NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Arnie Fielkow, a former New Orleans Saints executive who was elected to the New Orleans City Council after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city, is leaving his political post to become chief executive officer of the National Basketball Retired Players Association.
Fielkow made the announcement Monday morning in a news release. He said he will resign from the council effective Oct. 1 to take the new job.
“As my close friends know, I have dearly missed the sports field, an industry in which I have spent over 20 years,” Fielkow said in his announcement.
Fielkow, an attorney, was a former president of Southern League of Professional Baseball when Saints owner Tom Benson brought him to New Orleans as the Saints’ director of business administration in 2000. Fielkow would eventually be named a team vice president as he oversaw a streak of 36 consecutive sellouts of the Louisiana Superdome and served as a lead negotiator of what was then a 10-year lease of the Superdome that called for the state of Louisiana to pay Benson $187 million.
But Fielkow was fired in the fall of 2005, after Katrina and the resulting levee breaches flooded the city and left the Superdome a wreck. The Saints became NFL nomads — playing their first “home” game in New York and setting up temporary headquarters in San Antonio. Benson had business interests in that city and there were worries in New Orleans that he might move the team there permanently. Fielkow was an outspoken proponent of keeping the team in New Orleans and making the team a leader in the rebuilding process, a stance that he has said led to his dismissal.
Fielkow stayed in New Orleans and ran for and won his first political job in 2006 — a city-wide election for an at-large post on the City Council. He was re-elected last year. Among the initiatives he took a lead role in promoting was the overhaul of the New Orleans Recreation Department, which provides recreational opportunities for young people. In his resignation statement he also touted a host of other accomplishments and efforts, including his support for creation of an Inspector General’s office for the city and “strong advocacy to combat discrimination and inequity, ensuring social justice for the gay, lesbian and immigrant communities.”
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.