TL;DR
The Sewerage and Water Board needs accountability, stable funding, and measurable performance. It does not need politicians running its daily operations. Council President JP Morrell’s criticism of Randy Hayman for consulting General Superintendent Kaitlin Tymrak shows exactly how fast oversight can curdle into political micromanagement. New Orleans has already proven, with its own electric utility, that government can regulate an essential system without operating it. That’s the model SWBNO needs now — not a Council President treating good delegation like a fireable offense.
Key Points
- Political oversight and political management are not the same thing, and confusing them is how reform goes off the rails.
- JP Morrell’s criticism of Randy Hayman for turning to his General Superintendent misunderstands how large organizations actually function.
- The dispute has real personal history: Steve Nelson wanted the ED job, lost it to Hayman after a national search, and now sits inside Moreno’s administration.
- Hayman’s $427,000 salary draws constant fire while the Audubon Nature Institute’s CEO earns more — $525,000 — with a fraction of the scrutiny.
- New Orleans already has a working model for this: the city regulates Entergy without operating it. SWBNO needs the same firewall.
The politicization of the Sewerage and Water Board may become one of the most dangerous mistakes New Orleans ever makes.
The city absolutely needs stronger oversight. It needs clear accountability, responsible rate regulation, and measurable performance standards. But oversight is not the same thing as political control, and that line matters more than it might sound.
The City Council should monitor SWBNO. Council members should review budgets, question management, and demand results. What the council should not do is run the agency itself, restructure leadership based on personal preference, or reach into technical decisions that belong to trained professionals.
The streets must drain. The toilets must flush. Clean water must reach every home. If those systems fail, New Orleans becomes unlivable — which makes SWBNO too important for political experimentation.
JP Morrell’s Comments Should Alarm Every Resident
Council President JP Morrell has already floated eliminating the Executive Director’s position entirely. His stated reasoning should concern residents more than the idea itself.
During a recent hearing, Randy Hayman turned to General Superintendent Kaitlin Tymrak to answer a detailed technical question. Morrell treated that as evidence Hayman isn’t needed — as if Tymrak knowing more about a specific operational detail proves the Executive Director has no real job.
That criticism misunderstands how large organizations function. A chief executive is not supposed to personally know every technical detail across every department. A hospital CEO doesn’t perform surgery. An airline executive doesn’t repair jet engines. A university president doesn’t teach every course. A construction company owner doesn’t personally install every electrical panel and pipe on a job site.
Strong leaders surround themselves with people who know more than they do. They hire engineers, financial officers, operating managers, and technical experts, then make sure all those parts work together. When Hayman refers a technical question to the Superintendent responsible for that work, that’s good management — not weakness. Executives who pretend to know everything are usually the ones running the most dangerous organizations.
Political Performance Is Not Executive Competence
Morrell is an experienced lawyer and a skilled politician. Courtroom skill and political instinct don’t automatically translate into running a major public utility, and it shows here.
SWBNO operates water treatment plants, drainage pumps, sewer systems, power generation equipment, and billing platforms, staffed by engineers, operators, accountants, and technicians. No serious executive has every answer memorized. The real danger is politicians confusing a polished hearing performance with operational ability. New Orleans doesn’t need the executive who gives the smoothest answer in a council meeting. It needs the executive who builds the strongest system.
Oversight Must Not Become Micromanagement
The council has every right to ask hard questions, demand accurate financial reports, and challenge failures. What it shouldn’t do is become a substitute utility executive — directing pump operations, deciding which manager answers which question, or reorganizing departments because officials preferred a different leader.
Political interference rarely announces itself. It starts small: a complaint about who answered a question, a demand to redraw the org chart, a suggestion that a qualified executive makes too much money. Piece by piece, elected officials start managing the organization without ever accepting responsibility for its daily results. At SWBNO, that would be catastrophic.
