‘No New Taxes’ signs oppose Sheriff Susan Hutson’s millage renewal. They’re inaccurate.
By Joseph Cranney
Source: The Times-Picayune | Nola.com
April 28, 2025
Mysterious campaign signs have cropped up around New Orleans that falsely attack a tax renewal from the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office, leaving Sheriff Susan Hutson scrambling to correct the record before the referendum goes to a vote next Saturday.
“No New Taxes,” the signs, which don’t disclose who made them, read in all capital letters. “Vote No on Sheriff’s 10 year millage (Election Date: May 3rd).”
The tax that Hutson wants voters to renew is, in fact, not new: It has helped fund a significant chunk of OPSO’s budget since 2014, and renewing it wouldn’t cause anyone’s tax bills to go up.
“This is a lie, and it’s dangerous,” Hutson said. Hutson’s office projects the tax would continue collecting around $13.1 million a year, or roughly 20% of OPSO’s operating budget.
“Signs like these don’t just mislead — they threaten the core funding that keeps our jail operational.”
Hutson has been campaigning in favor of her tax renewal for weeks, hosting community meetings, building a website and leading a media tour of the jail’s conditions. In recent days, OPSO has planted its own, “Not a New Tax!” signs around the city. Those signs cost taxpayers around $10,000, OPSO said.
The tax, known as the Law Enforcement District of Orleans Parish millage, expires at the end of this year. Hutson is asking permission from voters to renew it another decade.
Who is behind the signs opposing the millage is a mystery.
The signs don’t say, and no one within New Orleans political circles, including Hutson’s opponents in her 2025 reelection campaign, has taken credit for them.
Absorbing the hit
Louisiana campaign laws prohibit people from publishing campaign materials that they know or should know make a “false statement about a candidate” or “a proposition to be submitted to the voters.”
Knowingly spreading false political information is a felony in Louisiana. The law was recently invoked for the first time in decades in the arrest of a Lafayette-based political consultant, though courts have previously declared the law unconstitutional.
Rafael Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, said the millage is particularly critical because of Hutson’s otherwise limited abilities to increase the jail’s funding.
She’s been trying to raise more money for the overcrowded and badly understaffed jail since she took office in 2022, efforts that have largely been blocked by the New Orleans City Council.
“The city has an obligation to fund the sheriff’s office,” Goyeneche said. “If it doesn’t come from this, it has to come from the operating budget of the city, which means everything is going to absorb the hit, because this is fundamental and necessary.”
“It just means there’s less to go around for all of the needed and worthy projects and agencies that the city operates,” he added.
‘Not us’
Nearing the end of a rocky first term, Hutson faces a round of early challengers to her reelection. They include former New Orleans Police Officer Michelle Woodfork, former Criminal District Court Judge Julian Parker and Edwin Shorty, Constable for the 2nd City Court in Algiers.
Each of them, however, have publicly supported the millage renewal, and each of their campaigns denied planting the signs.
“It’s not us and we would disclose it if we were,” said Tyronne Walker, Woodfork’s campaign manager.
In 2023, when Hutson did ask voters to approve a tax increase, a batch of “No New Taxes,” signs also popped up around the city ahead of the election. That proposed tax would have nearly doubled a separate millage for OPSO.
The New Orleans political action committee behind those signs, Keep New Orleans Moving Forward, also distributed at least one anti-millage mailer during the campaign. Campaign finance reports show the group is funded by the Business Council of New Orleans, a public policy group of local and regional business executives.
Hutson’s measure ultimately was defeated by an enormous margin — 91% of the vote.
In an interview, Bruce Gallassero, chairperson of Keep New Orleans Moving Forward, denied that his group was the source of the latest round of signs opposing Hutson’s millage.
“No, we’re definitely not,” Gallassero.
One prominent local group that has come out against Hutson’s millage is the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, a group of roughly 100 mostly Black New Orleans ministers.
That group’s president, Willie Gable, Jr., with the Progressive Baptist Church in Central City, called Hutson’s proposal “vague” and said she hasn’t presented a detailed enough plan for what she’d do with the money.
The ballot question asks voters to approve the renewal of the tax “for the purpose of providing additional funding for the operation, maintenance and upkeep of jails and related facilities.”
Gable’s group didn’t plant the signs, however, he said.
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