By Jeremy Alford 

A New Orleans lawmaker who pushed one of the highest-profile changes to the state’s campaign finance laws during the recent special session on ethics reform is facing an ethics charge herself. Rep. Karen Carter Peterson, a Democrat, unintentionally accepted $1,250 in donations that should have been turned down last year for her re-election bid.   Sheldon Bruno of New Orleans, who prepared Peterson’s campaign finance report, says it was an oversight that has since been corrected. “That money has already been returned,” he says. “We’ve also filed a supplemental report.” Peterson’s blunder comes at a sensitive time. She pushed legislation that would ban third-party sources from paying campaign finance violations, and her measure is now sitting on the desk of Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican, for his signature. Last year, Jindal’s campaign failed to report in a timely manner an $118,000 in-kind donation from the Louisiana Republican Party. Rolfe McCollister Jr., publisher of Daily Report and Greater Baton Rouge Business Report who served as Jindal’s campaign treasurer, quickly vowed to pay Jindal’s anticipated $2,500 fine. Such third-party payments would be prohibited under Peterson’s provision. 

By Allen Johnson

Mayor Ray Nagin says New Orleans’ population has increased yet again. In an open letter to the national “State of the Black Union” last month, Nagin wrote that “the greatest measure of our success is the people who live here.” More than two years after Hurricane Katrina, Nagin claims that approximately 323,000 people now live in the city, or 71 percent of the city’s pre-storm population. “That is incredible, considering the predictions that we would never return.” Who said that? The mayor’s letter does not elaborate. His population estimate — the rosiest of any — has increased by almost 5,000 people in less than two months. Demographer Mark J. Van Landingham, a Thomas C. Keller Professor of Diversity at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, recently estimated the city’s maximum overnight population at 273,000. The professor says a team of experts is needed to resolve the disparities in estimates. Last week demographer Greg Rigamer estimated that the city just passed the 300,000 mark at the end of January. Van Landingham says reliable figures are necessary for accurately assessing murder trends and “other phenomena” in post-Katrina New Orleans. 

By Allen Johnson

A victim’s rights group is protesting Gov. Bobby Jindal’s appointment of an all-male state pardon board as insensitive to the needs of female crime victims and women inmates with children. David R. Kent, vice president of Victims & Citizens Against Crime Inc. (VCAC) and a retired assistant NOPD superintendent, says he will protest the “gender imbalance” of the panel when the Louisiana Senate schedules confirmation hearings on the new appointees. Louisiana’s history of violent crime “screams for a broader understanding and knowledge” of domestic violence and sex crimes as well as the “dire circumstances” facing women prisoners with children, says Kent. Jindal has replaced all but one of the five Pardon Board members named by predecessor Kathleen Blanco, including Julia Sims of Ponchatoula, a professional photographer and VCAC member who served on the pardon panel for 12 years. VCAC, based in Metairie, exercised its statutory but nonbinding privilege of recommending a replacement for Sims by nominating its president, Beverly S. Siemssen, a social worker from Kenner. The pardon board considers applications by convicted felons for pardons, commutations of sentence, and the restoration of citizenship rights, such as voting. The governor’s press office could not be reached for comment.