Renata Young blocks her front door with sandbags when it rains.
During a recent downpour, the water near her home in Treme was pooled ankle-high above each of the block’s four overwhelmed catch basins.
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New Orleans faces massive flooding risks. But City Hall can't keep storm drains clear.
His job helps keep New Orleans streets from flooding. There are few like him left.
More than three years ago, a neighbor complained to City Hall that one of the basins on North Robertson Street was clogged with concrete a contractor had poured down the drain. A crew inspected the drain in 2020, but the city hasn't been back since.
Young, 59, a retired nurse practitioner, has had to replace her hardwood floors twice in the last decade.
“I am trapped in my own house when it floods,” she said.
Young’s predicament is just one among many signs of a city breaking down, a dysfunction that’s pervasive and, at times, dangerous.
The evidence is stark and overwhelming.
Last year, the city’s beleaguered public works department was able to unclog just 2% of the city’s storm drains — less than a tenth of what City Hall accomplished just a few years ago.
Need a pothole filled in New Orleans? On average, city records show, that now takes about a full year. In Baton Rouge, or Nashville, Tennessee, it’s roughly two weeks.
New Orleans has 460 signalized intersections and more than 54,000 streetlights — and employs just two people to ensure they’re working. On a bustling thoroughfare like Claiborne Avenue, some broken lights have stayed dangerously dark for months.
A New Orleans Emergency Medical Services ambulance tries to race through traffic exacerbated by closed lanes on South Claiborne Avenue in New Orleans on Wednesday, May 15, 2024.
“It’s un-freaking real,” said lawyer Gilbert Buras, who worked under the city attorney and the Civil Service Commission for four different mayors.
“You used to not mind that New Orleans was so dysfunctional because it was so cheap to live here,” he said. “Now I don’t know what they’re doing with the money they get.”
Since Hurricane Katrina, only New York — with 20 times as many people — has collected more in major disaster relief from the federal government than New Orleans, with billions of dollars earmarked for fixing up the city’s streets, drainage system, government buildings and other public works here.
Yet that infrastructure continues to deteriorate.
The city does face distinct challenges related to the upkeep of its 19th-century infrastructure, in particular a swampy terrain that in many parts of the city has been steadily sinking for decades.
But some problems have directly resulted from a string of disastrous policy decisions.
The public works department inherited from the Sewerage & Water Board the responsibility of maintaining most of the city's drainage system in 1991, a duty that came without money because voters didn’t renew a long-assessed tax. The department has been chronically underfunded and undermanned largely ever since.
As hiring skilled laborers got more difficult in the late 1990s, public works officials began outsourcing core functions. Now, City Hall relies heavily on contractors for basic jobs like filling potholes or clearing storm drains, even as top administrators acknowledge — as officials elsewhere have — it’s quicker and easier to handle routine maintenance in house.
City Hall has a multi-billion dollar plan to replace damaged infrastructure across New Orleans, but city officials said they’ve spent only around 40% of the latest $1.4 billion batch of federal aid — sent eight years ago.
A sign on Orleans Avenue posted by City Hall, touting a road construction project, is badly leaning and marked with graffiti.
The result? While local tax collections have risen by nearly half in constant dollars over the last couple of decades, New Orleans has been backsliding badly when it comes to delivering the meat and potatoes of local government, such as paving roads, filling potholes, clearing drains and repairing broken traffic signals.
Consider:
- It takes the city, on average, 355 days to fill a pothole upon a citizen’s request, 311 data collected by The Times-Picayune shows. That’s much worse than any comparable city in the South. Louisville, Kentucky, and Miami do it within a couple weeks. Memphis, Tennessee? Five days.
- Even with $10 million in dedicated funding, city crews last year cleared just 1,500 of the city’s 72,000 catch basins, the first line of defense in the city’s all-important drainage system. The city has ramped things up in the first half of this year, but to clear every one at current rates would still take a decade.
