NEW ORLEANS — Emboldened by a Louisiana Supreme Court ruling in March that upheld its right to sue Mayor LaToya Cantrell, the New Orleans City Council took legal action Friday to recover $50 million it says the city should have received over the last nine years.
The City Council amended its 2022 lawsuit against Cantrell and around 50 heirs of a trust set up by a wealthy landowner 110 years ago. The council sued Cantrell hoping to force her to undo an agreement she signed in 2020 with the heirs of the Edward Wisner Donation. In that agreement, she unilaterally decided the city would extend the trust and keep sharing revenues from the Wisner lands with those other heirs, in perpetuity.
The council argues the 100-year Wisner Trust expired in 2014 and all the Wisner lands, some of which host lucrative oil and gas operations at Port Fourchon on the Gulf Coast, were supposed to be turned over to the City of New Orleans a decade ago.
By signing the 2020 agreement with the Wisner heirs, Cantrell was able to keep controlling about $3 million every year in Wisner funds to dole out to nonprofits, including a nonprofit she created and other pet projects. It also prevented the city’s general fund from collecting around $10 million every year from businesses operating on the Wisner lands.
The amended lawsuit claims all $75.9 million in revenue generated by those businesses since 2015 should have gone to the city. Instead, only $26.4 million went to the city – and then, only to a fund controlled by the mayor. The City Council’s latest court filing demands that the heirs, including Wisner’s descendants, LSU, Tulane University and the Salvation Army, to give back the other $49.5 million.
The council says the city should have taken control of the Wisner lands under Cantrell’s predecessor, Mitch Landrieu, but he temporarily extended the trust until after he left office in 2018. Cantrell took that a step further in 2020 by agreeing with the other heirs to make it a perpetual trust, something they had been seeking for decades.
A state appeals court ruled the City Council didn’t have standing to sue, but that was overturned in March by a 5-2 majority of the state Supreme Court.
► Get breaking news from your neighborhood delivered directly to you by downloading the new FREE WWL-TV News app now in the IOS App Store or Google Play.
