River Birch Landfill owners Jim Ward and Fred Heebe, who in recent months have re-emerged as kingmakers in the world of Louisiana politics, are also making their feelings known in the race for Jefferson Parish president.
The company is the main funder of a new political action committee — Jambalaya PAC — that in recent days sent out a mailer attacking former Jefferson Parish President John Young, who is one of the main contenders for the job in the Oct. 12 election.
Young is locked in a tight struggle with Councilwoman Cynthia Lee Sheng. A third candidate, Lee Bonnecarrere, is not expected to make a serious dent in either candidates’ support, but if it’s tight on Oct. 12, he could force a runoff.
Campaign finance records show that Jambalaya PAC was registered earlier this summer. The PAC has raised $31,945, based on a finance report filed Sept. 27. Of that, $25,404 was donated by River Birch, LLC on Sept. 25. The PAC had only one other donor: LaPlace resident Randy Rebaldo, who donated $6,541.
Ward and Heebe were long major players in local and state politics, but their largess in political donations may have gotten them crosswise with federal authorities. The two were the targets of a yearslong probe that appeared to focus on their use of a raft of shell companies to make political donations. The practice allowed them to far exceed the $5,000 cap that state law says a person can give to a candidate in each election cycle.
The probe fell apart after Heebe’s lawyer filed a civil lawsuit that showed federal prosecutors were using aliases to leave comments below stories posted at nola.com about ongoing federal cases, including the one targeting Heebe. The Ethics Board has a still-active lawsuit against River Birch and its principals that accuses them of violating elections laws by routing hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations through sham companies.
As noted in a recent story, Ward and Heebe have returned to the political scene in a big way. They have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the governor’s re-election campaign, while also steering $100,000 to a PAC supporting President Donald Trump, $105,000 to U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise and $35,000 to U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy. At the local level, Ward and Heebe put $9,000 into a get-out-the-vote effort run by Jefferson Parish Councilman Mark Spears, whose district includes the company’s Waggaman landfill.
River Birch has reason to care who occupies the parish president’s office. Currently, it holds a potentially lucrative contract to collect natural gas from the adjacent parish landfill, though River Birch officials say that collection has been hampered by poor maintenance by the contractor that operates the landfill. Problems at the parish landfill briefly raised the specter of possibly closing the parish landfill and using River Birch instead, but that idea was quickly dismissed by parish leaders.
The mailer sent out by Jambalaya PAC echoes claims Lee Sheng made in an ad she released last month. The mailer says Young “fired a female employee for telling the truth and made her life a living hell.” The reference is to a 2013 case in which a woman sued the parish, alleging she was given poor performance reviews and eventually fired after she reported her boss — not Young — for sexual harassment. The parish settled a wrongful termination suit for around $200,000. The employee whom she accused resigned. Young was never accused of sexual harassment.
Young has vehemently denied the accusations, and said that as soon as he heard of the harassment, he ordered an investigation. He has accused Lee Sheng of not having her facts straight.
The River Birch mailer is not the only one landing in Jefferson Parish mailboxes as the Oct. 12 election nears. Young was the subject of another attack piece that called him a major supporter of Donald Trump and said he was allied with those who fought the removal of Confederate monuments in New Orleans, including businessman Frank Stewart. Stewart has given thousands of dollars to Young in the past, and he most recently donated $1,500 in March, according to state data.
Young himself fired a shot at Lee Sheng, accusing her of supporting a move by East Jefferson General Hospital to create a standalone emergency room. The Parish Council — with Lee Sheng on it — did vote to allow EJGH to go ahead with the plan and rezoned the property to restrict its use to an emergency medical facility.
But EJGH is no longer going forward with those plans, and the owner of the property has sued the parish. The project, Young says, has cost $8 million in legal fees and is rising, Young said.
Lee Sheng has rejected those claims, noting that the decision to create the emergency room was solely the decision of the hospital’s board and that those votes never came before the parish council.
The mailer includes a picture of cash burning in a fire and asks if Lee Sheng thinks “we have money to burn?”
With less than two weeks to go before the Oct. 12 election, the race is expected to continue to intensify.
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“On Politics” delivers scuttlebutt on local politics across the New Orleans metro area. Items appear throughout the week online and are compiled in The Times-Picayune | New Orleans Advocate print edition on Mondays under the “Political Insider” heading.
Follow Faimon A. Roberts III on Twitter @faimon.
