NEW ORLEANS — New Orleans’ former top plumbing official pled guilty Thursday to stealing more than $100,000 from the Sewerage & Water Board by pocketing the fees plumbers had to pay for job permits.
Jay Arnold was charged by the feds in May.
But Arnold was suspended in November 2021 after WWL-TV reported how he and one of the inspectors in his office had been engaging in a web of self-dealing with area plumbers to issue permits and inspect each other’s work.
The morning after WWL-TV’s report, the FBI raided Arnold’s office at the S&WB and seized all open plumbing permits and inspection records, which then existed only on paper and index cards.
At the time, there was no computerized record-keeping in the S&WB Plumbing Department, not even a database of which records existed. That appeared to help Arnold keep secret his alleged arrangement with plumbers.
“Arnold would instruct plumbers to provide him with payments for the fees required to obtain plumbing permits,” the federal charging documents said. “Arnold would keep the payments for his personal use and then cause the S&WB to issue the permits without the S&WB having received the required fees.”
For more than a decade, Arnold, a resident of Harahan, ran the city of New Orleans’ plumbing inspections and permit division like a closed fiefdom. It was the only construction permitting office housed at the Sewerage & Water Board instead of City Hall. And Arnold was in charge of all city plumbing inspections even though he had not been licensed to do inspections in Louisiana since at least 2016.