City Services
New Orleans DELIVERS
Royce Understands:
The City of New Orleans has a $1.78 billion annual operating budget, but multiple departments have no standardized performance measures for tracking service delivery. This has led to public frustration over “paying more to get less” in basic services.
- Despite doubling maintenance budgets to around $15 million, the city remains less than one-third of the way to the $50 million per year needed for basic street upkeep.
- 55% of major roads in the New Orleans area are in poor or mediocre condition, costing drivers an average of $909 annually in extra expenses from faster vehicle depreciation, repairs, higher fuel use, and tire wear
- Residents face an average of 355 days to see repairs on submitted pothole requests, while many others linger unresolved inside its NOLA‑311 system indefinitely.
Structures like open data dashboards exist for some departments, but do not tie back to effective insights, accountability, or engaged management.
Royce Will:
- Get your money’s worth because he understands that every penny paid in taxes comes from someone’s pocket.
- Start with fundamentals: fixing streets, cleaning up neighborhoods, streamlining permitting, and equitably enforcing the rules that keep our city safe, functional, and fair.
- Move back to twice-a-week garbage collection.
- Rebuild public trust by initiating a top-to-bottom review of City spending to eliminate waste, consolidate duplicative functions, and redirect funding to frontline services like sanitation, permitting, blight remediation, and code enforcement.
- Maintain streets as a core City function, not a crisis response, by:
- Working to close the annual funding gap for street upkeep
- Coordinating road, utility, and drainage work to avoid waste and delay
- Improve 311 to ensure responsiveness and accountability
- Require permitting, sanitation, and blight enforcement to operate with a sense of urgency.
- While the Safety & Permits budget has grown, it has failed to produce better outcomes. We must ensure operations are supervised, streamlined, and held to measurable performance standards. No resident or business owner should be paying more to receive less.
- Invest in City Hall staff to ensure they have the tools, technology, and training needed to serve our citizens effectively and efficiently.
- Use case managers and technology to improve efficiency at City Hall and promote a mindset centered on impact, where every dollar, every hour, and every decision is aimed at delivering results for our residents.
- Support infrastructure plans and improvements to make New Orleans safe for bicyclists.
