, systemic problem: the agency was originally created during segregation, resulting in a history of unequally allocated resources, long-term neglect of specific properties, and a higher-than-average turnover rate among staff. These reforms, he said, if enacted, would streamline the agency’s work, eliminating the fragmentation of management and responsibility from which it suffers, and making it more open, transparent, and accountable to the public.
“The current system of separating maintenance from programming is not a good system,” Fielkow said. “They need to be aligned.”
District B Councilwoman Stacy Head agreed. “When I go into my district and see the tattered uniforms, and the lack of uniforms,” she said, “it breaks my heart. The only way to provide the same quality of services for all kids in New Orleans is to change the system.”
Head and Fielkow were accompanied at the meeting by former NORD director Angele Wilson, current director Vic Richard, and Councilwoman-at-Large Jackie Clarkson. Based on the questions posed to the council members at Wednesday’s meeting, the audience of about fifty community leaders, activists, NORD employees, and members of the public specifically wanted more assurance about who will serve on the proposed board.
That the private-sector members represent each of the city’s districts was not enough for some audience members, who repeatedly asked about the expertise, qualifications, and accountability of those members. Fielkow’s response, that the selection process would be as open and transparent as the board’s work itself, did not satisfy audience member Leon Clark, however. Standing between the city panel and the audience, Clark accused the council members of spreading misinformation and staging a takeover of the department. “It’s all about money,” he said, before being hushed by other members of the audience and leaving the meeting.
Other questions concerned the management of specific properties such as Norwood Thompson Park, which the Reverend Lois DeJean of the Gert Town Revival Initiative claimed had been allocated thousands of dollars for maintenance and repair which it had never actually received. Fielkow replied that under the new system, each property would have a specific person in charge of it, resolving these issues. Other members asked about the financing of the proposed agency: where its funding would come from, and whether new fees would be imposed. Fielkow said that NORD already receives about $1.5M per year from an existing millage which will continue until its expiration in 2020, and noted that the foundation would seek capital-level support from a range of sources, but did not specify any specific organizations or sectors.
Some attendees still expressed skepticism that a new structure itself would solve NORD’s existing disparities. “I think it’s sad that there’s such distrust in the current elected governmental process that in order to have a working program we have to pull it out of the public sector,” said Jane Dimitry of Neighbors United.
Fielkow urged voters still skeptical of the reforms to learn as much about the initiative as they could before the ballot. This will likely be the last time any proposed reforms of NORD appear before the public, he said, despite the fact that it was his signature agenda as a councilperson. If it fails, the city is unlikely to pursue any major structural adjustments anytime soon, Fielkow said: “There’s not going to be much steam left in this issue.”
