The Sewerage & Water Board has long been the butt of jokes and a target of angry complaints, but a new poll by the New Orleans Crime Coalition puts some stark numbers behind the derision: 80% of the people surveyed disapprove of the job the agency’s doing, while only 16% approve.
The agency — which is tasked with supplying clean drinking water, disposing of sewage and draining a sunken city — faces unique and often overwhelming challenges, including antiquated equipment, inefficient official overlap with city and state governments, a heavy reliance on engineering to clear out excess water and perennial funding shortfalls for massive capital needs. So any good news has to be put in perspective.
Still, there are promising developments.
Call it low-hanging fruit, but those mystery bills that too often frustrate residents should soon be a thing of the past.
The board has begun installing “smart” meters and plans to finish the job citywide next year. This will bring an end to the dreaded usage “estimates” that can defy understanding. And it will replace a manual meter-reading system that Ghassan Korban, the S&WB’s executive director, told The Times-Picayune Editorial Board contains built-in opportunities for error.
With the new meters, real readings will be electronically captured, and the software should be able to help pinpoint explanations for spikes in use, rather than just send what customers assume is a wrongly inflated bill.
In the interim, state officials, led by Gov. Jeff Landry, are offering help through targeted legislation.
One new law, authored by state Rep. Stephanie Hilferty, R-New Orleans, offers customers the option for level billing until the estimates go away and creates a badly needed arbitration process for disputes.
The Legislature also passed a bill by state Sen. Jimmy Harris, D-New Orleans, to shift responsibility for keeping the catch basins clear from the city’s Department of Public Works to the S&WB; it is awaiting action from Landry.
Until now responsibility for various parts of the drainage system has been divided between the city and water board, leading to what Korban called a lot of undue finger-pointing over why floods happen in certain situations. For example, if flooding is localized, he explained, then clearly the problem is at the catch-basin rather than the systemic level.
“You can’t have a dry street and a wet street and blame pumping,“ he said.
Still to be worked out is full funding to pay for the water board’s new duties.
Lawmakers passed a bill that included an amendment by Hilferty that directs traffic camera revenue to drainage, another positive development. But the total amount it would provide and other details are not yet clear.
These changes, though, represent steps in the right direction for an agency that has a long way to go to earn public trust.