In an attempt to free up more maintenance workers this summer to keep the grass cut along public right of ways, streets, state roadways and the interstate, the city-parish has awarded a more than $162,000 contract to a private firm to do a portion of the work.
The city-parish Department of Maintenance plans to farm out the grass cutting along the interstates that run through the city—a total of some 600 acres—to H&O Investments, which does business as H&O Grounds. The firm, which has other contracts with the city-parish totaling some $500,000, was the low bidder for the job.
“This contract isn’t a silver bullet but it will be a huge help,” says Chris Burnette, director of the Department of Maintenance.
Last summer, city-parish workers were unable to keep up with the more-than 1,000 linear miles of grass the city-parish is responsible to maintain and several council members complained about overgrown lots and rights-of-way in their districts.
For H&O, winning the contract—which must still be approved by the Metro Council later this month—is a welcome development after what was a bizarre start to the new year.
In January, the company backed out of a controversial job it had with the city of New Orleans to remove several Confederate-era monuments after company employees received death threats.
One week later, company owner David Mahler’s Lamborghini was torched to rubble outside the company’s warehouse on Promise Avenue off Airline Highway.
Mahler tells Daily Report this morning three separate divisions of the FBI investigated for more than two months but could not establish a connection between the two incidents. He is not convinced they are unrelated, however.
“I have to think it’s connected somehow,” he says.
The state fire marshal is continuing to investigate, Mahler says. Also in January, several former employees filed a class action suit again Mahler and the company in federal court for allegedly failing to pay them overtime and for reporting them as contract workers when they were actually full-time employees.
The class action portion of the lawsuit has been dismissed. The suit against Mahler personally is continuing to make its way through the court system. Mahler believes the timing of the suit was more than coincidental.
“I think it was a play for money, coming all in the middle of everything else,” he says.
Despite the rash of curious incidents, Mahler says the company is otherwise doing well and that it’s pretty much back to business as usual.
“It has been a circus,” he says. “But things are starting to die down. … It’s getting back to normal.”
—Stephanie Riegel
