2027 Proposed Budget Hearings - Day 5.

They secured permits this August so it's a major milestone, something they were waiting on for five years and we think that the growth of that terminal will begin soon. Just last week the mayor announced a $78 million project in New Orleans East for a 60-bed Veterans Affairs healthcare facility. That's really exciting. We've also been supporting site readiness to prepare for potential other investment, future investment. We've been participating in the state's Development Ready Sites Program so the city of New Orleans has its first certified site which is a CSX railroad-owned site in the MeShoot Innovation Corridor and we're also, the city invested ARPA funds in the New Orleans Regional Business Park, about $1.5 million to support improvements there. Just to mention kind of aerospace and defense, with the Artemis 2 launch this year and then the future Artemis 3 launch that will happen hopefully in the next 12 months, there's a lot of renewed interest in aerospace. The state's recent SpaceX announcement I think also brings about some exciting opportunities and there's existing space on the MAF campus to grow so there's a current solicitation out called Discovery Park where NASA is soliciting potential companies to go there and we hope that they would be companies that kind of support either an aerospace or defense mission. Textron announced an expansion earlier this year. They're also located in New Orleans East and Vivace is a great story of a local company that is building both defense vehicles and vehicles for aerospace. We're also finalizing a strategic plan for the MeShoot Innovation Corridor so once that plan is finalized we'd love to share it more widely and I know Nora's presenting later. They also did a façade renew program that supported 12 New Orleans East businesses. And that's just New Orleans East. We have several other major announcements. Things that haven't moved since Katrina we've seen move this year so the naval support activity, Tulane's charity announcement, Mercy Hospital demolition, we're excited about all of those. New Lab also broke ground in January of this year. They're supposed to open in January of next year. They're moving very fast and we just had our first announcement recently in Applied Atomics which is the first part of the first cohort of businesses being incubated by New Lab and they are investing $8 million in a building in the Bywater. They're creating 41 jobs. We also, as you know, have been working with the River District so we've been supporting Rivanna, the first residential facility there, as well as the nearby Omni. The mayor secured funds for strategic planning for the municipal auditorium in Armstrong Park. West End Agreement was recently announced and we're excited about potential economic development there. Autonomous shipbuilder Ceronic announced 75 jobs downtown. They're building ships in rural Louisiana but their white-collar jobs are here in New Orleans and we see that as a real opportunity as we have these big announcements in other places in the state that we can attract those office-based jobs here in New Orleans. Our goals for 2027, we want to continue to advance these catalytic projects that I've just been talking about, revitalize commercial corridors. We know that the real work of economic development happens in place, it happens in neighborhoods and communities and so I talked briefly about the New Orleans East Jobs and Innovation Corridors. The mayor and Sadie Finkel have announced the Canal Street Renaissance. We've been working diligently with the Bio District on its growth. The Claiborne Corridor Cultural Innovation District along North Claiborne Avenue has some momentum and I mentioned the strategic planning we're hoping to do around the Union Passenger Terminal next year. We continue to support small businesses and entrepreneurs. That's our bread and butter, our day-to-day work and Margaret McGee from our office does a lot of this work including hosting quarterly business information sessions on all kinds of topics that are important for businesses, biweekly permitting office hours where businesses can sign up and they will talk to Margaret and she can walk them through any issues that they're having with permits. Prosper in Place which is a series that we launched this year to support a business training program in a certain neighborhood and we're hoping to expand that next year and then a business stabilization fund which we've launched in the French Quarter to support businesses on Decatur who are experiencing disruption. We continue to responsibly manage incentive programs and to help steer public investments into private projects responsibly and diversifying our economy through a focus on priority industries which I've listed here. I think that's all I have. All right, great. Thank you, Courtney. With seven people, you guys are doing amazing work with economic development. How does your staff compare to other parishes where they have an economic development department like GEDCO? It's a great question and I also appreciate GEDCO's new videos online. They're doing their acting chops as well right now so I've got to up my game with Mr. Bologna. We are small. Other parishes, especially GEDCO, have staff that is two or three times the size of the city of New Orleans. That doesn't mean that the Office of Economic Development's work isn't supplemented, for example, by the amazing work of the Office of Cultural Economy, Nighttime Economy, and Community Development. So our work, there is a lot of investment in economic development that does happen outside of just the budget of the Office of Economic Development but in terms of absolute numbers, it is a relatively small economic development team but a mighty one. All right. And then outside of general fund sources, we have ARPA money that's sort of expiring.

What are we looking forward in the future? What can we anticipate as far as funding sources? We've been exclusively general fund funded for basically the entirety of the Office of Economic Development's existence. It's important to recognize that to a T, every office that is presenting today that's under the portfolio that I work with, we are all offices technically within the mayor's office. We are not chartered defined departments. And so because of that, we are either general fund or grant funded offices by and large. And so what that means for economic development is that we have had one-time money, like many departments in the city through ARPA and other resources, we are going to need to continue to be competitive in garnering those resources now and in the future. And so what that looks like is in this year's budget, for example, we have that IFAT grant. That's an innovation and finance grant that we won working with the building corporation, with Amtrak and some other key partners. It's going to bring a million dollars to look at, as Courtney outlined, redevelopment and economic development in the area at and around the Union Passenger Terminal. And so we're going to need to continue to be really competitive in garnering federal resources in that way, competitive federal grants. This week, in partnership with the Redevelopment Authority and Entergy New Orleans, we're submitting another $7.2 million grant to the Economic Development Administration for improvements in New Orleans East to benefit projects that we hope will be spurred by the new Louisiana International Terminal. So we're going to continue to strive for being competitive. We know that we punch way above our weight when it comes to federal grants, but that's going to be the work to supplement the general fund, the limitations of the general fund. I mean, with all these successes that you've outlined, which are fantastic, and I look at charity and mercy in my district, but also all the things that are happening in New Orleans East, I think that proves that, as you say, we punch above our weight. And so hopefully we can get some more grants because of the work that you've all done. So I just want to say thank you. Thank you, Councilmember. Thank you. Councilmember Willard. Thank you, Madam Chair. Good morning. Courtney, Jeff. Courtney, you were talking about the logistics and NASA projects out in New Orleans East. I know a concern about the, and then tying in the port project out there, I know there was a concern about some of the road development that needs to be addressed before we can actually start getting traction on those projects. Has the funding been identified or secured for the roads yet, and are we using, is there a pot of state money to do that or federal money to do that? That's a great question. So the grant that Jeff was referencing is for some improvements in that area, but also I know that DPW is looking at doing some improvements as well, and I think they're doing some exploratory work now. Okay. So it's still a work in progress? Still a work in progress. Yeah. And I would note that there are, there's a couple layers, I think, to your question. One is, right, what are the things that the city can control? You know, we know, for example, that there was a large sinkhole in front of, on Old Gentilly Boulevard, right in front of NASA's entrance. Steve and the DPW. You and sewage and water board teams mobilized very quickly to address what was a longstanding problem, but as soon as it surfaced, they went out there and fixed it within a matter of a week or two. You know that that's the kind of work that we can do to kind of triage and in the near term, as, as you both noted, the EDA grant will improve. Access within the 510 corridor and along the issue to make sure that truck traffic is not going adjacent to neighborhoods. And so that's the purpose of that EDA grant is to improve access to future transportation and logistics and other economic development sites in that 510 corridor without pushing all that truck traffic on the streets. And then the last part of the response I would offer is there's a much larger, probably billion dollar projects happening in St. Bernard Parish about that. I know you're partly referencing that's about getting truck traffic off of surface streets in St. Bernard Parish, but that will very much direct them into the Paris 510 corridor. And so that project still is not completely funded, but I know that there's a lot of momentum at the local and state and federal levels to try to get that funded. That'll likely be a toll way for the trucks utilizing it. Okay. You know, recently we've had a sort of an increase in the formation of small businesses, black owned businesses, women owned businesses. We have a lot of coals in the fire right now as it relates to economic development, some, some really big wins in announcements celebrated this year. But I wanted to ask, is the Office of Economic Development focusing on developing on building on any type of programming for our black, black owned businesses and entrepreneurs, women owned businesses and entrepreneurs and just our small businesses overall? Sure. So, yes, that's a huge focus of our office is kind of the small business development and navigation. And we're also really fortunate in New Orleans to have such a robust ecosystem of support organizations. So, you know, everything from Propeller and Thrive and the Idea Village, GNO Inc. and and some of their programming really does speak to supporting small businesses. We also launched a pilot program called Prosper in Place this year, focused specifically on North, Claiborne and Treme. But it brings kind of the expertise, the business acumen that you probably could get in various places, but it brings it to a specific neighborhood where we're hoping to launch one in New Orleans East next year. But the idea is that we're making sure that businesses have support every step of the way.

