More than 5,000 people who lived and worked in a community the city of New Orleans allowed to be built on top of a toxic waste dump were recently awarded $14.2 million as part of a class action lawsuit.
To help disburse the money, Orleans Civil District Court Judge Tiffany Chase appointed Paul Valteau in February 2014 to serve as special master, an individual the court typically hires to assist in complicated cases. Bourgeois Bennett CPAs was chosen as claims administrator.
Valteau, with help from the Metairie accounting firm, reviewed thousands of claims forms from residents of the Agriculture Street Landfill, located on a 45-acre tract of land in the Upper 9th Ward. He determined who was eligible to be paid and how much they would receive. He also helped to establish administrative court costs and the fees for the five attorneys representing the residents.
The attorneys, who worked the case for several decades, were given 40 percent of the judgment for an average of $1.1 million per lawyer. The court set aside 10 percent, or $1.4 million, to pay for its own administrative costs, which included compensation for Valteau. That left $7.1 million for more than 5,000 residents, some of who lived on the toxic dump for more than 30 years. Their settlement checks amounted to a few thousand dollars per person.
Now, residents are raising questions about the fairness of the disbursement process after learning that Chase and Valteau have a longstanding relationship.
Valteau served as Chase’s campaign chairman in 2007 and has donated thousands of dollars to the judge’s political campaigns over the years. That includes $3,100 in July 2014, five months after he was appointed special master. Valteau has also been referred to as Chase’s “godfather.”
Shannon Rainey, who has lived on the landfill site since 1981, said Chase’s appointment of Valteau looks like the judge was doing a special favor for a close friend, handing him an opportunity to make more than $1 million from a fund meant to compensate the residents for decades of hardship.
“Everyone made a lot of money except the people who suffered,” said Rainey who received $6,237.97 for property damage and emotional distress. “It doesn’t look right.”
Chase referred a reporter’s questions to Civil District Court spokesman Walt Pierce, who defended the appointment.
“Valteau is uniquely qualified and was selected as a result of his … wealth of experience, knowledge of law as well as ability to apply the proper policies and procedures,” Pierce said in an emailed response. “He was called upon many times during his tenure as Civil Sheriff by the judges of Civil District Court to assist on cases.”
Valteau, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, served as Orleans Parish Civil Sheriff for 28 years. He chose not to run against Sheriff Marlin Gusman in 2010 after the civil and criminal sheriff’s offices were consolidated into one agency. He is now a partner at the law firm Valteau, Harris, Koenig & Mayer.
Pierce also added that Valteau is not Chase’s actual godfather and is only referred to as such informally.
“Judge Chase was raised in the Catholic Church and was not christened by Mr. Valteau,” Pierce said. “He is not her godfather in the traditional Catholic sense of the term. He is a longtime friend of the Chase family.”
The controversy is just the latest to arise from the Agriculture Street Landfill. Between 1969 and 1980, the city and the Housing Authority of New Orleans built two residential communities, Press Park and Gordon Plaza, on the former site of the city’s waste dump. They rented and sold homes without telling residents about the land’s history, according to court documents.
After the federal government in 1994 declared that the community was a Superfund site, one of the most contaminated in the country, the residents filed a class action lawsuit which they won in 2006.
The court found the city, the Housing Authority of New Orleans and the Orleans Parish School Board, which built Moton Elementary School on the site, liable for property damage and emotional distress. They have denied responsibility and refused to pay the residents any compensation.
The court has not yet established an amount owed by the city, HANO and the School Board but ordered former insurers of the housing authority to pay $14.2 million.
Suzette Bagneris, one of five plaintiffs’ attorneys who worked the landfill case, defended Chase and Valteau. The plaintiffs requested the court appoint a special master and had no objections when Valteau was selected, she said.
“There has been nothing inappropriate, unethical or illegal about the court’s appointment of Mr. Valteau to serve as a special master in this case,” Bagneris wrote to Joshua Allen, a former resident of the landfill, after he raised questions about Chase and Valteau. “Additionally, he has served the court and the class in a highly professional manner. At all times, Mr. Valteau has evaluated the claims of class members in a fair and impartial manner.”
Bagneris ran against and lost to Chase in the 2007 election for the Civil District Court seat. At the time, she criticized Chase for being the candidate of a political machine headed by Valteau and Clerk of Court Dale Atkins, who also ran Chase’s successful 2014 campaign.
But now Bagneris says Chase and Valteau’s ties are irrelevant because they are not related by blood. She cited an article in the Louisiana Civil Code that requires judges to recuse themselves if attorneys or parties appearing before them are their spouses, parents, children or immediate family members.
“Assuming for argument’s sake that Judge Chase is the ‘godchild’ of Paul Valteau that has no bearing in this case, and does not serve as a bar to his appointment as special master,” Bagneris said.
That’s not entirely true, said Greg Smith, an ethics professor at Louisiana State University’s Paul M. Hebert Law Center. He noted the Louisiana Code of Judicial Conduct states judges “shall act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary,” and that judges “shall not allow family, social, political or other relationships to influence judicial conduct or judgment.”
The code also states a “judge should avoid appointments which tend to create the appearance of impropriety. A judge shall not approve the compensation of appointees beyond the fair value of services rendered.”
While Chase might not have done anything illegal, her appointment of Valteau is on thin ethical grounds in that it created an appearance of impropriety, causing the residents to question the integrity of the court, Smith said.
Smith pointed to the case of St. Charles Parish District Court Judge Kirk Granier, who the Louisiana Supreme Court censured in 2005 for hiring his girlfriend, Tanya LeBlanc, as an independent contractor to summarize medical records for 19 cases.
LeBlanc, a registered nurse with 23 years of experience, was qualified for the job, but her hiring “brought the judicial office into disrepute,” the court determined.
Granier “allowed a social relationship to influence his judicial conduct” and violated the judicial code of ethics by creating the appearance of impropriety, the court stated in its censure ruling.
“The judge was actually apologetic about it and said, ‘I didn’t realize this was going to look bad and I apologize for that,'” Smith said. “Nevertheless, the court said, ‘Well, it did look bad so we’re going to censure you.’ The fact that you didn’t intend to do evil is not the question. It just didn’t look right. It didn’t pass the smell test.”
Chase’s appointment of Valteau treads similar ground, Smith said.
“The code is telling us, ‘Don’t do things that look bad because we want the public to have confidence in the judiciary. We want the public to believe that justice is blind,'” Smith said. “Obviously, judges are human beings and they make errors, but you don’t want to make decisions that are intended to benefit your family and friends and people you’re close to. If you make an error, you make a legal error. You make a judgment error. But not an error to favor people.”
As for the $1.4 million paid to Valteau and his team for a year’s work, Smith said, “Nice job when you can get it.”
Correction: The story initially stated that Paul Valteau was Judge Tiffany Chase’s campaign manager. He was her campaign chairman.