NEW ORLEANS — The state agency that maintains floodwalls, gates and levees on the east bank of Jefferson, Orleans and St. Bernard largely stood by its top employee Thursday as it met to discuss concerns over how she was hired earlier this year.
But it’s clear that politics is playing a major role at the Flood Protection Authority – East, a board that was created after Hurricane Katrina to be less political and secretive than the pre-Katrina parish levee boards, where the focus was often diverted away from flood protection to money-making ventures like casinos.
Some members of the Flood Authority board said Thursday that a proper public review and selection process was not followed in March when the board president at the time, Herb Miller, appointed Kelli Chandler the agency’s regional director.
Another commissioner, Eugene Joanen, said he wanted to know more about the process of selecting the regional director and expressed frustration that he often doesn’t get enough details about board business before they vote.
Commissioner Clay Cosse complained that Miller appointed Chandler to the agency’s top position, making $171,000 a year, without any public board discussion. He said Miller made the move a day after the board had met and had just been informed that the process to replace the resigning chief administrative officer would begin.
Cosse noted that the last time a regional director was hired, shortly after the Legislature created the Flood Authority in 2007, there was a national search and the board voted publicly to select engineer Bob Turner. The Flood Authority bylaws state that the board can hire and set the duties and compensation for a regional director, but when Miller selected Chandler, he did so after “polling” some of the board members by phone and email.
Cosse and the board’s current vice president, Roy Arrigo, both said that was improper.
“The appointment of a chief executive over a multibillion-dollar flood protection system protecting almost one million taxpayers was made without public discussion, without transparency and without a vote of the board,” said Cosse, who described Chandler as “unqualified” for the position.
Cosse called for a board discussion in the wake of a WWL-TV investigation last week, which found court records and emails showing that when Chandler was the agency’s finance director in 2017, she was arrested and booked on DUI charges in Georgia and then transferred $51,500 in taxpayer funds from the authority to a fictitious Georgia company that had no business with the authority.
Chandler reported the transfer of funds to the police four months later, saying she had been tricked by email hackers posing as the board president at the time, Joe Hassinger. Emails obtained by WWL-TV show that someone using Hassinger’s Flood Authority email address asked Chandler to wire the money. When Chandler sent an email asking for more information about the payment, the person claiming to be Hassinger wrote back that it was “to complete an acquisition supply that we have been negotiating privately for some time now” and asked Chandler not to mention it to anyone in the office until the deal was formally announced.
Nobody was ever charged for the alleged theft of public funds and the Flood Authority ended up recovering about $25,000 of the loss from insurance.
When Miller named Chandler regional director in March, she also had seven criminal counts pending in Georgia from an October 2017 crash on Interstate 20 near Atlanta. Her blood-alcohol level was measured at twice the legal limit and she pleaded guilty this August to a count of DUI and a count of failing to maintain her lane. She was sentenced to a day in jail, community service, a year of probation and had to surrender her license. In a statement last week, Chandler told WWL-TV that she had been through a painful divorce, but the incident didn’t affect her performance at the Flood Authority. She also said she is allowed to keep driving her personal vehicles in Louisiana even after surrendering her license to the court in Georgia.
The issue could be relevant because Chandler is now in charge of the levee district police. Cosse said at Thursday’s board meeting that Chandler had forced the superintendent of police, Kerry Najolia, to resign in September after he had spoken out against a proposal to outsource the distribution of supplemental policy details.
That plan has since been scrapped in favor of having two levee district police officers dole out the detail assignments. And a police captain, Terry Durnin, stood up at Thursday's board meeting to express strong support for Chandler.
“Bottom line is we need to take the politics out of all this and get back to what we are. Our mission is flood control. That's a leader,” he said, pointing at Chandler. “That's leadership.”
Board member Richard Duplantier, who is an attorney at Hassinger’s law firm and took over his spot on the Flood Authority board in July, also defended Chandler and the way Miller selected her. Duplantier said the bylaws give the president of the board the authority to appoint employees.
“The president acted as the appointing authority properly in selecting the new regional director,” Duplantier said. “Kelli took that job in May and has done a tremendous job since then.”
Cosse tried to introduce a motion to advertise for a human resources director, a finance director, an internal auditor and a new police chief but was shot down by the majority of board members. Chandler said she had already begun advertising for a new human resources and finance director.
The board took no action on anything related to Chandler’s hiring. Miller and the current board president, Mark Morgan, did not attend Thursday’s meeting. Both said last week that Miller acted within his proper authority to select Chandler without a public board meeting.