Inspector general's plan to use citizen volunteers will go ahead
Hoping to quash Inspector General Ed Quatrevaux's plan to enlist volunteers to verify the number of addresses serviced by New Orleans' trash collectors, two of the three firms have offered to finance a "comprehensive, location-by-location, citywide count" that would be supervised by representatives of Mayor Mitch Landrieu's administration, the inspector general's office and the three firms.
View full sizeThe trash contractors -- Metro, Richard's and SDT Waste & Debris Services -- are paid based on the number of addresses where they collect trash. There has been controversy for years about how accurate those address counts are.Metro Disposal and Richard's Disposal "are willing to pay the entire cost of conducting a complete door-to-door inspection, which would utilize an independent, professional methodology acceptable to all parties... to ensure a complete and accurate house count," the companies' attorney, Daniel Davillier, said in a prepared statement Thursday.
The offer was almost immediately rebuffed.
Citing the inspector general's autonomy, Landrieu's spokesman said the firms' dispute with Quatrevaux's process is independent from the administration's ongoing effort to convince Metro and Richard's to slash the cost of their contracts.
"We continue to seek a fair price for the same level of sanitation services for New Orleans families," spokesman Ryan Berni said in an e-mail message.
Quatrevaux, meanwhile, said in an e-mail message that he "will continue as planned."
The companies made the offer a day after the chairman of the city's Ethics Review Board, which hires and fires the inspector general, said the panel lacks the authority to halt the inspector general's plan to launch a "citizen verification project" to check about 2,000 addresses drawn at random from the lists of service sites that all three of the city's garbage vendors are required to submit monthly.
The figures are key because the contractors -- Metro, Richard's and SDT Waste & Debris Services -- are paid based on the number of addresses where they collect trash. There has been controversy for years about how accurate the address counts are.
Davillier initially appealed to the board, calling the inspector general's methodology "duplicitous and wasteful." He said Metro and Richard's prefer a process employed by a contractor hired by then-Mayor Ray Nagin to establish an official address list. The vendor is GCR & Associates Inc.
While Davillier called his clients' offer to pay for the survey "a show of good faith," the firms' contracts already require them to provide the city with monthly tallies of their actual service sites, including addresses.
The vendors were required to deliver a list of service locations to city officials by Dec. 1, 2006, a month before they began picking up trash in neighborhoods outside the French Quarter and Central Business District.
The lists were supposed to identify household and small-business locations by street address and assign each site an identification number, the contracts state. With the city's approval, the rosters were to serve as the official service-location list.
Thereafter, the contracts call for the vendors to submit monthly invoices including "a listing by physical address of any units or litter cans added or deleted from the previous billing," plus a report showing the total number of trash cans emptied during the previous month.
Those tallies are supposed to serve as the basis for the vendor's payments, though the city reserves the right to withhold payment for disputed addresses.
However, invoices submitted by Metro and Richard's in 2007 show that the firms during that year did not submit any address changes and billed for the same number of service locations -- 40,000 for Metro and 60,000 for Richard's -- every month, according to records provided last year by the Nagin administration.
Those totals reflect the exact amount that Nagin-era officials used as estimates in their bid solicitation the previous year. Bid documents stated that the unit estimates were for "bid purposes only."
In each month of the following year, Richard's increased its billing tally to 63,000 sites, records show.
Michelle Krupa can be reached at mkrupa@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3312.