Why New Orleans’ depleted public works department is unlikely to add more staff any time soon

By Joseph Cranney

Source: The Times-Picayune | NOLA.com

December 15, 2025

Despite Mayor-elect Helena Moreno’s campaign promises to beef up city services, her proposed $1.6 billion budget for the City of New Orleans makes it clear that the beleaguered public works department next year will remain as depleted as ever.

As a candidate, Moreno was consistent in her position that there was no bigger problem facing New Orleans than the deplorable condition of its streets and other infrastructure, and the city’s chronic failures in maintaining them.

“And that’s why within my first 100 days of office, my main focus is to get our city services right and to get them back,” Moreno said during a televised debate in September. “Making sure that our street lights stay on, that our traffic lights stay on, that we get a real street maintenance program.”

Moreno promised to hire 100 new city maintenance workers, a key step toward bringing New Orleans in line with other cities that don’t struggle as mightily with routine tasks, like repairing traffic lights or filling potholes.

But based on her budget, that’s not happening anytime soon. Moreno’s budget proposal includes a 29% cut to the public works department. That budget was approved by the New Orleans City Council on Dec. 1, before it was vetoed by Mayor LaToya Cantrell on Friday. That means parts of it could still change, though Cantrell didn’t mention public works in her statement explaining her veto.

A representative for Moreno said the cut to public works would merely account for the removal of the department’s parking enforcement staff — who Moreno is shifting under the purview of the New Orleans Police Department — and that the public works maintenance division isn’t being cut. But there are no budgeted staffing increases, either.

That’s the case for most of the city, as Moreno and her team have said reductions and furloughs are necessary to fend off what would have been a roughly $220 million deficit in 2026.

Still, a couple of departments saw a boost under Moreno’s proposal, including the Department of Safety and Permits with a 16% increase, another target for reforms frequently mentioned by Moreno on the campaign trail. The police, fire, emergency medical services, sanitation and recreation departments each had their budgets increase or remain roughly the same.

Moreno’s transition staff didn’t respond to detailed questions about her budget priorities and declined to make Moreno available for an interview.

When Moreno unveiled her budget on Nov. 30, she acknowledged her campaign promise to hire 100 new maintenance workers. But she still hasn’t said how she plans to do so.

“Right now, we’re outsourcing that to different contractors, and it’s projected that that’s several million dollars extra that we’re spending every year,” Moreno said at the time. “As I scale back the contracts, I’ll build up that workforce.”

The need for workers

Few American cities fail more dramatically at maintaining their streets and other infrastructure than New Orleans does.

The Times-Picayune reported in 2024 that it takes the city, on average, nearly a full year to fill a single pothole upon a citizen’s request. Other similarly sized cities can do it within a week or two.

Over the last decade, the number of potholes filled annually in New Orleans fell by 35%, the newspaper found. The number of streetlight outages restored each year fell by 84%.

The problems largely come down to staffing, which Moreno has previously acknowledged.

The public works department is responsible for more than 1,500 miles of streets, yet it is down to just one pothole crew. In the mid-’90s, though the city had far less money, the department spent roughly twice as much on its personnel as it does today and employed six times as many maintenance workers.

Public Works Director Clinton “Rick” Hathaway, who took office in 2023, has said he’d like to have around 200 maintenance workers in the field, around a tenfold increase from current staffing levels.

The city has made some strides under Hathaway. The City Council last December agreed to transfer control of the city’s roughly 72,000 catch basins to the Sewerage and Water Board, relieving Hathaway’s strapped department of an enormous maintenance responsibility.

And in October, Hathaway’s department unveiled a new system for scheduling repairs, handling service requests and tracking inspections for the city’s more than 54,000 streetlights and traffic signals.

That move came after the New Orleans Office of Inspector General criticized the department for failing to timely respond to traffic light outages, which the department has relied on contractors to fix.

Money for streets

The Bureau of Governmental Research proposed a solution in 2017 to the public works department’s budget woes: Take the tens of millions of dollars the city collects in streets-related revenues each year — parking tickets, meter collections, towing and booting charges and other fees — and spend it on streets-related maintenance.

As it stands, the city allocates none of that money directly to streets: It’s deposited in the overall general fund for all city departments.

BGR’s president, Becky Mowbray, reiterated her group’s position in a recent interview, describing the proposal as an equitable way to give public works a much-needed boost.

“New Orleans’ street grid produces revenue for the City of New Orleans in many ways, but little of it goes to street maintenance,” Mowbray said.

The public works department’s parking enforcement division alone brought in more than $15 million in parking tickets in 2024, records show. Moreno’s transition staff said they’re ramping up parking enforcement and ticket collections in 2026, projecting $13.5 million on top of earlier expected revenues.

The department-wide general fund for public works in 2026? Just under $20 million.

Fair Use Notice

This site occasionally reprints copyrighted material, the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We make such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of issues and to highlight the accomplishments of our affiliates. We believe this constitutes a “fair use” of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is available without profit. For more information go to: US CODE: Title 17,107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond “fair use,” you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.