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- Edward J. Price, Jr. , son of Eddie Price, is mayor of Mandeville, Louisiana. Like his father, Eddie Price Jr. played football for the Tulane University Green Wave. He was first elected mayor in 1996 after serving for 16 years on the Mandeville City Council. During his fourth term as mayor in 2008, Price became increasingly surrounded by scandals, one of them involving a wee-hours accident on April 22, when Price drove a city-owned luxury sport utility vehicle (SUV) into a tollbooth at the north end of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway; he admitted that he had been drinking, but the failure of the city police to give the mayor a sobriety test, along with the failure of the police to issue the mayor a ticket until two weeks later when the story was in the hands of news reporters, augmented the controversy. Price gave up the keys to the city SUV in June 2008. In February 2009 a petition to recall Price from the mayoralty failed to collect enough signatures prior to its deadline. Soon after failure of the recall—and on the same day (2009 March 6) as inauguration of a city vehicle policy which Councilwoman Trilby Lenfant criticized as deficient in accountability—Price again began driving the city's SUV, which, according to Cindy Chang in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, remains fitted with illegal "ghost" license plates—untraceable plates intended for use by undercover officers—until the arrival of a new public plate. On 2009 August 13, Price was indicted for perjury in a case against Gary Kopp, owner of SpeeDee Oil Change & Tune-Up Company. Price maintained his innocence and refused to resign even as the Times-Picayune editorially urged him to do so. Instead, he announced plans to select a new police chief, whereupon the Times-Picayune published a second editorial calling for him to resign. On 2009 August 27, for the second year in a row the Mandeville City Council gave no raises to Price and his department heads but did grant raises up to 5 percent for others on the city payroll. At his arraignment on September 3, backed by his attorney Ralph Whalen, Price pleaded innocent.
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