Barry Bordelon, executive director of the Jefferson Parish Housing Authority, has a soft spot for Mediterranean food. It shows in his culinary choices in 2007, 2008 and 2009, when he spent $2,943 in public money on 40 meals at various Byblos restaurants throughout the New Orleans area, according to the housing authority's credit card records. He also showed loyalty...
Barry Bordelon, executive director of the Jefferson Parish Housing Authority, has a soft spot for Mediterranean food.
It shows in his culinary choices in 2007, 2008 and 2009, when he spent $2,943 in public money on 40 meals at various Byblos restaurants throughout the New Orleans area, according to the housing authority's credit card records. He also showed loyalty to Applebee's Neighborhood Bar and Grill in Algiers and Houston's in Metairie.
The records show that Bordelon's publicly financed meals hit a peak in 2008, when he used the housing authority's credit cards to spend $5,093 dining out around town and during what he described as a training trip to Orlando, Fla. That trend tapered off in 2009, when he spent $1,699 on meals that year, records show.
Donna White, spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, where the housing authority gets the bulk of its financing, said Bordelon's yearly spending habit "sounds excessive." She said that HUD's New Orleans field office will look into a recent spate of complaints against the agency by parish officials.
Bordelon said Thursday that the meal money was spent during a flurry of meetings with the housing authority's executive board members to help manage a glut of disaster programs thrust upon it after hurricanes Katrina in 2005 and Gustav in 2008.
"You have to remember, back in that time, there were a lot of programs enacted by HUD going on," he said, pointing out that the meal expenses tapered off in 2009 as the programs were being phased out. That trend has continued in 2010, he said.
Bordelon paid for the meals with the authority's business accounts, not the per diem payments that board members receive for meetings, said Bordelon, who is not the same Barry Bordelon who serves as a top aide to Parish Councilman Elton Lagasse. The per diems give the board chairman $300 a month, the vice-chairman $225 a month and each remaining board member $150 a month, according to the authority's 2009 financial report.
Parish Councilman Chris Roberts, who has called for inquiries into the housing authority's fiscal behavior before, questioned why a public official was using public money for meals in the first place.
"I'm not a proponent of having a public credit card, period," he said.
Roberts obtained the agency's credit card statements last week and provided them to The Times-Picayune. He made the request on Dec. 18 through the council's office of research and budget analysis. While the law requires a response within three days, Bordelon took four weeks to respond because of the holidays, he said.
"I think that they have gone under the radar for quite some time," Roberts said.
The housing authority, typically a low-profile agency that manages public housing complexes on the West Bank and farms out oversight of the federal Section 8 housing voucher program, has returned to the public spotlight through criticism of its spending habits. Roberts has called for the state legislative auditor to investigate the agency's practices after its annual audit showed the agency spent $9.6 million on administration costs in 2009.
"It just doesn't seem to me to fit the mold of transparent government that Jefferson Parish is on the path to create at every level," Roberts said.
That $9.6 million paid for the work of the Louisiana Housing Development Corp., which oversees the Section 8 program. Bordelon said the housing authority doesn't have the staff or infrastructure to manage the program itself. The agency has a $44.9 million annual budget, according to its audit.
This isn't the first time Bordelon has run into criticism for his use of a public credit card. He was chairman of the authority's executive board when HUD chastised it in 1989 for spending $2,000 on meals that year. That reprimand led to the board implementing the $150 per diem policy for its members, then-Executive Director Pamela Landry said at the time.
. . . . . . .
Richard Rainey can be reached at rrainey@timespicayune.com or 504.883.7052.