In Orleans Parish, citizens are keeping their fingers crossed that they’ll avoid another boil water advisory from yet another water main break. That’s not the case in neighboring Jefferson Parish. So, what’s up with that?
Becky Mowbray is a former journalist and government watchdog who is now President and CEO of the Bureau of Government Research. She says the more patchwork makeup of New Orleans’ Sewerage and Water Board makes it inherently more clunky and less responsive than Jefferson Parish’s more flexible and centralized system.
“They have (in Jefferson Parish) a larger Department of Public Works and within Public Works, they handle street and traffic light functions, they have a water department and a drainage department. They handle all of those issues that, in New Orleans, are just fielded by The Sewerage and Water Board,” Mowbray points out.
She says Jefferson Parish’s more centralized Department of Public Works allows the parish to be more flexible and responsive when infrastructure issues pop up. Ultimately, New Orleans’ patchwork approach to solving infrastructure issues only after they become a problem has put the parish in dire financial straits.
“Decades of deferred maintenance are now coming back to bite us. A lot of people throughout a lot of the 20th century didn’t pay the full cost of the system. So, now all of us who are here are dealing with the problems and the spiraling costs of that,” added Mowbray.
Ultimately, she believes leadership in the city of New Orleans will have to make some tough and potentially unpopular decisions to raise revenue so they can make much-needed infrastructure repairs.
“Make no mistake. We’re in a terrible situation where the full costs of running the system for decades were not paid by the people who benefited from it. It’s a generational cost transfer and we’re certainly shouldering the problems of a broken system,” Mowbray conceded to those concerned about potentially rising bills.
Across parish lines, a vastly different infrastructure picture