- In 1995, the public works department’s maintenance yard had more than 175 workers. Now it’s down to fewer than 30, leaving it with a smaller in-house team than St. Bernard Parish. “Oh, my God,” the parish president there said. “That’s impossible.”
- The city’s traffic signal shop is so understaffed that whenever a light requires emergency repairs, officials are forced to go through the weekslong process of hiring a contractor. The last three times the city sought bids for light repairs, no one responded.
- Over the last 15 years, invoices show the city has paid at least $2.9 million to consultants who all sounded similar alarms about flooding risks. One warned that a 10-year storm would threaten at least 40% of the city with standing water of up to 3 feet. The city briefly boosted its unclogging efforts, but never approached the yearly rate that consultants said was necessary. Under Mayor LaToya Cantrell, the city has backslid badly.
Decades of deferred maintenance
The fallout of this dysfunction is borne by New Orleanians everywhere, in a thousand ways, large and small — from flat tires, busted axles and sky-high insurance, to the stress of helplessly watching floodwaters approach the stoop in a routine afternoon shower.
The Times-Picayune has repeatedly sought comment from Cantrell since mid-April. After she declined to be interviewed, a reporter shared a summary of this article’s findings with the mayor’s communications team. A representative said Cantrell has nothing to add beyond what her aides have said.
Gilbert Montaño, Cantrell’s chief administrative officer, said the city has fallen behind on routine maintenance in large part because of losses in the workforce and supply chain delays caused by the pandemic.
New Orleans faces massive flooding risks. But City Hall can't keep storm drains clear.
Montaño said those challenges are compounded by a tangled web of regulations set by the Civil Service Commission, an independent agency that screens the vast majority of hires at City Hall.
“We are recovering, like most cities, from decades of deferred maintenance,” Montaño said, adding that the Cantrell administration recently brought on a new public works director.
Clinton “Rick” Hathaway, hired in December, became the fourth person to hold that job in as many years. An engineer, Hathaway was the maintenance chief in the 1990s for what was then called the streets department, when it had more than 100 frontline workers.
Hathaway said he’d ideally like to have about double that number of people in the field, which would bring New Orleans more in line with its peers in the South. But it would require a tenfold increase from today’s staffing levels.
Hathaway recently committed to adding 16 maintenance workers, which would grow the frontline staff by about 60%, but would still leave the department with fewer than one-fifth the number Jefferson Parish employs.
State and local officials also recently announced more than 400 infrastructure and beautification projects they say they’ll complete before New Orleans hosts Super Bowl LIX in February. However, they haven't released a detailed list, and many of those projects appear largely cosmetic, such as adding murals to blighted downtown buildings or clearing homeless encampments.
Hathaway said his department is making progress in the meantime through the federally subsidized Joint Infrastructure Recovery Request program. The program includes more than 270 streets, drainage and other maintenance projects, though city officials recently acknowledged that a quarter of those projects are on hold because of cost overruns.
“Things are happening,” Hathaway said. “It’s not dire straits.”
Vexing challenges
Some of New Orleans’ challenges, while vexing, are not unique among American cities.
Like many older towns, New Orleans’ population peaked more than half a century ago, at 630,000. Today, just over half that many people live here.
Some New Orleans potholes last so long that they become part of the cityscape. Occasionally, they acquire sardonic decorations, like this one at the corner of Constance and Dufossat streets.
Integration, suburbanization and the interstate highways unleashed a wave of White flight, and with it, much of the city’s wealth.
Even as the population shriveled, the city’s developed footprint grew: Hundreds of miles of new streets and pipes and canals and other infrastructure needed to be maintained.
Ironically, the growth was only possible because of advances in drainage New Orleans made during the 20th century. The Wood screw pump allowed city leaders to dewater the backswamp, making areas that for two centuries had been considered uninhabitable fit for settlement.
The then-prosperous city soon spread far from its original hub along the natural levee hugging the Mississippi River.
But the drainage revolution had unforeseen effects. Depriving the former swamp of water caused the land to sink, slowly but dramatically. The subsidence causes roads to buckle and ancient pipes — some made of terra cotta — to crack.
