NEW ORLEANS — As the COVID pandemic seems to – at the very least – be on a break as far as impacting daily life, the city of New Orleans seems to be at less than full capacity as it is attempting to go back to business as usual.
Police, garbage pickup and court trials are all facing staffing and capacity shortages.
The city acknowledged the staffing shortages in February and announced a plan to recruit and retain workers.
Jury trials began at criminal court Monday, but a lack of jurors and an imposing backlog of 205 cases for homicides alone, according to the Metropolitan Crime Commission, mean that getting the wheels of justice turning again will be a slow process.
According to a report on NOLA.com, 1,000 jury summonses were sent out to potential jurors in advance of Monday’s re-opening and nearly 50 were undeliverable and another 600 got no response.
“We are expecting a good deal of work. Even today we had competition for the jurors who are available for a number of trials. With only 100 jurors coming at a time, it's going to be, it's going to be slow, but it's going to be deliberate,” said Derwyn Bunton, Chief Public Defender for New Orleans told WWL-TV’s Meg Farris.
In addition to juries and trials, the city’s police manpower shortage impacted parade routes, shortening them to eliminate a mile or two in some parades. It got rid of the traditional Magazine Street section of the route for dozens of Uptown parades, kept Endymion off St. Charles Avenue and kept the Krewe of Thoth from parading past Children’s Hospital.
Now, that same shortage is threatening to curb the size or route of second lines, but for a technically different reason.
Second lines, like the Carnival parades held outside of the city’s two week “city roll” depend on volunteers from the police department.
Spokesman Beau Tidwell said that organizers of those “special events” set a pay rate to compensate officers who can choose to sign up for the event or not. Tidwell said officers sign up voluntarily and depending on the number of volunteers, the event may have to scale back its scope.
With second line season upon us, Tidwell said the numbers will determine how big an event can be.
“This is not intended to be punitive, not meant to single anyone out. Right now NOPD has 1,024 officers, that has an effect on anything we want to do or not do. We have to work with the numbers that we have,” he said.
Tidwell said that while the rules have been on the books since 2017, the city would often not vigorously enforce them but that public safety is the main goal.
And, finally, five months after trash pickup in the city was reduced to once a week, it’s not apparent when it might return to twice a day. Tidwell said the Request for Proposal to possibly get another vendor to provide trash pickup hasn’t hit the streets yet and that the current providers – Metro and Richards, don’t have the capacity to do twice a week pickup at this time.
“The sanitation department is not confident that they can do it consistently. Right now, both major groups, Metro and Richards, do not have adequate resources to catch up after a holiday event as we saw in the last week, so until we are satisfied that they can do that we’re not ready to put them back on a two a day,” he said.