Who Owns The City's Landfills?

Something smelly is going on again concerning contracts signed in the waning period of Marc Morial's administration. It appears that private owners bought some of the land, however, the City of New Orleans, under Morial's administration trumped their ownership that has now resulted in a civil lawsuit. According to the Times Picayune:

The current landfill's origins date to 2001, when a nearby construction dump -- the AMID Landfill, also operated by Stumpf -- was nearing capacity.

Saying New Orleans needed a facility that could accept construction debris, officials in Mayor Marc Morial's administration proposed opening a new landfill partly atop a city dump that had closed nearly two decades before.

At the time, City Hall claimed to own the land in question. When the city sought a state permit for the landfill in 2002, City Hall officials attested to the city's ownership.

In 2001, Stumpf and Woods formed a joint venture and submitted the only proposal to operate the new facility. In the final days of the Morial administration in early 2002, they signed a deal under which -- provided the landfill received a state permit -- they would keep 97 percent of the proceeds, with the city getting the other 3 percent.

It would be more than three years before the facility opened, shortly after Hurricane Katrina, when officials from the state Department of Environmental Quality gave it emergency authorization to begin accepting debris. It soon became the busiest debris depot in the state, taking in as much as 100,000 cubic yards of construction waste on some days.

Let's see how this play out. Will it result in possible other revelations about Morial's cronies dipping their hands in the city's coffers? I do smell scandal.