NEW ORLEANS — The New Orleans City Council has frozen the budget of two of the city’s major departments as it expresses frustration with stalled road projects, broken lights scattered around, and enforcement around short term rentals in the city among other issues.
The council, calling it a last resort, unanimously voted to freeze the budgets of the city’s Department of Public Works and the Department of Safety and Permits. The move will effectively prevent hiring in those two departments but wouldn’t affect current projects.
One example given by the council during budget meetings late last year was that the city had 200 open cases for short term rental violations and it had scheduled only 10 hearings.
“I think if we’re going to have a comprehensive plan to address flooding businesses, the lack of enforcement on short term rentals, I think those departments need to have processes and plans to change things that articulated to the public,” said Councilman J.P. Morrell.
A spokesperson for Mayor LaToya Cantrell said that the pandemic and hiring issues have caused many of the problems and that freezing the budget will only make things worse.
Cantrell also weighed in herself. According to The Times-Picayune | New Orleans Advocate, the mayor said: “While there have been well-documented challenges with the implementation of city programs, defunding city departments only adds an additional layer of complexity to already complicated work," Cantrell said. “Today’s actions do nothing to resolve the issues we face,” she said, adding that the council's action would "create dysfunction."
The newspaper also reported that Councilman Joe Giarrusso hopes the move to freeze those budgets would force the city to come up with plans to improve all of the areas that citizens see as pain points when it comes to what seem to be quality of life issues.