The New Orleans City Council is poised to pass Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s $1.78 billion budget for 2025 at its regular meeting on Thursday (Nov. 21) – but with some notable additions.
An “omnibus amendment” to the budget, proposed by the council, will add nearly $69 million to Cantrell’s budget — taken from the city’s general fund and unspent reserve dollars — with money going to increased departmental staffing, homeless services and the Orleans Parish School Board, among other priorities.
If passed, the council’s modified budget will include additional funding for a slate of affordable housing, public safety and quality-of-life measures, as well as key increases for a small number of city agencies, including the Coroner’s Office and the Office of Homeless Services.
“From basic quality-of-life needs and working on large-scale economic development projects to funding interventional services and allocating money to all aspects of public safety, this Council has proved its commitment to improving the lives of all New Orleanians,” CouncilmemberJoe Giarrusso, who chairs the budget committee, said in a statement.
When Chief Administrative Officer Gilbert Montaño presented the executive budget at the beginning of October, he warned that a number of requests from department heads could not be accommodated while the city works to “right-size” departmental budgets. The effort to shrink departmental spending comes as the city faces the exhaustion of federal pandemic relief funds and shrinking departmental staffing levels.
“We’ve had the ebbs and flows of a significant amount of one-time money; we’ve had the ebbs and flows of significant revenue loss, and now we’re stabilizing,” Montaño said at the time.
The amended budget comes after four weeks of budget hearings before the council and four community meetings around the city. At the hearings, multiple city departments and agencies pressed the council for more funding, especially for hiring and retaining workers, while at the community meetings, residents pressed mainly for local quality-of-life issues, according to Giarrusso.
“People are concerned about the things that are district-specific, so it should never be a surprise that you’re going to have questions about specific infrastructure needs,” Giarrusso told Verite News. “If you listen to people, there’s definitely a sense of, ‘We’re paying more, but we don’t think the services are commensurate with what we’re paying,’ and we know how hard that is.”
As a result of feedback from those meetings, Giarrusso said that the council made sizable commitments to a few city agencies.
The council’s amended budget would add more than a half million dollars to the Coroner’s Office to support additional staffing, fulfilling a longtime request by Coroner Dwight McKenna for more money to hire additional pathologists. Councilmembers also plan to provide an additional $1 million to the Orleans Parish Communications District — which runs the city’s 911 call center — to help the agency meet its staffing requirements.
The council also plans to allocate an additional $10 million to the Office of Homeless Services. According to a memo provided by Giarrusso’s office, that money will fund housing navigators and outreach specialists, as well as support for local shelters and the office’s rehousing efforts.
However, other city departments weren’t so lucky.
The council did not increase funding for the Orleans Public Defenders. At an October budget hearing, New Orleans Chief Public Defender Danny Engelberg said that his office was overburdened due to resurgent “tough on crime” policies and intervention from state agencies — such as the Louisiana State Police’s Troop NOLA and the state Attorney General, which is handling some prosecutions in Orleans Parish Criminal District Court.
“All of these changes stress an already overburdened system ill-equipped to adequately and appropriately address a myriad of public health and social needs of the community and require OPD to adapt even more to meet the moment and best serve our clients,” he said at the hearing.
Engelberg also pointed to the fact that his office was facing eviction from Tulane Tower – where the Orleans Public Defenders have long rented space – since the building is up for sale. He asked the council for help in purchasing the building so that the public defenders’ office could remain near the intersection Tulane Avenue and South Broad Street, the locus of the criminal justice system in the city.
But the council did not increase or amend the budget for the public defenders in its proposed budget amendment.
Nor does the amendment include more funding for the Departments of Public Works or the Department of Safety and Permits, both of which face cuts under Cantrell’s executive budget. But Giarrusso did note that the city is working on retaining a hiring firm to help staff up those departments.
“Those are critical public safety agencies, and they’re understaffed,” Giarrusso said. He noted that the council could appropriate more funding in future budget amendments to support additional staffing in those departments.
Some of the council’s proposed budget additions will benefit projects outside of city government.
The council allocated millions of dollars to address the housing crisis in the city, providing substantial support to affordable housing projects.
The most significant new line-item amendments to the city’s budget will provide gap financing for multiple housing developments. The council plans to appropriate $12 million toward affordable housing within the Charity Hospital development, $2 million toward the Gold Seal affordable housing development and $1 million toward a building at the Naval Base, which should create nearly 300 affordable housing units.
The council also plans to dedicate $10 million to the Orleans Parish School Board to help it address the NOLA Public Schools district’s estimated $36 million budget gap. The money is coming as part of a proposed $20 million settlement to a long-running lawsuit the School Board filed against the city.
If the amended budget passes, the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority will once again get a $3 million city subsidy to support the Algiers Ferry, as it did earlier this year. (The agency asked the council for $7 million last month.) And at the request of Councilmember Oliver Thomas, the council will dedicate $5 million to support site mitigation efforts at the Six Flags site in New Orleans East as part of a major ongoing redevelopment.
The council also plans to dedicate tens of thousands of dollars to support a local food pantry, a tire clean-up incentive program, services for domestic violence victims and a study on bringing more grocery stores into New Orleans East.
“Investing in a fresh food initiative is a vital step toward improving public health, economic development, and addressing systemic inequities,” Thomas, whose district includes most of New Orleans East, told Verite News. “Access to fresh, nutritious food is a fundamental right, yet my District faces barriers such as food deserts and the prevalence of low-quality foods.”