NEW ORLEANS — New Orleans’ inspector general took aim Thursday at Mayor LaToya Cantrell and members of her administration for soliciting donations from a city contractor and directing a nonprofit how to spend private funds.
Inspector General Ed Michel released his report Thursday on Forward Together New Orleans, 18 months after issuing a subpoena that caused the nonprofit to freeze its accounts. FTNO stopped operating at that point, returned more than $1 million in city money and was formally dissolved last year.
Mayor Cantrell formed FTNO, first as a fund for her inauguration as mayor in May 2018 and then as a tax-exempt nonprofit called the “Mayor’s Fund,” which raised private donations to support public city initiatives during the pandemic, such as job training for at-risk youth and gun-violence prevention programs.
A WWL Investigation in 2022 found city employees sent emails directing FTNO staff to solicit private donations to help run the mayor’s social-welfare programs, including a $25,000 contribution from United Health Care, a city contractor.
The WWL report also uncovered an email Cantrell wrote in 2021, directing FTNO’s executive director to send $500 checks to Mardi Gras Indian chiefs and call it a “housing expense.”
“Do we have some FTNO checks we can cut for support, $500 each(?) No pressure just let me know. It can be housing expense,” Cantrell wrote before FTNO provided the money for the big chiefs.
The IG’s report Thursday said it’s unethical for city employees to solicit donations from city contractors or from anyone seeking a city contract. It also said it was “perhaps a conflict of interest for Liana Elliott, then Deputy Chief of Staff to Mayor Cantrell, to serve as a member of the FTNO board.”
When WWL asked about the United Health Care donation in 2022, the mayor’s spokesman said people could “quibble” with it, but it was the most efficient way to get aid to desperate people during the pandemic.
He said the $25,000 UHC donation requested by Emily Wolff, then Cantrell’s director of the Office of Youth and Families, paid for 250,000 diapers and baby food for families in need.
“Isn’t that what the director of Youth and Families should be doing?” said Gregory Joseph, Cantrell’s spokesman at the time.
WWL reported on the FTNO controversy shortly after the IG’s subpoena caused the nonprofit to stop paying for key city training programs. But at a news conference a few days later, a combative Cantrell accused this reporter of getting “in between that young person and that stipend that they deserve and they're putting in the work to receive.”
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