On Thursday, the New Orleans City Council voted 5-2 to change the locks on a luxury apartment used by Mayor LaToya Cantrell.
Previous mayors have said they had used the apartment to hold meetings, stage special events, or house a visiting dignitary. Cantrell, on the other hand, was spending long, long days in the apartment, according to public surveillance video unearthed by WVUE-TV. According to WVUE, Cantrell had been spending extended time with her police bodyguard and had stayed there overnight with guests to the summer’s Essence Festival.
The mayor claimed not to be using the apartment anymore, according to a Wednesday statement from her office. In that case, she won’t miss it when it’s gone.
“We hope that any reasonable person would recognize that initiating an eviction process is unreasonable when there is no tenant to evict,” the mayor’s said.
In 2022, Cantrell survived a petition for a recall election. During the recall effort, she faced questions about the apartment and about her decision to bill taxpayers for her first-class trips abroad. Political opponents ultimately failed to collect enough signatures on their recall petition.
Cantrell has defended her use of the apartment as proper… but not everyone agrees.
In March 2023, the city’s inspector general said in a letter to the mayor that her use of the apartment may violate the state constitution’s restrictions on the donation of public property and city code language governing her salary.
Later that year, the council passed an amendment to sell the apartment. They even overrode the mayor’s veto, and they gave her a deadline to leave.
Now, the council is reviving the dispute.
Council President J.P. Morrell said in a Feb. 28 letter to the mayor that “furniture and other personal effects” remained in the unit. “It is also my understanding that you and members of your executive protection detail possess the only keys to the unit,” Morrell wrote.
The sheriff might evict Cantrell by putting her furniture on the sidewalk, one political analyst told WVUE.
The city owns one of the 50 units in the 19th-century building, called the Upper Pontalba Building.
The building sits in the French Quarter, steps away from local landmarks like the Mississippi River. Along with St. Louis Cathedral, Upper Pontalba is among five historic structures overlooking the green space known as Jackson Square. The other units remain available for rent, but no units are on the market currently, presumably due to high demand.
Cantrell survived the recall petition due to the petitioners’ failure to collect enough signatures. However, she remains ineligible to run in 2026 because of term limits. She earns a salary of $140,000 per year.
In a statement issued early Wednesday, Cantrell’s office said the French Market Corporation, the nonprofit in charge of the building, had keys to enter the unit. It didn’t say whether the mayor had given up her keys. The statement said Cantrell is not using the unit and that there have been no impediments to the corporation’s access to the unit since last year’s ordinance was passed.
The Horn editorial team and the Associated Press contributed to this article.