Lakeview residents walk through construction materials en route to their cars on May 15, 2024.
The consequences today are clear in newer sections of town like Gentilly, where — funded with a tranche of federal relief dollars — the city has torn up huge chunks of the residential streets between Gentilly Boulevard and the lake.
Kevin Bozant, a retired graphic designer, said he welcomes the improvements on his block of Painters Street. But it’s also been a hassle.
On a recent afternoon, he said the street had been off-limits to traffic since the fall, forcing the area’s many older residents to park on neighboring streets.
Bozant, 71, said he took a fall while towing his trash cans around the corner, after one wheel got caught on construction netting.
“It’s good, I guess, in the long run,” he said. “It’s a pain in the ass for now.”
Politics at play
As the city’s footprint expanded in the last decades of the 20th century, its taxpayers continued to leave. Those who remained grew less willing or able to pay for upkeep, which only made things worse.
Political timidity was also part of the equation.
Unlike water boards in other cities, the S&WB's rates were capped under the Louisiana constitution, which meant increases had to be approved by state lawmakers.
The Legislature — and later the City Council — largely declined to increase water and sewer rates for most of the 20th century, according to a study by the nonprofit Bureau of Governmental Research, which concluded that political pressure was a key reason for the S&WB’s historic lack of funding.
Then, in 1991, New Orleans voters declined to renew a 100-year-old tax that supported drainage work.
In response, S&WB officials handed over the operation and maintenance of roughly two-thirds of the city’s stormwater management.
Just like that, City Hall became responsible for tens of thousands of catch basins and roughly 1,200 miles of underground pipelines — with no additional money to deal with them.
“From that point, it’s been an uphill battle to solve the problem,” said Cedric Grant, a former deputy mayor who oversaw public works and the S&WB under Mayor Mitch Landrieu.
State and local officials recently advanced plans to return maintenance of that infrastructure back into the S&WB’s hands. But it’s not clear how or if that will be funded, with the S&WB estimating it needs at least $30 million for catch basin maintenance.
His job helps keep New Orleans streets from flooding. There are few like him left.
A major boost came recently through the city’s share of pandemic relief money, $10 million of which the City Council set aside in 2022 solely for the purpose of clearing catch basins.
But not a dollar of it was spent until this spring.
Joe Threat, Cantrell’s infrastructure chief, has vowed that the city’s crews — along with the help of contractors — will clear 7,500 catch basins by the end of the year.
But Threat also acknowledged that the public works department is overwhelmed by a backlog of complaints. In late May, Threat asked residents to stop filing complaints about catch basins and contact their local council representatives instead.
More money
Just as it would be facile to blame all of New Orleans’ woes on the city’s swampy foundation, it would be an oversimplification to chalk up the sorry state of its infrastructure to a lack of money.
For one, the city’s revenue picture has dramatically improved.
After an overhaul of property assessments, City Hall now takes in about $190 million a year in property taxes. That’s 43% more in constant dollars than it brought in two decades ago — to serve a population that’s shrunk by roughly a quarter.
On top of that, the city’s budget this year is stuffed with more than $300 million in federal grants, an amount that dwarfs any American city of comparable size.
New Orleans’ $1.5 billion budget is twice as big as that of Memphis; almost three times the size of Birmingham, Alabama; five times the size of Charleston, South Carolina.
'Absurd' staffing
Instead, the problems stem partly from a quiet, yet significant, change in the way the city spends its money over the last generation — in a way that impedes basic tasks from getting done.
Under Mayor Marc Morial in the 1990s, though the city had far less money, the public works department spent almost twice as much on its personnel as it does today and employed six times as many maintenance workers, records show.
“That’s absolutely absurd,” Morial said, when told of today’s numbers. Even in lean economic times, keeping stoplights working and streets passable always remained a priority, said Morial, who served from 1994 to 2002.
