The city of New Orleans has so many infrastructure challenges that our reporters could write about a different one every day — and some weeks, they do.
Age, deferred maintenance, the area’s unique environmental challenges, jurisdictional confusion and bureaucratic shortcomings all contribute to a frustrating reality for weary residents. As anyone knows who suffered through last week’s citywide boil water advisory or is following the paper’s “Broken City” investigative series — which most recently highlighted hundreds of missing or less-than-optimally functional fire hydrants on our streets — the hits never stop.
All that said, we are seeing a few reasons for hope of late.
A bright spot out of the spring legislative session was a new law to put all parts of the drainage system under the Sewerage & Water Board, instead of dividing responsibility between the board and City Hall. This has got to be a more functional system; it’s hard to imagine a less functional one than two different agencies responsible for one set of pipes.
Elsewhere, a group of agencies working on improvements ahead of next year’s Super Bowl is making visible progress; coordinator and GNO Inc. CEO Michael Hecht says things are going so smoothly that officials hope to keep the system they’ve developed going after the big game.
Even a new critical state Legislative Auditor report on the timeliness of city payments to contractors offers some reason for hope.
The findings themselves don’t reflect well on the city. The report found that New Orleans has trouble tracking how long it takes to pay vendors; they generally get their money within 30 days of invoices being entered into a central system, but the city cannot track how long these payments take from initial submission to final payment. The current process allows for delays due to contracting and purchase orders, and it also permits unpaid invoices to be deleted and reentered, thus starting the clock anew, the report found.
This is not only unfair to people who do the work; it also may well deter potential contractors from bidding on jobs that badly need doing, which could end up costing taxpayers more, City Council President Helena Moreno noted when the report came out.
But the document also gives some grounds for optimism.
It says the auditors looked into the system pursuant to a City Council resolution — the result of the council, which has historically left infrastructure matters to the administration, taking a stronger hand in trying to unravel problems. While this new aggressive stance has sometimes led to conflict with Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s administration, the mayor and her team embraced the auditor’s findings and said they’re already working on fixes.
So hopefully this audit will lead to problems being solved, not just more hand-wringing and finger-pointing. The city’s seen too much of that for too long, and it hasn’t gotten us anywhere.