To fix New Orleans budget, City Hall must show receipts 

It’s 2026, and New Orleans is once again looking to residents to help close a budget gap. That’s a hard sell when money is tight. It’s even harder when they don’t trust the city with what they’ve already given.

This is a problem we’ve seen repeating itself over and over for decades; especially in the past two years of acute budget crisis. 

We saw it earlier this year with the sanitation fee increase. Until then, the fee had been unchanged since 2015 (back when gas cost $2 a gallon). But still, the increase faced major public pushback. 

We saw it last year with the school board lawsuit, when residents had to choose whether to believe the city council, the then-Cantrell administration’s chief administrative officer, or the finance director, who each had a different story about the city’s fiscal standing.

Time and time again, the city’s financial picture reaches New Orleanians in pieces and residents are left to guess how they fit together. We get glimpses of untold truths in the news – NOPD payroll fraud is responsible for some of the more than $25 million overspent on overtime. New Orleans trash contractors are being paid for services they’re not delivering. The legislative auditor uncovers a $160 million budget hole that the Cantrell administration obscured and the city council didn’t have enough information to see. 

With each emerging story, the fiscal picture of the city solidifies, and New Orleanians’ trust in the institution that is supposed to serve them erodes. In the past year, I’ve spoken at dozens of community meetings about the city budget and residents’ questions about the crisis have grown increasingly skeptical: Why are we just now finding out about this? Who could have prevented this? And why didn’t they? 

The path to restoring trust includes accountability, effective management, and honesty to the public, and you can’t do any of that without transparency. If this budget crisis has taught us nothing else, it is this: 

You cannot manage what you cannot see. 

Moreno administration officials have made some significant strides when it comes to budget transparency and fiscal management. They have reined in overtime and published a public overtime dashboard. They have transformed the executive budget reports to the city council and implemented dashboards for cash management and spending by department, fund, and category. 

These all chip away at institutional distrust, and importantly, give more effective tools to the people who manage the money and hold the mayoral administration accountable. 

Had these improvements been in place in 2024, we might not have seen the crisis unfold as it did in 2025. And if we’re going to get out of this mess and prevent a future crisis, we need to treat them as the baseline, not the ceiling. 

Here’s what the city needs to do to restore trust and build durable solutions.

Show us the receipts

While the new spending dashboard gives a window into the city’s spending, the view is still foggy. In times when the city is having to make line-item cuts, we need more specificity. 

The city of Cincinnati’s budget dashboard includes department spending down to the object code.  Residents can see how much each department spent on gas, staff training, machinery, and everything else. If New Orleans had that clarity, experts inside and outside of City Hall could make qualified recommendations on what we can afford to pay, and what we can afford to live without. 

Getting there will require some shifts internally. City Hall will need to strengthen internal controls and apply the same financial procedures to every department that receives general fund dollars. Good governance often starts with this mundane work. It’s not glamorous, but it’s necessary. And everything else is built on it. 

Explain your reasoning 

New Orleanians understand tradeoffs. Poverty is high. Households budgets are tight. A higher than average proportion of people in this city have had to choose between school supplies and gas; between family time and extra shifts; between hunkering down and evacuating in a storm. 

It is not enough to say that the city doesn’t have any money and our hands are tied. Crisis or not, the city has to make difficult choices about where to spend the General Fund every year. Taxpayers deserve to see the reasons behind the cuts, alternatives that weren’t chosen, and how their voices and their dollars can meaningfully change the outcomes for their communities. 

Engage the public before decisions are made

By the time residents get a chance to weigh in, the budget is already written, and public comment can only nibble at the edges. Rather than notify the public in the late summer, once department budgets have been created already; the city should start the conversation in the spring, before the budget is drafted.

City officials should meet with residents and community groups to ground-proof city priorities and hear directly what neighborhoods need. That outreach can’t stop at the usual voices. The city should make an intentional effort to reach the communities most affected by systemic inequities, who often have the most at stake and the least access to the process. 

Officials in charge of making budget choices should say up front how input will be used, then come back to show residents what they heard and what changed as a result. In a budget year when our most vulnerable populations– those facing eviction, the unhoused, and youth– are facing major cuts, this targeted, equity-based outreach is crucial.

Codify transparency into law

Residents have been demanding budget transparency for years. Now that we’re finally making strides, we can’t afford to back down. We can’t afford to lose our progress to the whims of a future administration. To ensure that the solutions being built now don’t disappear, the city council should pass an ordinance to require key elements: the budget dashboard, improvements to processes and better community engagement. 

The city will always need money and residents will always have to decide whether to trust the people asking for it. That trust can’t be built in the dark. 

Residents cannot be expected to blindly support revenue increases, millage renewals, and other creative financial solutions we need to get out of this hole. If leaders want that support, they need to shine a light on the finances and keep it on.

Nellie Catzen is the Executive Director of the Committee for a Better New Orleans, a nonpartisan civic engagement organization that has been engaging residents in city decision-making since 1966. The organization’s Residents Guide to the City Budget teaches about 3,000 New Orleanians each year to navigate the city’s most consequential decision. The Committee for a Better New Orleans is a founding member of the Big Easy Budget Coalition.