Laf. planning chief survives dismissal

Frank Morris, the oft-criticized director of Lafourche Parish’s Department of Planning and Permitting, survived by one vote a movement by the parish council to fire him. He has four months to change the way locals perceive him before he returns for council reappointment.

After an hour-long discussion at last week’s council meeting, Morris retained his position when the Lafourche Parish Council voted 6-3 to oust him. The parish’s Home Rule Charter requires a super majority, seven votes, for mid-year removal of a department head.

Councilmen Joe Fertitta, Matt Matherne, Lindel Toups, Phillip Gouaux, Rodney Doucet and Daniel Lorraine voted for his removal. Jerry Jones, Michael Delatte and Louis Richard opposed it.

Morris, who maintained a public silence in the lead-up to the regularly scheduled council meeting and didn’t speak during the ordeal, talked with reporters afterward.

He said he believes the issues can be worked out before January and he would continue to be consistent in his interpretation and enforcement of state building codes.

“I want to be here,” Morris said of the second, lingering judgment day. “I’m going to continue to do my job.”

When asked for specific issues he felt needed to be corrected, he said: “Working with the council.”

The council’s attempt to oust Morris serves as a warning to the permit chief and his department. In four months, after the upcoming election cycle and no matter its results, Morris will need to be nominated before he is once again sent before the council for confirmation, when he could be dropped with a majority vote.

Councilman Michael Delatte said he didn’t decide to vote in Morris’s favor until after discussion on the issue had began. If specific problems are not solved by January, he said he would vote against Morris’s reappointment.

“I just gave him the benefit of the doubt tonight because I’d like to talk to him about what I heard to see if instead of just scrapping the whole thing, if we can fix it,” said Delatte, who added that Morris does not write the code and said calls for his head had a “shoot-the-messenger” vibe.

Confusion about new codes and the lack of the office’s accessibility are Delatte’s top concerns and even made him pause two personal development projects that have been in the works since January, he said.

“Actually, I have two buildings I want to build right now, but I just put them on hold until I have more time to devote to it and get out here and make sure it’s done right, because it’s not the same-old, same-old that it used to be,” he said. “We’ve got to follow these codes and the IBC, and, this neck of the woods, we just don’t fool with that.

“We need to educate people better. They need to come here first.”

Morris’s critics contend he is tough to work with. They say he inhibits the community’s growth and has caused hardship on entrepenuers by being vague with directions and unwilling to grant discretionary variances.

The state Legislature created in 2007 the Louisiana Uniform Construction Code, which is an adoption of the International Building Code. The IBC exceeds edicts laid out by FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program.

FEMA conducts random inspections, and if the parish is found to have issued permits that stray from code requirements, Lafourche could be suspended from the insurance program.

Ten people spoke in regard to Morris before the council held a discussion. Eight of whom, mostly contractors and third-party building inspectors, spoke in his favor.

Karen Dillard, an inspector with Planet Earth Environmental Consulting in Houma, said Morris has been courteous in helping her understand convoluted codes and she feels that she can talk to him without fear of being reported as incompetent to the code council. “Before Mr. Morris came, I didn’t have anyone I could trust,” said Dillard, who has been an inspector for about one year.

Jimmy Rogers, of Rogers Building Construction Consultants in Houma, conducts most of his business in Lafourche. He said he has sold eight houses, has two more on contract and six more are on the way, and the permit office is always “eager to help.”

“Why would y’all want to shoot yourself in the foot?” he asked the council. “You have the perfect man in office right now.”

Morris said the number of advocates who traveled from across the state to speak on his behalf surprised him. Lorraine called it a “set-up.”

Not all of his reviews were positive. Two women spoke against him, charging Morris with ruining their separate business ventures.

Shannon Danos said she started a project to open a snowball stand in January. She listed a litany of concerns, including lost paperwork at the permit office that caused a five-month delay in attaining her permit, repeated demands for her to hire a contractor although it wasn’t necessary for her project and several fruitless trips to the permit office.

“It’s not the fact that Mr. Morris doesn’t know his job. I do believe that the confrontation is that there is a lot of confusion when you come in here, Danos said”

Lorraine has been an advocate for permit satellite offices to be placed in south and north Lafourche to cut down on travel time. The permit office is headquartered in Mathews and is only open four days a week.

“People don’t mind going over there once or twice, but when you’ve got to go three, four, five, six times, and these are Cajun people, and they end up saying, ‘Well, I’m going to do what we got to do,'” Lorraine said.

Discussion on Morris’s job status was made public by the permits chief. The state’s open meeting law gives the subject of a character and competency review a choice to hold the discussion behind closed doors.

Doucet led the charge for Morris’s dismissal. He placed the item on the agenda and made the longest-winded case in favor of removal.

Morris was hired to restore order in the parish’s permit process, which was embroiled in controversy after certified inspectors allegedly overstepped their authority when they issued permits without a chief building official’s approval in 2008.

In addition to handling day-to-day operations of running the permit office, Morris is tasked with bringing the parish back into compliance with the Louisiana State Uniform Construction Code Council.

Prior to Morris’s arrival, the South Central Planning and Development Commission was the parish authority on construction code and permits. In the aftermath of hurricanes Gustav and Ike, the parish issued more than 100 permits without approval from Mike Wich, South Central Planning’s Chief Building Official.

The Tri-Parish Times obtained copies of letters circulated between the parish, the state code council and a member of the state’s general counsel. The correspondence offers insight of the issues shrouding the parish allowing its contract to lapse with South Central Planning.

South Central Planning reported the parish to the regional and state code councils, who requested the parish to retroactively approve the permits they say were issued improperly. The parish has yet to do so, saying they adhered to an interpretation of the law that allowed some projects to be permitted without a CBO’s approval and has argued that the code councils do not have jurisdiction to issue an injunction on the permit office, which is an oft-discussed penalty in correspondence between the two entities.

Frank Blackburn, assistant secretary and general counsel with the state’s Department of Public Safety and Corrections, Public Safety Services, said his office holds the position that the state code council cannot seek injunctive relief against “governmental entities.” Blackburn recommended the parish consult with its legal counsel.

Morris cited Blackburn’s opinion in a letter to LSUCCC, dated March 25, 2011, writing: “In summary, we are considering this case closed with no other action needing to be taken on our part.”

Doucet said the parish should not have left South Central Planning and made a plea for Morris’s removal with the letters serving as proof of the parish’s, and Morris’s, inaction. It wasn’t enough to provoke a super-majority vote, but the matter will likely be revisited, one way or another, at the beginning of next year.

The parish launched a public relations campaign two months ago in an attempt to make citizens more aware of the importance of building to code. It brought in the state fire marshal, commissioner of insurance and FEMA representatives, introduced the slogan, “Before you build it, get a permit,” and uploaded permit checklists to its website.

Morris began serving Lafourche Parish in January as the highest-paid government employee with an annual salary of $75,000. Prior to landing the gig, he had 37 years of construction experience, 61 construction-related certifications, instructed more than 40 classes and ran a subscriber-based E-learning community for certification prep.

The council last dropped a department head in January of 2008, when Parish Administrator Cullen Curole and Public Works Director Ray Cheramie failed to be reappointed.

Yvette Pitre, of Galliano, urges the Lafourche Parish Council to dismiss Frank Morris, saying she and her husband have spent more than $500,000 in opening a campground and Morris is enforcing a rule that requires campers to leave within 30 days. ERIC BESSON