Our quarterly business information sessions are also targeted to support small businesses with, you know, any any questions that they might have or steering them to the right organization, whether they need a business plan or whether they're a startup and need to, you know, raise funds, things like that. There are different organizations that we can help navigate them to. OK. Just just from my work in the legislature, I know that, you know, LED has a lot of programming for small businesses as well. Do we do any type of assistance like pairing them perhaps with state programs or incentives or anything like that within Office of Economic Development? We had Louisiana Economic Development actually presented our quarterly business information sessions this year and they talked about their different programs for small business. OK. And I want to give a special shout out, as Courtney did, to Margaret McGee, who is a one person concierge. She started a long time ago doing the business service management in a former iteration of our office several administrations ago. And there is nobody better at connecting folks both internally navigating the city hall processes, whether it's around an occupational license or, you know, safety permits or, you know, other other services that folks might be looking from the city, but also in connecting them to those outside partners. And so, in addition to LED, Margaret has regular office hours with some of our D.A. providers like Propeller to make sure that folks are getting access to those resources. OK. Thank you so much. Of course. Council Member Green. Good morning. Just wanted to thank you for your presentations this morning. But I also want to thank you all for being present when we call on your office, for example, whether it be at the Downwind Road Merchants Association, a very important corridor in New Orleans East, whether it be at the Lafitte Greenway, the Conservancy. There's a lot of positive work that's going on in the city of New Orleans and we don't get front page headlines for economic development, even though I will say we've gotten a few more than we've gotten in the past. You've been around for a while. Projects that are taking place in areas such as in New Orleans East or in Gentilly are getting recognition. I do want to thank the entrepreneurs who are watching and the families that are investing in businesses. You're in Gentilly from time to time because people in that area and in District D are investing in their new businesses, whether it be in a new meat market or a restaurant, for example, or a urgent care facility. Those are being created by people who live here in the city of New Orleans and it's having a very positive impact on our city. I will say that it's one of the reasons why the unemployment rate of the city of New Orleans is lower than it is in Orlando, Dallas, and places that people think of as high growth corridors. So it's up to the entrepreneurs to continue to do what you're doing in our city that makes a difference. But you are supported by economic development and this pro-business council, and I just want to encourage that investment, but to thank you all with your limited staff, to recognize that your limited staff still gets around and provides significant services to entrepreneurs and businesses, and I appreciate it. Thank you, Councilman Green. Just a quick note, we couldn't agree more that we see our work as creating the conditions for businesses and entrepreneurs to thrive, whether they're going to be working with our supplier diversity office. Director Charles is obviously here today to present a little later for folks who want to do business directly with the city, but it's also about the folks who are never going to have been on a city contract but who work in one of our amazing commercial quarters and in our neighborhoods or who are entrepreneurs with the next big idea. And I know the mayor has trumpeted this, occupational license applications are up significantly, by some measures up over 40%, and so that is a huge testament to the collaboration between the council and the administration, the hustle of our entrepreneurs and our small business owners, and just generally giving folks a sense that this is a place to start a business and put down roots. So I just want to put an exclamation point on what you just shared. On yesterday evening, or was it the evening before yesterday, the evening before yesterday for Night Out Against Crime? Yes. At the Desire Florida Community Center, a woman, Brittany Penn, who is invested in two businesses in the Ninth Ward, who owns multiple rental properties that are well maintained, who grew up in the Ninth Ward and who built her house just recently in the Ninth Ward, sponsored an event, and it's because she's committed to a particular community that doesn't get a lot of attention. That's what entrepreneurship sometimes results in, people who are successful, who give back, and give back to the immediate community. So I just want to emphasize the role that entrepreneurship is playing in our city. We don't have to have Fortune 500 companies all over the place to have one of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation. The nation's unemployment rate is 4.2%. The city of New Orleans is 4.4%. That's not bad to say that people think that we are a city that has no economic activity other than tourism. We have entrepreneurs that are creating jobs in our city, and I appreciate the role that economic development, your division, plays in making some of that activity happen. Thank you, Councilmember. Thank you. All right. So I see a lot of new faces here. I just want to go over protocol for speaking. If you want to speak on a topic, you need to fill out a yellow card. You need to note your name, your address, and what item you want to speak on. All right? Everyone gets two minutes. You need to announce whether or not you are a paid actor, paid to be here.

