The New Orleans Regional Transit Authority’s Board of Commissioners met on Tuesday (Nov. 26) for the first time in more than three months, ending a months-long deadlock in the agency’s governing body’s ability to conduct business. 

The latest pause — the second this year —  came after a series of board departures over the past six months, including all members representing Jefferson Parish, following the parish’s decision to exit the New Orleans-based transit agency this summer. 

That, along with the August resignation of then-board chair Mark Raymond, Jr., left the seven-member board with only four members, too few to legally hold public meetings and conduct business. Further complicating things, a new law passed last year required the board to have one member appointed by the New Orleans City Council and another by a state lawmaker. The four-member board had neither. As a result, the board has been unable to meet since August.

In October the council appointed former RTA manager of planning Mitch Guidry, Jr. to the board. And this month, Louis Colin, who was appointed by State Rep. Delisha Boyd — the legislator who sponsored the bill requiring the new appointments — joined the board.  

The two men were sworn in at the top of Tuesday’s meeting, after which the board elected Fred Neal Jr. as board chair. Neal —  is chairperson of the board of trustees for national transit advocacy organization The Transit Center and director of planning at New Orleans architectural firm Villavaso & Associates — was appointed to the board in 2018 by New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell. 

“The brief message is we’re ready to get to work,” Neal said at the meeting. “We have a lot to do but we are ready for it.” 

After the meeting Neal said he and the other commissioners were happy to “be in front of the public” again. 

The newly reempowered board will have to address a number of challenges, including projected short and long-term deficits that could lead to services cuts.  

The RTA has also been roiled by scandals over the past year. The departure of Jefferson Parish earlier this year followed an investigation that found the agency had authorized about $1 million in payments to a contractor without board approval. And Tuesday’s meeting came one day after The Times-Picayune reported on an internal audit that revealed salaried RTA employees in the paratransit department had received tens of thousands of dollars in overtime pay – a practice that goes against agency policy – between 2021 and 2023. According to a former employee interviewed by the newspaper, some of the overtime pay was for hours that employees did not work at all. 

In an interview following the board meeting, RTA CEO Lona Edwards Hankins said some of the overtime issues stemmed from staffing shortages. 

She said that among the people who received improper overtime were employees who schedule routes for paratransit riders, work she said that they have to do manually. The RTA is seeking bids for paratransit scheduling software that Hankins said she hopes will mitigate the problem. 

“We’ve now clamped down on our processes,” Hankins said.

An RTA spokesperson did not deny allegations that some staff were paid for overtime hours that they did not use, but added that  the allegations of fraud came from a “disgruntled employee” who no longer works at the agency. 

“The RTA did exactly what we were supposed to do and the individual that was supposed to report those things has the ability to deny all of those requests for overtime, and they did not.” the spokesperson said. “That person did not do what they were supposed to.” 

Tuesday’s meeting included a presentation of the agency’s proposed operating budget. The public will have an opportunity to weigh in on the proposed budget in an open meeting on December 6, RTA Chief Financial Officer Gizelle Johnson-Banks said.  

In October, Hankins and Johnson-Banks presented the budget to the City Council, requesting $7 million to fund the Canal Street-Algiers Point ferry. The council approved $3 million for next year, the same amount the city kicked in this year to avoid a shortfall. 

Hankins told commissioners she was “feeling pretty good about” the $3 million that the council allotted, as it was coupled with a pledge from several council members to identify a permanent funding source for the ferry. 

Hankins said the agency has spent nearly $13 million this year on the two ferries that operate between Canal Street on the East bank of the Mississippi River and Algiers Point on the West bank and between Lower Algiers and Chalmette.

Most of the RTA’s operating budget is drawn from sales taxes, though the agency is also sustained by funds from passenger fares and federal grants, among other sources. However the Canal-Algiers ferry has not had a dedicated funding source since 2013, when the state stopped charging a toll on the Crescent City Connection. Bridge tolls had previously funded the ferry service for decades.  . Hankins has said that in recent years the RTA has used federal COVID-19 relief funds to pay for the ferry, but that money has run out. 

In the interview Hankins said she was “excited” to continue agency business now that the board is able to meet again. 

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Before joining Verite, Bobbi-Jeanne Misick reported on people behind bars in immigration detention centers and prisons in the Gulf South as a senior reporter for the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration...