Cancienne's record expunged Dec. 5, Orleans keeps license
The contractors licensing board settled a complaint against the most powerful player in the state's $750 million home elevation grant program Thursday, accepting Orleans Shoring's owner's explanation that a statement in his 2007 license application was an "unintentional inaccuracy" and allowing the company to retain its license.
One of Orleans Shoring's highest profile lift jobs was moving the 'Green Mansion,' a historic home dating from 1928, from the Veterans Affairs' medical complex site.For the time being, Orleans Shoring remains suspended from the grant program it has dominated, meaning it can't collect any advance payments for home-lifting jobs. The state agency running the program is reviewing Orleans Shoring's settlement with the Louisiana State Licensing Board for Contractors before deciding what to do about its suspension.
Orleans Shoring's Christian Cancienne was accused in November of lying about his criminal record on the application. By then, he'd already emerged as a lightning rod in the state's troubled Hazard Mitigation Grant Program. Smaller contractors and some politicians, including Democratic state Sens. Karen Carter Peterson and J.P. Morrell, had loudly criticized Orleans and Cancienne, first for paying another senator, Republican Julie Quinn of Metairie, to push Gov. Bobby Jindal's administration for major grant program policy changes, and then for running an undercover sting operation that got some of his competitors suspended.
Critics thought Cancienne would get his comeuppance when it was discovered that his 2007 application for Orleans' commercial contractor's license contained a falsehood -- it said that no principal of Orleans Shoring had ever been convicted of a felony, when public records at the time showed Cancienne himself had been convicted in 1999, at the age of 19, of felony marijuana possession with intent to distribute and possession of Valium with intent to distribute.
But the issue was not cut and dried for the contractor's licensing board because Cancienne's conviction was set aside earlier this year, effectively acquitting him. On Dec. 5 a Jefferson Parish court expunged his record, rendering the 1999 conviction confidential.
Orleans argued that it was as if the conviction never happened in the first place, although it was still in full effect in 2007 when Cancienne signed the license application.
Quinn said the parties reached a settlement in advance of Thursday's hearing.
"There was no finding of willful misrepresentation," she said. "It was an unintentional inaccuracy."
Quinn said Orleans Shoring offered to remove Cancienne as the company's qualifying party for 60 days, replacing him in that function for the meantime with five employees who have been with the firm for more than 120 days and hold active licenses with specialties in home rigging, moving and foundation repair.