“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”…If you’re from New Orleans, you probably know what this means: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Over the Mardi Gras weekend, the citizens of this fair city were regaled with the news that Mayor Nagin presented the Zulu Social Aid & Pleasure Club with a grant for $800,000 to rebuild their headquarters.

Ordinarily this would probably raise a few eyebrows, considering the amount of money that’s changing hands. Close-to-a-million is a lot of duckies. Considering that the Mayor is a member of the Zulu organization, it smells sorta fishy. But, hey, this stuff has been going on in New Orleans for a really long time.

I’m pretty positive that most of the citizens of New Orleans don’t know this, but there are a lot of “slush funds” in city government that those in the know can take advantage of. And they’re all under the aegis of so-called economic development. Give you a couple of examples: when I first started the magazine and was trying to get the Louisiana Music Directory off the ground, I found out there were some funds available for economic development for projects that were evaluated by the City Council. So I went to a councilman’s office who I knew, who granted me about $1,000 to help get the project off the ground. Mind you, it cost way, way more than $1,000 to create and maintain this project, which is still around today at LouisianaMusicDirectory.com. In my humble opinion, that grand was well-spent and certainly had something to do with economic development. Keep in mind that it was only a thousand dollars.

In the early days of OffBeat, there was others in city government employees (no names here, if you’re involved in local music, you’ll know who they are) who created some worthy educational projects using  the city’s time and funding. However, instead fof keeping these projects going at the city level, these individuals created their own non-profit entities while working for the city and were given substantial (six-figure) grants from the same “economic development” grant funds our current mayor used for the Zulu project to fund their non-profits. These people then left the city’s employ, using the economic development funds to basically provide start-up funding (including their salaries, for probably several years) for  their own businesses (just because it’s a non-profit doesn’t mean that it’s a charitable endeavor. Trust me, non-profit Executive Directors can make a shitload of money). I’m also aware of a gentleman who operated a small restaurant where Lil Dizzy’s is now (on Esplanade) who couldn’t make it work (he really wasn’t a good businessman, based on my observations), and who managed to get economic development funding for a new place of his own in a different location.

Now all of these people had an “inside” on how to get that economic development grant. To my knowledge, there is no “competitive process” to get this funding. It’s purely who you know in city government. Ray Nagin is member of Zulu, so in my mind that’s a clear conflict of interest. But you know, in Louisiana, those three words don’t mean squat.

I’m not dissing Zulu, but I know how the process of acquiring those funds works. There are a lot of organizations who were at least as deserving as the Zulu SA&PC. The new mayor and city council need to get rid of the slush funds that provide patronage to their special friends. This is supposed to be government for all, not a select few.