N.O. watchdog sees ‘inch-by-inch’ progress in city

• By ALLEN JOHNSON JR.
• Advocate New Orleans bureau
• Published: Jun 25, 2008 - Page: 1A - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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NEW ORLEANS — One year after his appointment as New Orleans’ first inspector general, Robert Cerasoli says he has no idea what role his watchdog office will play in the event of a hurricane.

“God! That’s a good question,” Cerasoli, 59, said Tuesday at a news conference hosted by the city Ethics Review Board at Loyola University’s Danna Student Center. He joked about fleeing the city via River Road then earnestly added: “If someone wants me to stay, I’d be happy to.”

A Harvard-educated native of Quincy, Mass., with a national reputation as one of the first statewide inspector general of any state (Massachusetts), Cerasoli is still struggling to set up a watchdog office since arriving in August — two years after Hurricane Katrina flooded most of the city.

Both the local office of inspector general and the ethics review board were created and enshrined in the City Charter with the approval of New Orleans voters in 1995, at the urging of then-Mayor Marc Morial.

Both monitoring agencies remained “paper tigers,” until after Katrina struck the city in 2005.

In January 2007, the City Council began to revive both watchdog concepts in an attempt to shore up confidence in a local government with a national reputation for waste, fraud and corruption. On June 12, 2007, the ethics panel voted 7-0 to hire Cerasoli following a nationwide search.

On Tuesday, Cerasoli — whose passions include theater, Latin and the Boston Red Sox baseball — recited a tale of woe about trying to establishing his office that sounded similar to complaints of local residents trying to rebuild from the storm.

His office still does not have computers. Only nine of 30 staff positions have been filled. And the office finally got telephone service two weeks ago.

“I had my first staff meeting yesterday,” he told an audience, which gasped with shock.

Cerasoli blamed a number of “unusual circumstances” for the prolonged delay in getting to his basic mission of ferreting out waste, fraud, abuse and illegal activities in city government.

Obstacles, he says, include: trying to set up an agency in a city that is still recovering from a major disaster and “unnamed people” opposed to the inspector general. “It’s been a combination of arcane practices and procedures I have had to cut through and break through,” he said.

For example, Cersasoli said, he rejected City Hall assertions that he could only advertise for staff positions in The Times-Picayune, the city’s official journal. He argued that he wanted to advertise in minority-owned publications and alternative news outlets, and ultimately did so.

Lacking the full support of Mayor Ray Nagin’s administration, he says he had to design the office computer system himself.