Roadwork frustrations, widespread delays plague New Orleans; what will the city do to fix it?
Cratered, trenched and stripped streets dot New Orleans, preventing access to homes and businesses and turning simple navigation into a maze of detours. It’s common to find residents whose streets have been inaccessible for months or longer, dug up without any sign of new work or any indication when the project will finally end.
Frustrations over the widespread delays, which have accompanied the unprecedented number of road improvement projects in New Orleans, took center stage before a City Council committee Thursday. But even as administration officials said they were moving to crack down on lax contractors in the future, residents pointed to the nuisances they face now.
“There’s a trench in front of my house that’s three feet deep. It’s been there over a month, and there’s not a worker in sight,” said Richard Murphy, a civil engineer who lives in the Irish Channel and couldn’t understand how job sites are left to sit unfinished across the neighborhood.
Much of the current work is funded by 2015 FEMA settlement for $2 billion over damage to streets and pipes from flooding during Hurricane Katrina. For years, administration officials - both under Mayor LaToya Cantrell and her predecessor, Mitch Landrieu - have acknowledged some problems while trying publicly to focus on the eventual benefits of such a huge amount of roadwork, saying that with progress comes temporary pain.
But residents are now “feeling more pain than progress from city contractors,” said council member Joe Giarrusso, who chairs the Public Works Committee. “Some of this has been brewing for a long time and people have known what these problems are, so we need these solutions to be able to strengthen the communication and drastically cut down on the delays.”
The complaints are widespread and numerous. Giarrusso brought out a 2½-inch-thick binder of emails about problems in the streets program. One neighborhood just held a "birthday party" for a Lakeview street that has been dug up for a year with no sign that workers were returning to fill it, he said.
Council member Jay Banks hammered the Cantrell administration on a particularly problematic stretch along the riverfront where work in the Garden District and Irish Channel has been stalled for months. The administration needs to say “there will be no future project started until the ones that are opened up are now finished,” Banks said.
All five district council members could point to other problem areas.
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