Document storage company withholding ‘hundreds of boxes’ of city records amid financial dispute

Document storage company Iron Mountain is withholding hundreds of boxes of files it is storing for the city of New Orleans because of an ongoing financial dispute with Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s administration, a City Hall spokesman confirms.

The dispute first came to light in an unrelated federal case involving a New Orleans police officer. Court records show that the city and the NOPD–both defendants in the case–have been unable to produce documents needed for trial because they are “in the custody of Iron Mountain, which is currently in a financial dispute with the city and requires a subpoena for the release of any records stored on behalf of the city.”  

The court records do not make clear the specific nature of the dispute or whether the company is withholding the files because the city hasn’t paid its bill, though that is the implication.

Cantrell spokesman Gregory Joseph was unable to provide many details except to say, “we are currently in the process of working out our contractual issues with Iron Mountain, which we believe may have hundreds of boxes that contain the city’s records.”

He added, “we cannot give a time frame for when these issues might be resolved.”  

Iron Mountain is a publicly traded company based in Boston with local offices in Harahan. It stores paper files and digital documents for clients around the world.

The company and its attorneys did not respond to multiple requests seeking comment.

Though Joseph confirmed the dispute and referred to “contractual issues,” he said the city has been unable to locate a contract or purchase order with Iron Mountain for document storage services, so it is unclear how many records are in the “hundreds of boxes,” how far back they go and how many city departments may be affected. 

Councilman Joe Giarrusso, who heads the City Council’s budget committee, was unfamiliar with the dispute. But he said the situation is troubling on many levels and raises red flags about how the city and one of its vendors are conducting business.

“The bottom line is the city needs to be able to access its own documents, and if we’re paying for a service, we have to know what the service is and what the terms of the service are,” he said. “Conversely, if we’re getting a service and we’re not paying our bills then we need to pay our bills.”

Frustration with silence 

The dispute between the city and Iron Mountain came to light in a federal civil lawsuit filed in 2022 by local couple Derek Brown and Julie Bareki-Brown against the city, former Police Chief Shaun Ferguson and NOPD Officer Derrick Burmaster. The suit claims Burmaster violated the Brown’s civil rights when he fatally shot their 18-week-old rescue dog while responding to a noise complaint at their home.

At issue are old records from Burmaster’s personnel file that the Brown’s attorney, William Most, has been trying to obtain in preparation for trial. Though the city resisted turning over some of the files on the grounds they were irrelevant, it agreed to release a 2012 NOPD Public Integrity Bureau report on the findings of a probe into another fatal dog shooting at Burmaster’s hands.

Records show the officer was cleared of any wrongdoing in that incident.

According to court documents, the city served Iron Mountain with a subpoena in early October for the PIB report.

“I agree to produce the 2012 Burmaster complaint because it concerns use of force against an animal, even though it resulted in the charge not being sustained,” Assistant City Attorney Jonathan Adams wrote to Most in an email last October. “As you know, I subpoenaed that from Iron Mountain.

But the company ignored the subpoena and follow up calls from Assistant City Attorney Jonathan Adams. 

At a hearing in late November in U.S. Magistrate Judge Karen Roby’s court, another assistant city attorney on the case, Jim Roquemore, said the city had still been unable to obtain its records from the company. Roby set a hearing for Jan. 4 on a motion to try to force Iron Mountain to turn over the documents.

That hearing was postponed, however, after the city signaled the two sides were working to resolve their differences.

Missing contract?

Iron Mountain is a 60-year-old company, traded on the New York Stock Exchange with more than 24,000 employees worldwide and valued at more than $1.1 billion. The city’s online database of contracts show that the company has had an agreement with the sanitation department for more than a decade to provide paper shredding services as part of a free recycling program.

But there is no record of a contract to store old paper files for the NOPD or any other department. Iron Mountain’s local administrator, Robert Leamann, spoke to a reporter in early December and declined to provide information about the company’s scope of services for the city. He also said at the time he was unaware of a dispute with the city or the subpoena. After being sent a copy of the court records, he referred subsequent requests for comment to a corporate email address, which did not respond to multiple emails.

The company’s local attorneys, Kellen Matthew and Kathleen Cronin, also failed to respond to emails seeking comment.

Joseph could not say why the city purchasing office could not locate a contract with the company, but noted that all contracts and purchase orders contained in the city’s BuySpeed and AFIN databases were lost in a 2019 cyber attack.

In Dec. 2019, the city was hit by a cyber attack that temporarily shut down local government, exposed weaknesses in the city’s IT system and cost millions of dollars. Apparently some crucial formation—like contracts with vendors, who are paid with public money—were permanently lost.

Giarrusso said the situation with Iron Mountain is troublesome and raises questions about what other bills the city isn’t paying.

“It’s hard to say for sure how bad the problem is but we hear rumors of it all the time,” he said. “Vendors are reluctant to come forward because they want to do business with the city and they do not want to be hurt by saying something publicly.”