The Steve Nelson History Can’t Be Ignored
This fight has a personal history that shapes everything happening now. Steve Nelson previously served as SWBNO’s own General Superintendent and sought the Executive Director job when it opened. The board ran a national search instead and hired Randy Hayman away from the top job at the Philadelphia Water Department. Nelson didn’t get the position — he landed inside Mayor Helena Moreno’s administration as a Deputy Chief Administrative Officer, close enough to SWBNO’s orbit to keep resurfacing whenever Hayman’s leadership comes into question.
Moreno has been candid on the record that she’d have preferred an interim leader over Hayman from the start, though she said she’d give him a chance to succeed. Morrell and Moreno are entitled to believe Nelson would have been the better pick. What they cannot do is turn that personal preference into public policy after the fact, undermining the very search process the city ran to hire Hayman in the first place.
Think about the message that sends. Why would a nationally respected utility executive ever take a job in New Orleans if elected officials can reorganize the agency around him after every election? Why would any qualified professional accept this position if political leaders can erase the job simply because they wanted someone else? New Orleans already struggles to recruit top talent. Political instability guarantees that problem gets worse, not better.
Judge Hayman by Results, Not by Resentment
Hayman’s hiring mattered because New Orleans finally brought in someone with real experience leading a major water utility. That doesn’t make him untouchable, and it doesn’t mean the public should look away from failures.
It means he should be judged by the right questions. Is billing improving? Are pumps becoming more reliable? Have boil-water advisories decreased? Is the agency replacing aging pipes and building a realistic capital program? Those are legitimate performance standards. If Hayman fails them, the board should hold him accountable. But the city shouldn’t dismantle his position because he relies on a knowledgeable Superintendent — that’s not a performance standard. That’s political judgment wearing a management-reform costume.
The Salary Debate Is Misleading
Hayman’s $427,000 salary has become its own political flashpoint. Morrell has called it “a waste of money” and said on the record he doesn’t “see what this person does other than occasionally go on TV and try to make you feel better.”
Compare that to the Audubon Nature Institute, whose president and CEO, Michael Sawaya, earns $525,000 running the zoo, aquarium, and insectarium. Nobody is holding community meetings about whether the zoo needs a CEO. Nobody is calling that salary wasteful on the record. Hayman makes less than the zoo’s CEO, for a job where failure means flooded streets, boil-water advisories, and water main breaks that shut down businesses and threaten hospitals.
Most New Orleans families can’t afford regular zoo visits anymore given what admission costs. Every family needs water. Every family needs working sewerage and drainage. The question was never whether Hayman’s salary sounds high. It’s whether the city is getting results equal to the compensation — and that’s a performance question, not a political one.
New Orleans Already Has the Right Model — It’s Called Entergy Regulation
Many New Orleanians remember NOPSI as the city’s old electric company. Here’s the detail that actually matters: NOPSI was always an investor-owned utility, regulated by the City Council — never a department the city itself operated. That distinction is the whole argument in miniature.
Government can regulate a utility without running it day to day. The council can review rates, require investment, demand performance, and protect customers, all without managing daily operations. Entergy New Orleans still has real problems today, and its profit motive doesn’t always align with public need. But the regulatory structure itself — oversight without operation — has functioned as the standing model in this city for a century. That’s the model SWBNO needs too: politicians set the goals, professionals run the system, and the public measures the results.
What BGR Actually Recommends
The Bureau of Governmental Research recently laid out exactly this kind of oversight, and it’s worth taking seriously on its own terms. BGR’s core finding is that SWBNO operates the system while other elected officials have long controlled much of its money — and that divided authority is what created today’s accountability gap.
Their recommendation isn’t to hand the council daily operational control. It’s independent financial and engineering review, measurable performance reporting, and funding decisions grounded in facts rather than political pressure. Act 938 hands the council real tools for exactly that starting August 1 — broader authority to examine SWBNO’s budget, rates, and performance, and the ability to elect its own board president instead of the mayor automatically holding that seat. Used as oversight, that’s precisely what this agency has needed for years. Used as a weapon in a personnel dispute, it becomes something else entirely.
New Orleans Funds Ribbon-Cuttings, Not Sewer Lines
New Orleans regularly finds money for hotels, tourism projects, and high-profile development. Meanwhile the city struggles to replace aging pipes and stabilize the utility infrastructure everyone actually depends on every day.
