James Perry on transparency
It’s unfortunate for our city that some people only remember how Mayor Nagin and Sanitation Director Veronica White accused Stacy Head of racism after the Councilwoman accused White of lying. It’s unfortunate that some people don’t remember what the underlying issue was: transparency.
Veronica White revealed that she was willfully withholding monthly data for the number of garbage pickups in New Orleans.
Stacy Head said that White’s deception, after repeated requests for the data, was grounds for dismissal. Then White packed her belongings, ran to the mayor, and called Head a racist.
But Stacy Head wanted the data to determine whether the city was paying too much for garbage pickups. Saving money from one city service frees up limited city revenues to spend on other priorities. There are few people who would argue that we should spend less on education and recreation than we spend on garbage disposal. There’s nothing racist about that. There’s nothing racist about wanting access to the data.
Mayoral candidate James Perry stated on WBOK 1230 AM this morning that we need to get past the politics of the past. He stated, correctly, that the issue between the sanitation director and the councilwoman was really about access to data, not race.
When New Orleans implements an open data policy in 2010, we can remove personality, politics, and race, from the discussions we need to have about government performance and how our tax dollars are spent by public officials.
If we can’t have a discussion about government performance without some people raising racial accusations, we’ll never be able to create a City Hall that provides better service to all citizens.
