Ray Nagin accuses Councilwoman of verbal abuse, racism

Incensed by apparently erroneous accounts of Tuesday's heated confrontation between New Orleans City Councilwoman Stacy Head and the director of the city's Sanitation Department, Mayor Ray Nagin has accused Head of "very crude race-baiting" and has directed all his department heads to walk out of council meetings "if they are verbally assaulted or personally insulted."

Head said Thursday that even though she accused Sanitation Director Veronica White on Tuesday of not telling the truth and called for her dismissal, Nagin's allegations of profanity and racial remarks were "inflammatory and baseless."

The Head-White clash is just the latest of many contentious disputes between the Nagin administration and the council.

During one confrontation last year, the council threatened to level contempt charges against a Nagin aide who did not respond to a council subpoena, and Nagin accused the council, especially Head, of "browbeating" administration officials.

However, relations between the two sides, though rocky, generally have not reached the state of open warfare that prevailed between the council and Mayor Dutch Morial during several years in the 1980s.

The basis of the latest dispute is Head's longtime criticism of the cost of the trash-collection contracts the administration awarded in late 2006 to three local companies.

Head has said she thinks the companies are overbilling the city millions of dollars a year. She said her review of addresses where the city delivered new plastic trash containers found numerous cases in which the same address was listed several times, as well as listings for demolished houses or properties not eligible for city sanitation service.

White has said there are innocent explanations for many of the discrepancies and that the city could be paying the contractors too little. She told the council in April that an audit to be completed by June 30 would determine whether the city was being overbilled. If it was, she said, the city would be reimbursed.

However, that audit was not even begun by June 30 and has yet to be completed, the council was told Tuesday during its hearing of the Sanitation Department's proposed 2009 budget of more than $42 million.

Also during that hearing, White told the council she receives monthly updates of how many addresses are served by the companies, as required by their contracts.

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