Eight years ago, LaToya Cantrell stormed into the New Orleans mayorโs office with an attitude.
This week sheโll leave with one, too.
That the voting public views her brash personality quite differently now compared to when she was first elected says much about her roller coaster of a public life.
As the , itโs worth stepping back in time to remember what made her popular in the first place. She was scrappy and self-made, a onetime neighborhood activist who rejected the supposedly expert theory that her beloved, low-lying Broadmoor should be sacrificed to the flood plain after Hurricane Katrina. Instead, she led in a well-organized, inspiring revival, the type that other flooded neighborhoods sought to emulate.
The reputation she made as head of the Broadmoor Improvement Association propelled her to the City Council, where she took on the difficult challenge of making restaurants and bars smoke-free. And it cast her as the fresh face running against a pair of politically pedigreed opponents seeking to replace an outgoing mayor who hailed from a legendary family and governed very much as an insider.
Columnist Stephanie Grace
Her elevation made sense at the time. Under Mitch Landrieu, New Orleans largely emerged from its long post-K doldrums, but after eight years, fatigue always sets in. Unlike the technocratic, practiced outgoing mayor, the blunt-spoken Californian, nicknamed โTeedy,โ was unpolished and often profane. She drew votes across traditional political, geographic and racial lines, one more way she seemed like a new type of mayor for a new New Orleans.
And in her best moments during her first term, she was. Cantrell took on the powers in Baton Rouge and landed the agreement to claw back tourism taxes for infrastructure improvements. When it became clear that Carnival 2020 had been a super-spreader event, she brushed off complaints and imposed strict protocols that brought the numbers down, and many of her constituents cheered her heartfelt pleas to keep others safe.
But her defiance too easily and too often crossed over into defensiveness. From the beginning, she resisted advice and stood by appointees who were ill-suited for their jobs for too long. She survived a clownish attempt but instead of rising above it, she lashed out angrily at its supporters. Particularly in her second term, she met the City Councilโs newfound aggressiveness with behavior that very much justified the restraints they sought to put on her.
She made a mess of trash contracts, traveled too much and too luxuriously on the city dime, took up with her bodyguard and allegedly lied about it, leading to an August that still hangs over her head. She irresponsibly spent the COVID relief money that flowed in, leaving her successor Helena Moreno, the council vice president, with a .
She did get some things right, including the choice of Anne Kirkpatrick as police superintendent and health director Jen Avegnoโs work on public health-based crime prevention initiatives. That Moreno is not changing course on public safety is notable.
She also focused needed attention on getting unhoused people into shelter and addressing the cityโs vulnerability to climate change. Some important landmarks happened on her watch, from exiting the federal to the completion of a for the Sewerage & Water Board.
In hindsight, a more complete picture of the hits and misses will emerge, as it always does.
In the moment, though, there is the attitude, expressed not as candor but as petulance that borders on self-pity. The mayor rarely takes questions these days, or does much to effectively highlight her accomplishments. Among her last moves in office were pointless vetoes of the council-passed budget and of council membersโ attempt to stop her from spending city money recklessly in her administrationโs waning days. On both, she was easily overridden.
Iโve observed multiple mayor transitions, and this period reminds me most of the final days of Ray Nagin, the last outsider to follow an insider โ Marc Morial โ and fall precipitously from public grace. Morial, like Landrieu, was the son of a strong mayor who possessed an encyclopedic understanding of how city government works. Moreno shows signs of being far more like them than Cantrell, even though she too served on the council after moving to the city as a young adult.
If thereโs a lesson to this pretty predictable cycle, itโs that the mayor of New Orleans can be tremendously powerful โ but only if the person in that position understands how to work the jobโs various levers. Because as both the cityโs voters and the candidates they elect keep learning, attitude only gets you so far.