Amid city budget cuts, New Orleans Mayor-elect Helena Moreno has gutted the Mayor’s Office of Resilience and Sustainability (ORS). The office will lose nearly half its staff, including its director.
Chris Lang, the office’s circular economy and policy program director, said he and other colleagues received emails yesterday afternoon stating they would no longer be retained past Monday (Jan. 12).
“Urban agriculture's protected, and the stormwater and green infrastructure team, urban water team is safe. They didn't get terminated,” he said. “So basically the energy, the waste and the transportation folks, as well as the director position [were cut].”
Lang said the office primarily deals with quality of life issues for New Orleans residents, like increasing recycling access, tree canopy, bikeability and solar affordability.
The cuts came as a surprise to both the office’s staff and Moreno’s transition committee on climate and sustainability.
”This is news to us, and news to me,” said Davante Lewis, the committee’s chair. “But I’m hopeful that in the coming days we can be able to hear what the administration's plans are going forward.”
Jackson Voss, another member of the transition committee and the governmental affairs and policy coordinator at the Alliance for Affordable Energy, said the cuts directly contradict the committee’s recommendations to bolster the ORS, which included making the office a permanent city department or elevating its leadership to a cabinet-level position.
“ I think that this is the wrong direction to go, and I suspect there are many people across the city who feel the same way and expected (Moreno) to really be a champion for climate in a very different way than closing ORS,” he said. “I hope that they will reconsider this move.”
According to the 2025 adopted city budget, the office had an operating budget of about $1.4 million dollars. The office also manages hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants.
“We're coming from mostly federal funds, outside of some of our salaries,” Lang said. “But I would say the biggest hit is really because there isn't really an office outside of ours that's leveraging these federal funds and working across departments.”
In a written statement to WWNO, Moreno’s transition team said the change “embeds climate and resilience work across City Hall, not siloed in a single office. This ensures these priorities are integrated into the daily work of core departments where implementation and accountability occur with urgency.”
Moreno’s team also said there will now be eight positions under the ORS and the Chief Administrative Office, “responsible for grants operations, electrification, clean fleet, benchmarking, and outreach,” in addition to a few other positions now scattered across other city departments.
“I respectfully disagree with that idea, that there shouldn't be an office that's focused on ensuring that New Orleans is a place where we're doing the work that's necessary for people to live here, for generations to come,” said Voss. “And I think that that is what we're losing in losing the ORS office.”
Aimee McCarron, who is replacing Moreno as the chair of the City Council’s Climate and Sustainability Committee, said she was also not informed these cuts were coming and is planning on calling for a meeting on the subject as soon as she is sworn into the City Council next week.
“ I am committed to understanding what this means for the city and then how the council can work on it,” said McCarron. “We have the ability to do some things through the climate committee, and if I need to take on some of these things, then it's something that I'm willing to do and willing to partner with the administration on to make sure that we have these initiatives.”
