NEW ORLEANS — Leaders at the sewerage and water board answered questions surrounding sexual misconduct allegations and of a sex room at the Carrollton water treatment plant.
It's stranger than fiction. Councilmembers flooded leaders of the city's sewerage and water board with questions about a, "break room," that had allegedly been used for sex, inside the Carrollton Plant.
Sewerage and Water Board Executive Director Ghassan Korban has been talking about an online Verite News article, exploring allegations and whistleblower complaints filed by a former employee that a, "secret room," inside the plant was used for sex by employees on and off of their shifts.
According to Korban, the allegations are not fair.
"It was written in a very dramatic way to get attention," Korban said. "These situations are not tolerated and if they were true, they would have been addressed at the time, but they were not true. "
But councilmembers, like J.P. Morrell, said they wanted Korban and other SWB officials to flush the excuses.
"I don't think anyone is saying the sewerage and waterboard condoned what was going on in that room," Councilman Morrell said. "The fact there hasn't been an aggressive effort on SWB to find out how this room was converted, who was using it, and why the people were using it and why the people who were using it weren't fired."
The whistleblower in this case, who spoke with WWL-TV anonymously, has said they have been harassed by peers and supervisors since joining the department several years ago.
That former employee took cell-phone video of the alleged sex room and said it's only one of many infractions they encountered working at the Carrollton facility.
Infractions that led Councilman J.P. Morrell to share some advice at the hearing.
"It would help us to help you if when these investigations came out there was an aggressive effort on SWB to get to the root of these issues and to terminate all the people involved," Morrell said.
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