4 S&WB board members to be replaced as city gains more oversight
By Rachel Handley
Source: WWL
August 4, 2026
Thanks to a new state law, the City Council and mayor’s office now have much more power over the Sewerage & Water Board.
A newly enacted state law is shifting more oversight of the Sewerage and Water Board to the City of New Orleans. On Tuesday, officials announced major changes to one of the S&WB’s governing bodies.
In a video posted to Instagram Sunday, Mayor Helena Moreno expressed optimism about the takeover.
“Ultimately we get blamed for all the problems anyway, might as well have the authority to fix them as well,” she said.
On Tuesday, her office confirmed four members of the S&WB’s Board of Directors would be removed– Courtney Scrubbs, Tyler Antrup, H. Davis Cole, and Joseph Peychaud. It would not confirm who would be nominated to replace them.
In a statement to WWL Louisiana, the Sewerage and Water Board said: “We thank our former board members for their dedicated service to the utility and the city of New Orleans. We look forward to the opportunity to work with the new board of directors as we continue to address our aging infrastructure and efforts to secure sustainable funding to improve and strengthen our water system.”
Meanwhile, the City Council is preparing to vote on an ordinance that will give its members much more power over the S&WB’s operations as well, including its budget, emergency alerts, and construction projects.
“It’s going to be constantly maneuvering different levers to make it work better,” Council President J.P. Morrell said last week.
Rebecca Mowbray, president and CEO of the Bureau of Governmental Research, a local watchdog organization, said BGR has long argued that the S&WB’s leadership structure should be simplified.
“The oddball structure of the Sewerage and Water Board, in which there are a lot of people involved, but there really is no true oversight, really is the root cause of all of the dysfunction that we, as residents of New Orleans, experience on a regular basis,” she said.
She said BGR would have preferred the city lay out a detailed plan for the transition of power before making any changes. But overall, she said she is pleased with the progress so far.
“There is a transition period during which accountability may be unclear or in question, and you know, let’s hope that we don’t get a major storm during hurricane season. But that said, I do think that everybody’s got their eyes open, and they seem to be working toward the right things,” she said.
Morrell said there will be bigger changes later on, with the ordinance as a first step. Council members will vote on it Thursday.
“Doing things like having PR consolidated, governmental affairs consolidated, having notifications go through NOLA Ready– that’s all things that we can do practically very quickly,” he said.
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