NEW ORLEANS — The City of New Orleans today announced a comprehensive overhaul of its sanitation system to correct years of broken processes, modernize sanitation records and establish a fee that reflects the actual cost of service.
The reforms follow a Legislative Auditor review requested by the Moreno Administration that identified two fundamental problems: an unsustainable funding structure and an outdated service-location database requiring significant reconciliation and modernization.
These problems are longstanding. Accuracy issues with the City’s sanitation service list were identified by the Office of Inspector General as far back as 2010, yet the City never established a formal process for routinely updating the list. The Auditor’s current review identified thousands of potentially improper service locations, including retired, duplicate and potentially ineligible addresses.
There are also glaring inconsistencies between the properties the City is paying contractors to service and the properties actually being billed for sanitation services. City service-location records and Sewerage and Water Board billing records do not consistently align, including discrepancies between the number of units serviced and the number billed.
At the same time, the sanitation fee has failed to keep pace with the actual cost of service. Contractor costs have increased, while the City’s fee structure has not kept pace. The City has also not charged residents a recycling fee since Hurricane Katrina, despite curbside recycling resuming in 2011.
The Moreno Administration is addressing these problems together through a Sanitation Accountability and Funding Reform Initiative. The City has already begun a comprehensive reconciliation expected to take approximately seven months, including comparing City, Sewerage and Water Board and Assessor records; removing duplicate, retired, vacant and ineligible properties; reconciling billing and service discrepancies; and establishing standardized procedures to prevent these problems from recurring.
The Administration is also completing a cost-of-service analysis and final calculations for a revised sanitation fee based on the actual cost of providing service, which will be presented to the City Council next week.
The overhaul will include stronger internal controls, routine reconciliation of contractor service lists, improved billing accuracy and customer protections, including continued protections for seniors and qualifying low-income households.
“This system has been broken for years, and too many of these problems were identified and then allowed to continue. We are going to fix all sides of it, who is being billed, how much the service actually costs and how the records are maintained. We are correcting years of problems instead of passing them on to another administration, and we are going to build a sanitation system that is accurate, accountable and financially sustainable. I want to thank the Legislative Auditor and his team for their thorough review and recommendations to finally get this longstanding issue resolved,” said Mayor Helena Moreno.
Louisiana Legislative Auditor’s Report: Click Here