“Basic city services, you have to do that first,” said Morial, now the president of the National Urban League. “Police, fire, streets — that’s what people pay taxes for.”
An Edible Flowers delivery driver, top center, had to walk through a maze of road construction to get to a home in the Lakeview neighborhood on May 15, 2024.
New Orleans didn’t simply cut services — it outsourced them, in many cases, an effort that accelerated around when Morial left office. Buras, the former deputy city attorney, said officials were trying to save money by avoiding workers’ compensation claims and tightening the city’s pension rolls.
Hiring private companies also allowed City Hall to avoid what officials describe as a burdensome civil service system that was designed, at least in part, to defeat the patronage politics that defined the era of Huey P. Long.
Striking shifts
It's difficult to determine just how much the public works department has relied on contractors because — unlike many local governments — New Orleans doesn’t itemize the expenses in its budget and hasn’t for the last 30 years.
Street flooding in Treme on April 10, 2024.
But payroll records and archived city budgets show a striking shift in the city’s in-house capabilities.
The city has more than 1,500 miles of streets and is down to just one full-time pothole crew. The city recently spent more than $1.1 million on four catch basin trucks, but doesn’t have the manpower to staff all of them full time.
Even the council’s budget chair, Council member Joe Giarrusso, said he was unaware of the extent to which the public works department has been diminished.
“Many of us would prefer to have these services in-house,” Giarrusso said.
Raising alarms
The city’s outsourcing of public works has helped create a huge and growing backlog of routine maintenance.
For a generation, outside consultants have been raising alarms about what the BGR has called the “deplorable” conditions of the city’s streets, drainage system and other infrastructure.
A 2016 study gave about two-thirds of the roads in New Orleans a failing grade, or said they don’t meet today’s minimum standards.
Crystal Hidalgo attempts to unclog a catch basin in Treme on April 10, 2024.
By the city’s own estimates, every dollar invested in preventive maintenance can save $4 or $5 in repair costs down the road. Yet for every dollar that officials say is needed, the council budgets only about 16 cents a year, according to research by the BGR.
In 2019, voters rejected a tax hike that would have brought in an estimated $50 million over the last five years for routine maintenance. Voters did approve $500 million in bond sales that officials said would be spent on large capital improvements, including drainage projects.
Backsliding badly
The results haven’t gotten any better: The number of potholes filled annually has fallen by 35% over the last decade, audit reports show. Similarly, the number of streetlight outages restored each year dropped by 84%.
A NOLA sign in the front yard of a Lakeview home surrounded by street construction on May 15, 2024.
Perhaps no issue is as urgent for New Orleans as flooding, against which the city’s catch basins provide a first line of defense. Yet the city this year says crews will unclog only 1 in 10 of them — and that would represent a huge improvement from last year.
Even so, it's well short of the city’s previously stated goal of about 1 in 5, which was achieved the last full year under Landrieu, records show.
“If not for the engineering, there’s no reason anybody in the world should live in New Orleans,” said Grant, the former public works czar.
Even with the engineering, Grant said, “it needs to be maintained to survive.”
Rising waters
Too often, that’s not happening. In Treme, residents say they’re as worried as ever that the city is failing to protect their homes from floodwaters.
A neighborhood group, which was formed three decades ago to address the historic area’s lack of economic development and affordable housing, has shifted its focus to drainage.
Cheryl Austin, director of the Greater Treme Consortium, watches her neighborhood flood on April 10, 2024.
Fed up with the lack of response from the city, the Greater Treme Consortium does what it can. The group’s director, Cheryl Austin, said they’ve installed more than 60 rain barrels, rain gardens, French drains and planter boxes designed to capture stormwater.
They’ve also planted 50 trees and removed 900 square feet of concrete, which exacerbates flooding, Austin said.
In the fall, the group hosted a workshop that trained Treme residents on steps they can take to help.
Austin was standing in heavy rain that pooled around her ankles during a recent storm when one of the flyers she handed out for that event floated past her.
She could only laugh.
Staff writer Jeff Adelson contributed to this report.
