New Orleans Mayor Helena Moreno’s administration says almost $80 million in cuts are needed to help fill a $100 million deficit in the city’s budget for next year if city officials don’t increase taxes.
At a New Orleans City Council meeting on Tuesday (Sept. 22), Moreno and Joe Giarrusso, the city’s chief administrative officer, said that the city could make up around $77 million from a 2027 budget proposal Moreno called “lean,” and an additional $22 million from one-time funding sources like grants.
“Last year, we had to make difficult decisions to get out of a financial crisis,” she told the council. “This year, we have to make difficult decisions to make sure that we do not fall back into one.”
Those “difficult decisions” in last year’s budget included employee furloughs, a hiring freeze and significantly downsizing city departments, like the Mayor’s Office of Resilience and Sustainability.
Moreno committed to halting furloughs next year — though Giarrusso said this year’s budget calls for cutting 152 full-time city jobs. The city is still looking at a hiring freeze in 2027.
Moreno and Giarrusso also proposed a 10% salary cut for themselves, which would save the city around $50,000.
The pair repeatedly said that many of the proposed cuts could be avoided if the city chooses to roll forward its millages next year — which would effectively amount to a tax hike for residents. Depending on which millages are passed, the city could get anywhere from $26 million to $42 million in revenue; enough to negate some, but not all, of the proposed cuts.
Reaction to the proposed millages has been strong and mostly negative, even among some council members.
“ We're saying we need more money,” District E Councilmember Jason Hughes said at the meeting. “We want residents to put more skin in the game. But if they're getting a level of excuses and poor quality of services that they're currently paying [for], what's the incentive to pay more?”
Moreno and Giarrusso laid out specific proposed cuts to several departments if the city failed to increase any millages, including cutting some non-officer positions in the New Orleans Police Department, scaling back Mardi Gras cleanup and a reduction in the health department's budget.
But they said no matter what, they’re leaving the Council on Aging and the New Orleans Recreation Department Commission alone.
They also said they’ll prioritize “essential services” defined by residents at the city’s budget town halls held around the city in September: “ transformative streets and infrastructure, safer neighborhoods, more opportunities through NORD, building economic opportunity and clean, functional neighborhoods,” according to Giarrusso.
Moreno’s budget proposal also received community pushback tied to the proposed cuts — specifically cuts tied to homelessness funding and internship training. One of the cuts Moreno mentioned was recouping $2.5 million by closing the city’s only low-barrier city-run homelessness shelter.
Nellie Catzen, with the advocacy group Committee for a Better New Orleans, told the city council those cuts would be hard felt.
“These cuts, paired with federal funding cuts to Medicaid, will put the pain you mentioned on the most vulnerable people. People who are already hurting,” she told the council.
The council will hold more budget hearings later this month, ahead of a final vote in November.