Nobody cuts a ribbon for a sewer line buried underground. But that sewer line may matter more to daily life than the building sitting on top of it. I’ve made a version of this same point before, writing about a water system dying while both Moreno and Landry run out of excuses, and about a city that can find millions for a hotel but not the pipes or the pumps. The pattern isn’t new. It’s just gotten more dangerous now that the council has real power to act on it, one way or the other.
Build the Firewall
New Orleans needs a real firewall between oversight and operations. The mayor and council should set performance standards, approve sustainable funding, and demand transparency — then let qualified professionals actually do the job. Board members should bring real expertise in engineering, finance, and utility management, not serve as political messengers. Management needs enough independence to make technical calls, paired with strict accountability for the results.
I’ve written before about why Hayman can fix this agency, if the city stops resetting the process every time politics gets impatient, and about why hiring him was the most important decision SWBNO made in a generation. None of that means Hayman is above criticism. It means the job needs room to actually work — the same room we’d give any other executive doing theirs.
JP Morrell should ask hard questions. Helena Moreno should demand better performance. The council should regulate rates and spending, exactly as Act 938 now allows. But political leaders have to understand where their role ends. Morrell’s criticism of Hayman for trusting a technical expert shows exactly how easily oversight slides into micromanagement — and that’s how political control always begins, one small complaint at a time.
When politicians interfere with an ordinary city agency, taxpayers might lose some money. When politicians interfere with SWBNO, homes flood, water turns unsafe, and sewerage stops moving. Politics cannot run the pumps. Expertise has to.
Sources:
NOLA.com/Gambit — “New Orleans City Council eyes eliminating top Sewerage & Water Board position,” July 2026
NOLA.com — “Will the New Orleans council fire the S&WB’s chief? Council blasts utility before power shift,” July 2026
NOLA.com — “Mayor Helena Moreno mostly quiet about broader vision for S&WB as agency faces turning point,” January 2026
Fox 8 — “New Orleans City Council to oversee Sewerage and Water Board starting Aug. 1,” July 2026
NOLA.com — “New Orleans Audubon Zoo gets new CEO, Michael Sawaya,” November 2024
NOLA.com/Gambit — “Blake Pontchartrain: When did NOPSI become Entergy New Orleans?”
Bureau of Governmental Research — SWBNO governance report shared with the PUMPS working group, 2026
About the Author
Jeff Thomas is the publisher of Black Source Media and a New Orleans-based entrepreneur writing on Louisiana politics, civic affairs, and Black political power every Sunday. He is also president of Crescent City Rebuild LLC and CEO of Fenix AI Incorporated.
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Publisher — Black Source Media
Jeff Thomas
Publisher • Opinion Columnist • New Orleans
Jeff Thomas is the publisher of Black Source Media and one of New Orleans’ most direct voices on civic affairs, economic justice, and Louisiana politics. He writes from the intersection of experience and accountability — as a licensed general contractor,a tech company founder and executive with over 30 years experience, and a businessman who has worked across the city’s civic, media, and construction ecosystems for decades.
His Sunday column covers Louisiana legislative politics, insurance discrimination, housing policy, and the forces shaping Black community life in New Orleans and across the state. Thomas writes in the tradition of Black journalists who hold power accountable without apology — building arguments from data, delivering verdicts from evidence, and speaking to Black New Orleans with the directness the moment demands.
He is also the principal of EA Inspection Services, LLC, a government inspection services company. Black Source Media is his platform for the civic conversation New Orleans has needed and too rarely had.
Selected Articles by Jeff Thomas
Black Neighborhoods Pay the Highest Insurance Rates in Louisiana. Here’s What They Don’t Want You to Know.
They Didn’t Yell the N-Word. They Went to Law School, Bided Their Time, and Rewrote the Constitution Instead.
Vappie vs. Morrell: Why Does Justice Look Different in New Orleans?
The State Has the Money. New Orleans East Just Needs Them to Use It.
The Failure of Mitch Landrieu
