New Orleans flood board weighs $2M increase to police budget | Environment

The New Orleans area’s flood protection authority is considering expanding its police force and increasing its budget again, a plan that has drawn scrutiny from watchdogs who say the agency’s focus should remain on flood protection.

The agency staff presented a draft of the next fiscal year’s budget to its board on Thursday that calls for increasing police spending by $2 million. That would mean spending over a fifth of the flood agency’s operating budget on policing.

The proposal would allow the agency to hire new police officers, increasing the total headcount from 47 officers to 65. Its police force would also buy a new computer-assisted dispatch system as well as tasers, in-car cameras and body cameras. 

The budget bump follows a nearly $4 million increase on police spending in this year’s budget, a 45% hike. 

If approved, the overall operating budget, excluding major infrastructure projects, will rise by about 8%, according to the agency’s finance director Denise Williams, from about $56 million this year to around $62 million next year. The agency will also hire additional employees in other departments to fill staff vacancies.

The board is set to formally approve the budget with a vote at its March 24 meeting. The increase would be paid for in part by an effective tax hike in Orleans Parish that the agency’s board approved in October following a property reassessment there. That partially account for a 16% increase in total agency revenues next year. 

Regional Director Jeff Williams stressed that the budget’s main thrust would continue to be “direct investment in critical flood protection infrastructure,” and he emphasized that the budget is balanced. The budget draft proposes to increase spending on personnel agency-wide by 16% and calls for fixing erosion to the London Avenue Canal, conducting a survey of the Lake Borgne Storm Surge Barrier, and funding other flood protection work. 

The draft also proposes to increase spending on operations staff — who oversee the flood systems’ pumps and floodgates — by $1.9 million. But the largest year-over-year increase will go to the police department.

“We have more flood control assets than we had pre-Katrina,” he said. “Our first priority is protecting the flood assets, but we have fewer police officers to do so.”

He noted that before Katrina the Orleans Parish levee board employed 75 police officers.

The agency, formally known as the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East, is responsible for the flood protection system on the Mississippi River’s east bank. It also operates a small police force, charged with protecting the levees, pumps and floodwalls, as well as policing in a handful of neighborhoods along the shoreline of Lake Pontchartrain.

The police force was founded in the mid-20th century, when the pre-Katrina Orleans Levee District, the precursor to today’s authority, filled in sections of Lake Pontchartrain and sold property to create new subdivisions. Though the agency is funded by parish-wide millages, its police officers work primarily in those neighborhoods.

“The police force has been forgotten about for years,” said board president Peter Vicari. “They were understaffed, so we’re just getting it back up to the level that they’re supposed to be at.”

Residents in the lakefront neighborhoods have praised the increased police presence. But watchdog groups have questioned whether the increase is aligned with the agency’s primary mission of protecting the New Orleans area from hurricane storm surge.

“The flood authority’s core mission is flood protection — not building a larger police force,” said Blair duQuesnay of Citizens for 1 Greater New Orleans, an organization that advocated for reforms after Katrina. “Our priority must be maintaining and strengthening the levee system that protects our region from catastrophic flooding.”

Already, the agency has increased its focus on policing since Gov. Jeff Landry began taking an interest in the agency in 2024. Last year’s budget called for a substantial increase in spending on police that paid for 16 new vehicles, AR-15 style assault weapons, tasers, body cams, a police drone, and salary increases — including a large raise for police chief Joshua Rondeno, who now makes $208,000 per year, nearly twice his predecessor’s $110,000 salary in 2023.

Rondeno has taken on an increased role at the agency and performs the duties of a chief compliance officer, a position that did not previously exist. He and other agency leaders say the new equipment is necessary to professionalize the force.

He also filed a battery charge last year against former board member Deborah Settoon, with whom Rondeno had publicly clashed at board meetings. Rondeno alleged that Settoon punched him in the arm in October, which Settoon denied.

She said she believes the charges were brought against her to push her to resign. Rondeno dropped the charge earlier this month, on the day that Settoon resigned.

Thursday’s meeting also marked the first for new board member Ronald Schumann, appointed by the governor following the resignations of Settoon and fellow board member Randall Noel.

Without Schumann, the board would only have had five of its nine members and could not have approved infrastructure projects. 

Now, all board members have been appointed by Landry, with whom Regional Director Williams and Vicari met briefly on Thursday during a visit to LaPlace from a high-level delegation from Washington to highlight a new initiative aimed at speeding up Army Corps of Engineers projects.

Vicari and Williams said they only exchanged pleasantries with the governor, who has repeatedly declined to comment on flood agency issues. The board president sought to distance the governor from recent controversies. 

“All the BS that’s been going on, he’s not been involved at all,” Vicari said. “He asked me to take the chairmanship and do the right thing. That was it.”