Due to an overabundance of devotion to her constituency and a sharp sense of financial prudence, Mayor LaToya Cantrell decided to veto the budget proposed by the New Orleans City Council and Mayor-elect Helena Moreno.
"As Mayor, I have a responsibility to ensure that New Orleans operates with a balanced, sustainable, and legally sound budget," Cantrell said in a statement Friday, where she explains how the “amendments passed by the City Council rely on revenue that is uncertain, unverified, or based on one-time sources."
I’m sure I speak for most of us when I say: Thank God we’ve had such a principled leader over these past 8 years. Otherwise, we might have found ourselves $160 million in the hole for 2025; and staring down the barrel of a $222 million deficit for 2026; and having to watch our leaders high-tail it to Baton Rouge to figure out how the hell we’re going to pay essential city workers through the rest of the year.
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I read newspapers from major cities across this country every day. I’m not being rhetorical when I say New Orleans may have the single most ignorant mayor in the entire country. And it’s a willful, vicious ignorance.
It seems like Mayor Cantrell wants to pretend that she just came to the realization now, in December 2025, weeks prior to her final day in office, that it was her responsibility all along to steward the budget.
In her statement, Cantrell bemoans the fact that the budget and ideas proposed by the City Council are “not guaranteed revenues, and building a budget around them puts the City’s financial stability at risk. The plan also relies on employee furloughs—an approach that would harm City services and unfairly burden the workforce that keeps our city running.”
She adds that these ideas haven't been vetted before Louisiana's Revenue Estimating Committee, despite the fact that the budget proposal she vetoed was responsible for getting the state bond commission on board to approve the emergency loan to help limp us across the finish line.
The person talking about a "sound budget" is the same person who oversaw and adopted a budget that didn't account for NOPD overtime. And now she's hurt that her budget was thrown out. Well, perhaps the reason your budget wasn't the accepted solution, madame mayor, was that your administration couldn't even pull the numbers together to identify the scale of the budget crisis in the first place.
Your team didn’t even know the size of the wound, so why should your team be responsible for creating the bandage?
A legislative auditor had to crunch the final numbers, which ended up being far bigger than your team initially expressed. Then, through the discovery process, your team flat-out misled the council as they tried to come to conclusions in order to make the tough decisions regarding the future of this city's spending.
This act of self-righteousness is a last-ditch effort by Cantrell to make it all about her. And to do so, she's throwing whoever she can under the bus, such as trying to make it appear like the council has been opaque in putting forth a new budget.
If they were trying to pass this budget under a cloak of darkness, it was the worst-kept secret in America. Both Moreno and Giarrusso appeared on my show multiple times to explain how the 2026 budget is going to hurt, and they went to just about every other local outlet to repeat that message. But they did us the service of explaining themselves and showing their work. They explained why Cantrell's proposal of 30% sweeping cuts was irrational. They were fully up front about the reality of furloughs and how one-time revenues, again, aren’t ideal, but in this case, are 100% necessary. It was more than Cantrell ever thought to do for the tax-paying citizen.
That’s just where we’re at.
But we all know that this is a mayor who doesn't give a damn about anybody who lives in the city of New Orleans. She’s been spiteful and permanently stuck gazing inward. Now, because of that, the city has to wear this $222 million deficit as a badge of shame until we can pass a budget to mitigate the damage.
This is why, for Cantrell to even employ the vocabulary of "balance," "sustainability," and "legal-soundness" when referencing the budget is just a sick, selfish joke. And we're already seeing how we're worse off for her mismanagement and how those effects are leaving scars to carry on even after she's gone.
Just to use one example, coming out of her 8 years in office, we’re realizing that the city has to pause its extensive road work program. Dozens of blocks of roads will remain in purgatory due to budget issues. And we just have to sit around and pray that FEMA extends the deadlines.
The tragic part is that Cantrell could've used her final months to cement for herself a legacy of cooperation in working with the new transition team. There could've been a genuine effort to position the city for success. But it's clear she isn't interested in that even slightly.
She's done nothing but throw metaphorical elbows and stick metaphorical wrenches into the cogs of the machine she's so poorly managed for the last 8 years.
And I hate that so many people, myself included, are looking forward to seeing her go.