Victor Franckiewicz, Jr.

Adjunct Assistant Professor - Sustainable Real Estate Development

Victor Franckiewicz entered the legal field from a career in the public sector, having served in the state senate, and as Mayor of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. In 1999 and 2000, Mr. Franckiewicz was President and CEO of the Bureau of Governmental Research, one of the nation's oldest non-profit good government organizations, in New Orleans.

Mr. Franckiewicz has worked in community development and regional planning since the beginning of his professional career as a city planner in 1976.

Since January 2009, he has served as General Counsel to the nonprofit Louisiana Land Trust (LLT). Funded by HUD's Community Development Block Grant program, LLT was charged with managing nearly 11,000 hurricane-damaged residential properties in partnership with local entities and returning them to commerce. LLT also works on special blight remediation projects in conjunction with local governments. Mr. Franckiewicz is co-counsel to the Hospital Service District in New Orleans East and has assisted the hospital in returning a full-service hospital to that area, which has been without a medical facility since hurricane Katrina. This project is utilizing a combination of CDBG and FEMA funds, state capital outlay support, and a HUD Section 242 loan. He previously represented the Biloxi housing Authority and its nonprofit development arm on construction and contract issues for the authority's $65 million HUD-funded HOPE VI program during its recovery following hurricane Katrina.

He represents several local governments in Louisiana and Mississippi, including the City of Mandeville (on home rule charter matters), St. James Parish (in connection with the parish’s first comprehensive plan and land use ordinance), and the City of Ridgeland, Mississippi (for a comprehensive update of it zoning ordinance).

In 2002, Mr. Franckiewicz began leading a 15-member legal team to advise the Regional Transit Authority (RTA) in New Orleans. The work involved restructuring, renegotiating, and (in some cases) terminating and litigating many of RTA’s contractual relationships. The end result was a multi-phase reorganization flatten RTA’s managerial and operational hierarchies. Mr. Franckiewicz was responsible for drafting all of the implementing instruments, the formation of a nonprofit public benefit corporation, and a stock purchase agreement to through which that corporation would assimilate RTA’s operations from the incumbent management company. Within weeks of beginning to implement the plan, Hurricane Katrina struck, transforming the reorganization into a recovery effort. The team continued to represent RTA in its post-Katrina recovery on federal procurement matters, employment, civil service, collective bargaining obligations, ethics, Section 13(c) compliance, and contract issues.

Mr. Franckiewicz has worked in community development and regional planning since the beginning of his professional career as a city planner in 1976. He developed, wrote, and secured federal approval for Mississippi’s coastal zone management program; drafted enabling environmental legislation, implementing regulations, and the draft and final environmental impact statements for the program.