NOLA S&WB Board gets glowing evaluation, 30K raise

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He got just over a 11% raise, not 8.8%

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This small article about S&WB Executive Director Ghassan Korban's 8.8% raise. On top of his $271,666 annual salary, that works out to just over $23,900.

There are over 60 S&WB employees whose annual salary is less than Korban's raise. Also, he led an organization whose performance last year included ten boil water advisories, overtopping of a drainage canal because the canal was - and remains - clogged with over 20,000 tons of debris, multiple rain events with over 20 pump outages each (most of which went unreported in state-mandated reports), and at year's end, the destruction by explosion of a 20 megawatt turbine-generator followed by a month of silence on exactly what is being done to make up the shortfall before the rains come in the spring.

Leadership!

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- Executive Director Ghassan Korban was given an 8.8% raise over his $265,000 salary, which works out to a little over $23,000.

- Executive Director Korban announced S&WB was bringing back the annual employee awards banquet, an event labeled as a likely violation of the state constitutional prohibition on donation of public resources by the Louisiana Legislative Auditor in November, 2018. The last time the event was held before this year was 2016. In prior years, tens of thousands of dollars were spent on service awards like gold and silver watches and rings. Korbam said nothing about how they planned to address the Legislative Auditor's findings, and no one on the Board asked.

- Documents were published showing revenues for the S&WB through November were up 17% and expenses were down 13% compared to the budget. In other words, they have much more cash than they expected.

- Executive Director Korban announced they don't have enough money to pay for a root cause analysis of the explosion of turbine 5 last December, saying doing so would cost too much and would only turn up things they already know. Limiting the investigation also insulates top SWB leadership - including Korban and the Board - from being fingered as a root cause. No one on the Board had any comments or questions about this.

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