Sign the petition to have the worst politician in Louisiana removed from office!
Why, you ask?
Because the Mayor of New Orleans appears to once again be responsible for stealing from the people of her city.
NEW ORLEANS (WVUE) - A two-month-long FOX 8 investigation finds New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell is possibly breaking city policy and maybe even state law, spending much of her time at a city-owned apartment, possibly without paying rent.
FOX 8 investigators spent weeks surveilling the Upper Pontalba apartment building and obtained 24-hour surveillance video from a camera right outside of the door next to Jackson Square.
We combed through more than 630 hours of that video, from a camera operated by the city’s French Market Corporation, and found Mayor Cantrell at the apartment almost every day over a 26-day period. She often stays for hours at a time.
We saw Mayor Cantrell showing up early in workout clothes, leaving to take walks along the river, and watering plants on the balcony. One night in August, she did not leave the apartment until almost 1:30 a.m. The mayor spent the night at the apartment several times in the surveillance video we combed through.
The city owns the historic building on the edge of Jackson Square and the French Market Corporation manages it. According to the French Market Corporation, the two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment has a fair market value of $2,991 a month.
The city of New Orleans has a standards of behavior policy that each city employee must sign and return. It states “use of city property is for work-related purposes, and not personal benefit.”
LaToya the DesTroya is basically just giving herself a perk worth thousands of dollars each month without getting the city's permission.
As you probably remember, this isn't the first time this has happened.
“If the mayor is not paying rent, it doesn’t look good,” Dillard University public policy professor Robert Collins says. “It certainly will not look good for the taxpayers. I mean, here we have a situation. The taxpayers are already concerned about the mayor using their money in an efficient manner. She’s been taking long-distance trips and flying first-class. Her own city attorney has ruled that that is a violation of city policy. So now, if we find out that the mayor is using a city property, and the city rules require her to pay rent on that property, and if she is not in fact paying rent on that property, then that’s a problem. Because that I mean, she does not personally own that property, that property is owned by the taxpayers. And so the taxpayers should receive fair compensation for the use of their property.”