Mayor-elect Helena Moreno zeroes in on police overtime spending amid budget crisis
By Sophie Kasakove and Blake Paterson
Source: The Times-Picayune | NOLA.com
November 13, 2025
As Mayor-elect Helena Moreno attempts to make good on her recent promise to state leaders to keep a tighter watch on New Orleans’ finances, she’s already identified one area of concern: Overtime spending.
The understaffed New Orleans Police Department’s spending came under fresh scrutiny after Louisiana Legislative Auditor Mike Waguespack reported that no one had budgeted for police overtime in the city’s 2025 budget, which faces a deficit of $160 million.
But Waguespack has begun digging deeper into the issue in recent weeks at the City Council’s request. The Office of the Inspector General separately confirmed to WVUE television that it was investigating the matter back in July, after the station reported that 23 officers had more than doubled their salaries by reporting long shifts for weeks or months straight without a day off. The OIG is now working separately with Waguespack’s office on its investigation, a spokesperson said Wednesday.
Both moves come over a year after a NOPD official sounded alarms about mounting overtime expenses, emails show.
“Having discussions with the auditor and also our inspector general, there needs to be better controls of overtime with NOPD as well, and also a better look at potential abuse of overtime,” Moreno on Wednesday told a state panel that considered but ultimately decided against recommending the appointment of a state administrator to manage New Orleans’ finances.
“I don’t have a cent to waste. And so that’s another piece that we’ll be working through as well to ensure that not just NOPD, but that every department has the right set of controls on overtime,” said Moreno.
She added that her transition team plans to propose that $50 million be budgeted next year for overtime. Waguespack has estimated that the NOPD and other city agencies will have racked up close to that amount by the end of this year.
Though Waguespack’s review is not complete, he said Tuesday that his office has identified “some very excessive overtime” in NOPD records.
That includes officers who have signed up “to work a detail as opposed to work(ing) a shift,” which requires another officer to work at an overtime rate to fill the shift, he said. He added that his team will not release its findings until early next year.
NOPD Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick, meanwhile, has said the department has an abundance of unfilled positions, which means the officers who are working must log extra hours. In October, she rejected the council’s request to freeze overtime spending in light of the city’s cashflow crisis.
“I am not going to let an officer get hurt, and I am not going to let the community be hurt because I am not willing to pay overtime,” Kirkpatrick said in October.
NOPD did not respond to a request for additional comment on Wednesday. Neither did Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s administration.
Budgeting issue
The New Orleans Police Department has 900 officers, but needs 1,200 to effectively patrol the city, Kirkpatrick has said. To make the most of the diminished force, NOPD has consistently relied on overtime to keep officers on the street for daily coverage and major events alike.
But this year, city officials quietly abandoned a practice of using money budgeted for unfilled positions to cover overtime at year’s end. That meant the city budgeted for just $57,500 in employee overtime this year – a fraction of the $47 million it spent on overtime in 2024. City officials have yet to explain that decision.
New Orleans is on track to spend $50 million on overtime this year, Waguespack has said.
Kirkpatrick in October criticized the city for not allotting her office enough overtime. Though some events that require overtime – extreme weather, the Jan. 1 terrorist attack — cannot be predicted, others, like Mardi Gras and other holidays, generate a high amount of overtime each year and can be.
“I have to have a realistic budget,” said Kirkpatrick. “You can’t give me $45,000 in an overtime line item and expect me to manage that.”
After the state’s Fiscal Review Committee meeting on Wednesday, Moreno said she, like Kirkpatrick, thinks the city should “do whatever possible to ensure we have enough coverage” to keep residents safe.
At the same time, she said she instructed Kirkpatrick to increase overtime oversight.
Waguespack this week said that his office was still collecting overtime records and couldn’t yet say how many officers had chosen to work off-duty details instead of working regular shifts. His review, when complete, will include not just NOPD’s overtime but that of all city departments.
The Office of Inspector General will also “determine whether NOPD policies and procedures for overtime are consistent with best practices and effective in preventing payroll fraud,” said Inspector General Ed Michel in a statement Tuesday, adding that the office would release a public letter by the end of the year.
That office has previously found multiple instances of payroll fraud in NOPD’s ranks and overtime problems with the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office.
Alarms raised
The focus on overtime spending comes almost two years after an NOPD budget administrator first raised concerns about the agency’s overtime costs, emails show.
Antoinette Bradstreet issued multiple warnings to Kirkpatrick and other NOPD leaders starting in February 2024 about “surging” overtime costs. She urged leaders to reduce the cap for officers from 56 hours per week and noted that increases in the hourly overtime rate of pay in recent years had contributed to the increased costs.
On Feb. 18, she noted that the department had already spent nearly $4.5 million in overtime that year, and requested a meeting with Kirkpatrick. Multiple additional emails reiterating the costs through the end of April suggest that that meeting did not happen. In June, Kirkpatrick extended the 56-hour limit. Bradstreet, who left the NOPD and began a job with the city in July 2024, according to her LinkedIn, did not respond to a request for comment.
Kirkpatrick said in July of this year that the NOPD was looking into whether officers actually worked the hours they said they did, according to WVUE.
City officials also highlighted concerns of “surging overtime” in a special council meeting to discuss the city’s budget issues in February 2025. “Spending is Out Of Control” read a slide in officials’ PowerPoint presentation.
City officials again flagged overtime spending in May, when they estimated that overtime costs were projected to reach nearly $50 million in 2025. The Bureau of Governmental Research, a nonprofit good government group, also questioned whether overtime was being tallied accurately in an April report, and noted that the city’s budget leaders conceded then that overtime was not included in the 2025 budget.
Monthly budget reports the Cantrell administration prepared for the council in 2024 included “erroneous projections,” the BGR report noted, which “delayed by months the discovery of a $42 million deficit in the department’s budget related primarily to police overtime.”
An ordinance the council approved last week as it worked to convince the state to allow it to sell $125 million in emergency bonds to stem its cashflow crisis includes a requirement that the city’s chief administrative officer and finance director provide the council with 90-day overtime projections, among other new oversight mechanisms.
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