The City of New Orleans will not be able to spend an allotment of 2-billion dollars for street repairs by the August 2023 deadline.
By not completing the roadwork and missing the deadline to use the money, New Orleans will miss out on whatever cash was left on account with the federal government.
The City Council was apprised of this Thursday by Deputy Chief Administrative Officer for Infrastructure, Joe Threat.
In his remarks to the Council, Threat stated the Cantrell Administration is banking on the federal government to approve a deadline extension.
According to a report in The Lens, New Orleans has spent somewhere between 25-to-50% of the money allocated for road and infrastructure repair from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
That amounts to around a billion dollars being left on the table.
A shift in priorities, away from post-Hurricane Katrina roadway and pipeline projects to addressing the growing number of projects stalled or not being fully completed means the City may have to walk away from the table full of cash.
“The first priority is to close the work we have out on the streets right now,” Threat told the Council.
He also said the City has a good chance to get a deadline extension from the federal government.
According to the online source, the shift to addressing the more immediate problem of potholes and incomplete repairs is part of Threat’s mark on the department in light of the departure of CAO Ramsey Green.
“This is my city too. My car is in the shop from running over potholes. And it’s something we’ve got to fix,” Threat testified. “We owe it to the residents to fix it. So I’ve taken on the challenge when the mayor asked me to step up.”
The two-billion dollars came from Hurricane Katrina money granted to the City in 2015 for the Joint Infrastructure Recovery Request.
The money was to be spent fixing aged and broken Sewerage and Water Board pipelines as well as fix potholes in streets.
The original goal was to get as many projects going as possible—to put as much of the money to work getting the problems fixed.
Over the years, though, many projects has languished in incomplete states making streets even less passable than before.
“Really it was my job and Ramsey’s job to put money on the street and try to spend those funds. Now we see the problem of putting all the money out on the street at the same time. We pushed the contractors to capacity,” Threat said.
“The only remedy at this point is time out, let’s not do that anymore, let’s complete waves one and two and close up these neighborhoods, then have a strategy … moving forward with the next third and fourth and fifth waves we have scheduled right now.”