I do have two cards for Aquanet Bourne. Do you want to speak on this topic? Ms. Bourne? All right. And then I have Nadia Muhammad. Again, there's no indication. Do you want to speak on this topic or another topic? Another topic. Another topic. All right. Ms. Nadia, I'm going to have Dominique come and talk to you about which item. With that, Jeff, let's go to the next item. Ashley? The next item is the Office of Community Development. What's that? Yeah. I know. You guys can sit down. If there's any questions, you guys can call them. Yeah. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right, Jeff. While we're getting set up, we do have someone who wants to speak on Office of Economic Development, LaShauna Williams. And you get two minutes. Hi. You said we have two minutes? Two minutes to speak. Okay. Thank you. My name is LaShauna. I am a person with lived homelessness experience. I'm a person who is working through mental health recovery as well. And I really wanted an opportunity to speak about services that I do not see yet in the community that I think are essential. I see that there is a lot of opportunities for workshops to build resumes, to work through job readiness. I think a key part of economic development is also being able to build a proper business structure. And some of us who are coming out of homelessness, who are recovering from mental health, do not necessarily want to go the path of working a traditional job, but we do have skills that we want to build on to create viable businesses. But I do not see enough resources available for helping us build those businesses to help build a successful business foundation. As you know, when you're starting a business, there are a lot of expenses associated with it, and we need resources to be able to do that. We need workshops to be able to assist us in helping to build a solid foundation. foundation to be able to be viable business owners as well. We deserve that right. I feel like I have used the Small Business Development Center, but a lot of times I left there kind of without a clear path and left with homework that I really didn't know how to navigate, which made me feel like I would prefer if there were more budget allocations for workshops where we can actually show up, share the ideas that we have, and work through proper structuring of those businesses so that we can also become self-sufficient in the paths that we desire versus being told to just get a job even if that's not in our passion. So, thank you for listening and thank you for allocating funds to be able to do so. Thank you, Ms. Williams. Thank you. Jeff, whenever you're ready. All right. Thank you, Council Members. So, switching over to the Office of Community Development, I just want to reiterate some of my comments from the top because I know a lot of folks have joined since then. You know, I think one of the common lenses that we look at the work of the various offices who are presenting this morning is about how do we grow as a city and in our communities? And so, obviously, the Office of Economic Development is about how do we grow jobs? How do we grow our tax base? How do we make sure that investment is happening in all of our communities and not just in some? How do we prime the pump and get economic growth happening in our city in a way that we see many of our peer cities experiencing? I see the Office of Economic Development, which we'll talk about now, very much as the office that is focused on community development, which means housing, which means small business support, which means neighborhood services, which means investing in the really granular items that make our communities places that we all want to live and work. And so, this is critically important work that the Office of Community Development and its really amazing team of professionals is doing every day. And so, I'm really honored to also be able to support the leadership leading this office. The Office of Community Development is almost entirely grant funded. So, the Office of Community Development is the conduit, is the office through which almost all of our federal grant and entitlement money comes down from either the federal government or the state government and makes it into the city budget. And so, the lion's share of the work of the people who are funded through the office happens outside of the general fund. That being said, we have a very small amount of personnel funded, and then we have one larger contract that I'm sure some folks in the audience and I know council has been engaged with, and that is the right to council program, which is that $1.3 million figure that is not in the current proposed budget under the general fund. And so, that explains these numbers. The vast majority of the Office of Community Development's funds is in a whole series of non-general fund dollars. And so, I'm happy to walk through these in depth. These are obviously large figures, but they represent a combination of current and prior year entitlement money. That means community development block grants, home dollars, ESG, which are emergency services grants, HOPWA, which is housing opportunities for people living with AIDS, the Shelter Plus Care Program, the National Disaster Resilience Competition, where the city won $141 million eight or nine years ago, and we're still implementing that work in the Gentilly Resilience District. Some residual NIF money. Some post-item money. There's about $30 million of what's called Resilient Communities and Infrastructure Program, and then also bond money. So, about $18 million in bond money. And so, you see that very large $130 million figure.

