Landrieu wants to stop funds to agency linked to brother

• By GERARD SHIELDS
• Advocate Washington bureau
• Published: Mar 19, 2009 - Page: 1A

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WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu said Wednesday that she will try to rescind $190,000 she recently secured in the federal budget for a nonprofit New Orleans organization incorporated by her brother.

Landrieu was responding to an article published Wednesday in The New York Times, which reported that the money went to the Lake Mary Community Center. Her brother, Martin, helped incorporate the organization to convert an abandoned synagogue in 2007.

The project never came to fruition because the group couldn’t secure the necessary private funding. Landrieu had contacted her brother about the center but was unaware that, as a lawyer, he had volunteered to help the group form, she said.

Her brother was the former president of the Lakeview Civic Improvement Association in the neighborhood, where the project was to be built.

“I contacted him because I knew he would know about the project,” Landrieu said. “The request came up from the community.”

The proposal came to Landrieu’s office through Catholic Charities, she said.

“I was aggressively looking for projects like this, not only in the city but in the region,” Landrieu said.

Martin Landrieu said Wednesday that he didn’t know that the organization was seeking money through the senator’s office until after the fact. Landrieu said he never lobbied his sister on the project.

“Never once did I do that,” he said. “This is one project of many recovery projects.”

The proposal was part of a regional plan for the area compiled by community groups, he said. Asked if his relationship with his senator gave his organization more preference than another project, Landrieu said: “Certainly not.”

The Landrieus said the project was initiated by Margaret Dubuisson of Catholic Charities in New Orleans. Dubuisson did not return calls for comment on Wednesday. An aide said she was not in the office on Wednesday.

U.S. Senate ethic rules prohibit senators from seeking funding that would financially benefit themselves or a family members. The rule applies to financial gains. The agency in Landrieu’s earmark was a non-profit.

Special project funding in the budget are known as “earmarks” and have become very controversial because for their inclusion in legislators’ states or districts. Landrieu was recently ranked second in the Senate for securing earmarks worth $332 million for 177 projects, according to the government watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense.