Mayor LaToya Cantrell may have only 40 days left in office, but she's in the middle of yet another battle with members of the New Orleans City Council.
This time, Cantrell and the mayor-elect are at odds over how to fill the city's budget deficit.
Cantrell caught the ire of council members after she refused to allow Councilman Joe Giarrusso to proceed with a presentation on how the council plans to fill the city's budget hole by adding revenue that's available to the city. Cantrell claimed the council left her in the dark.
"There have been requests for information, presentation, (and) documentation to no avail," Cantrell said. "I don't feel comfortable rendering a vote. That's not comfortable at all."
Cantrell repeated the point after council member Oliver Thomas raised his own concerns about the process.
"You said you('re a) dummy. I must be Dummy #2 because my team and I have not have the thorough conversations and the vetting that we have asked for--and asked for repeatedly--leading up to this REC meeting that was called," Cantrell said.
But Mayor-elect Helena Moreno told WWL's Newell Normand that that's not true. In fact, Moreno says she and her council colleagues showed their work not only to Cantrell... but to the general public as well.
"Kind of the concept of it all was sent to the Cantrell Administration. I was on your show talking about it with Councilmember Giarrusso. You have all the numbers," Moreno said.
According to Moreno, she and other city leaders asked Mayor Cantrell to meet with them ahead of Monday's meeting to go over their plan to infuse cash into the budget.
"At that point, the mayor declined, saying it was a holiday and that people were off traveling and all these different things," Moreno said, adding that she would have been happy with a virtual meeting. "Seeing this level of resistance ahead to even talk about these revenue enhancements to the budget, that's when I started to think that there could be coming, obviously, or at the REC meeting."
Moreno said Cantrell's refusal to meet or to consider the council's ideas runs counter to how the city government typically handles the budget process.
"Every other time, Newell, that it's been budget season, I can tell you that we work weekends with the CAO's office," Moreno said. "We worked nights. We worked whatever it took to get this budget right."
Even though Cantrell shut down the presentation during the committee meeting, the full council voted to accept the additional revenues and to add them to the budget anyway.
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