I think the main point that I would like to make for council and for members of the public is that this represents very prescribed money, money that has a lot of strings attached that is only for very specific purposes, which by and large cannot backfill general fund gaps, for example, but also which go to really necessary and vital programs in the city. And I'm obviously happy to dig into any of those details. These bullets cover really the highlights of what I just outlined. The Office of Community Development is, again, staffed almost entirely through grant funds. And when I say entitlement, what that means is it's just a technical way of saying that every year the federal government, mostly through housing and urban development, sends down dollars based on our population and our income and our demographics. And so, that money comes in each year. It's about $20 million that's broken out between CDBG, home funds, which are for affordable housing, emergency services, which goes to our homeless shelters primarily, and then HOPWA, which supports folks living with HIV AIDS. We also support everything from the Low Barrier Shelter to the Mayor's Summer Youth Employment Program, pretty much all of the senior programs. Madeline Sanchez in my office, make sure I get out there to hear from our seniors all over town. These are incredibly important programs in communities that I think are really the beating heart of what it means when we say we're the Office of Community Development. In terms of budget efficiencies, we have done a number of things this year in order to help the city meet its challenges. First and foremost is we have eliminated some staff through the transition and elsewhere. There are some positions proposed in 2027 that are further proposed to be eliminated. Again, most of our positions are not general fund funded, so many of those don't directly impact the general fund, but we are still working to be more efficient with the scarce resources that we do have. We have also been spending a lot of time and energy on reimbursement. One of the things that I know council is well aware of is that all CDBG programs, all HUD programs, generally speaking, are reimbursement based. Frequently, our city's general fund is being asked to act as a revolving fund. When we don't quickly do the things that we need to do or hold contractors accountable to do the things that they need to do, there ends up being a really big lag between when the dollars go out the door from the general fund and when we actually are reimbursed. I'm happy to go into more details on that, but I'll just say that Horshery and Ziva, who are here in the audience today, Ronald, Thomas, Benjamin, I want to shout out the A-team in the Office of Community Development, Neliana, Deshanda. Many folks have worked on, really from the years 2021 through last year, bringing in well over $10 million in reimbursements to help the city meet its challenges, and that is no small undertaking. That is pouring over and reconciling thousands of lines of accounting. It's working really closely with Brandy and her budget team, as well as folks in finance and the CAO's office. This has been a huge lift on top of our day jobs, kind of making up for some of the prior shortcomings. That was a huge way of helping the city meet its challenges this year. Jeff, could you just pull the microphone closer? I think some folks can't hear you. Yes. It's usually not a problem with me, folks hearing me. We also do a lot in terms of cross-training employees. We have a number of stars in our office who are also supporting some of the centralized grants and contracting efforts that the budget and CAO teams are leading, and so that means we're digging really deep. We have folks whose job descriptions have significantly expanded in order to do more with, effectively, the same budget. And then we've also, I'll give Kaushari a big shout out here, as well as Valerie Bolden on my team. We are actually in the office space across the street, so we pay rent to 1340 Boydris, and we are working to reduce our physical footprint in that building, so trying to consolidate off of the 9th floor entirely onto the 10th floor. We're also doing everything we can there, which is no small undertaking, as well. Transitioning to 2027, I've already touched on a number of these programs, but we are very focused on delivering the services and making the investments on behalf of the city and our communities that we have done in the past, and really trying to continue to be really strategic, and also make new investments, and so I'll touch on a few of those. So, first and foremost, we have our priority programs. These are programs that are almost household names. The Mayor's Summer Youth Employment Program, our senior programs that I mentioned before, the Low Barrier Shelter, which I know we have a lot of folks passionate about that work. In the audience today, we work very closely with Dr. Vegno and her team at the Office of Health and Human Services, and also our ESP and HOPWA programs. We are going to continue to do that work. That means that there are dozens of contracts that have to get executed every year with every single one of those partners that is doing that work in partnership with the city that's receiving those funds, and so our team will continue to prioritize those really impactful programs. And then we are also extremely focused on affordable housing. Affordable housing and housing creation is one of the best ways that we can get out of some of the wicked problems that we face as a city with population decline and where we know our tax base isn't what it could be, and so being able to grow the number of affordable housing units in the city is absolutely a priority of the mayor, of our Office of Community Development.

