New Orleans may be paying for more garbage pickup than is needed

Before the city of New Orleans can raise the sanitation fee residents pay for garbage and recycling collection, it needs to figure out just how many households are using the service.

New Orleans Mayor Helena Moreno said the city is not breaking even on the sanitation fee, but Louisiana Legislative Auditor Mike Waguespack says that fee not be based on real numbers.

The fee is collected with Sewerage & Water Board bills, but the Sewerage & Water Board has 34,000 fewer customers than what the city is paying for.

"We're potentially paying for 164,000 service units, meaning a resident with a garbage can or two, and we only have payers for 130,000," Waguespack told WWL's Newell Normand.

Some of it, the auditor says, may be duplicates of existing addresses.

"You might have one data set that has the address of '100 Rosa Park,' whereas the other data set may have '100 Rosa Park Street.' So we've got to clean that up," Waguespack said. "Are we serving vacant homes? What's going on."

Waguespack says there is also a discrepancy between New Orleans' recent population losses and the amount of trash service the vendors say they need to deliver: "We ask the question, 'has the vendors ever sent in a list reducing the number of units served?' They said, 'no, it's always an increase.'"