Full stop, we need to figure out all of the ways that we can continue to grow and see investment in housing units in all of our neighborhoods, and so we have hit a number of milestones in 26 that we're going to continue to build on in 2027. One of the most exciting ones that I know Councilmember Harris, Councilmember Willard, Council Counsel, I know we have a number of stakeholders and advocates here today, worked tirelessly on this over the last two years, we now have a housing trust fund that is fully operationalized. I want to reiterate that. We have a housing trust fund that is fully operationalized. Yes. It has been, you know, there's a lot of sausage making that's gone into that, but I just want to recount what that means. That means that voters approved a charter amendment in 2024 that made the Housing Trust Fund a required part of the city's budget. It means that we then had to identify the appropriate sources of funding in order to meet that obligation, because that represents a new $16 million, roughly, annual investment into affordable housing in our city. And in case anybody has not been paying attention, the administration, the council, and all of our partners have been working to fill a $160, $220 million budget shortfall. And so being able to identify the funds to do that has been a very collaborative and creative process to be able to meet those needs in these really trying times. We then had to, after identifying the appropriate sources of funds, actually execute a cooperative endeavor agreement with the two fund administrators, both of whom I believe are in the room today. I see Ms. Brenda Brough and Charmaine and our friends at NORA, as well as Finance New Orleans, who are going to administer the funds that flow through the Housing Trust Fund on behalf of the city to make sure that programs are being deployed in, first and foremost, in a transparent and accountable way, but also where we're moving faster than the city can typically move when it comes to deploying contracts and getting dollars out to individual contractors, small landlords, renters, et cetera. And then finally, it's making sure that we are able to continue to fund this work, not just in 2026, but this is an obligation in perpetuity. We need to figure out how to fund this work in 2027, 2028, and beyond, so that'll be really critical work. I'm obviously happy to say more about the individual breakdown in the budget of Housing Trust Fund, but I just want to celebrate what a win that is and what a lift it's collaboratively been to get the Housing Trust Fund actually implemented this year. We are very focused. I know Councilmember Harrison, Willard, and the whole council have been extremely supportive, as the administration has, in finding funding for fortified roofing. We have been, I'm sorry, still, now folks can hopefully hear me. The fortified roofing program, the city has actually stood up at warp speed in partnership with the Redevelopment Authority a matching program for the state's fortified roofing program, so folks who receive, who win the lottery at the state level, we know that those funds don't entirely cover the cost of a fortified roof. The city actually has a program administered through NORA now that is providing the gap money on that. We continue, Ms. Cedrica Sertin and the housing team in OCD do an amazing job administering our soft second program, which every year invests in 60 to 70 first-time homebuyers who are receiving up to $60,000 of a forgivable soft second mortgage, and then we're also doing a ton of work supporting owner-occupied and rental rehabs in partnership with many community-based organizations. The mayor announced earlier this year an adjudicated properties working group, Rochelle Julick on our team, as well as I know members of your staff, Councilmember Harris, members of NORA leadership, of other city departments, are working at how do we disentangle adjudicated properties in our city, and the, I guess, easy way to describe the nature of this issue is that for a really long time, the city has been somewhat penny-wise and pound-foolish in pushing properties out through sheriff sales, because what happens is we do get, in some instances, third-party tax sale interests who are interested in maintaining and redeveloping properties, but they cannot do that for at least three years after the sheriff sale, and there's also issues with cloud and title, which means that it makes the properties incredibly difficult to actually redevelop, and only in some instances are those properties able to actually be put back into commerce, and that results in really unintended consequences like what's happening in the Lower Ninth Ward, where you have about 7,800 parcels in the Lower Ninth Ward, and fully 10% of them, over 700 parcels in the Lower Ninth Ward are adjudicated to the city, which means they didn't even sell at tax sale, and so that means that those properties are not even able to be redeveloped without the city taking some really intentional steps forward, and so this adjudicated properties working group is actively working on some strategies for how we get adjudicated properties back into commerce. We are also really focused on what we call CORIT, which is city-owned real estate. There's a team of city departments and leaders who meet quarterly to look at city-owned assets and identify ways that we can redevelop them and put them back into commerce. We are very committed to multifamily NOFAs and trying to make sure that projects which had received commitments from the city to build long-term affordable housing at scale in our city are receiving funds as well, and then we're also very focused on making sure that we have a robust housing strategy for the city, which is really important because we can do anything, but we can't do everything, and having a strategy is critically important, so we are actively putting together that document as we speak. I know that was a lot.

I will stop there, and I'm positive there's going to be some robust discussion. Well, we have a lot of cards for this topic. I just want to make an announcement. I know a lot of folks are here for low-barrier shelter. We're going to hold that to the Health Department when the Office of Homeless Support and Services comes up. I know you mentioned low-barrier shelter, but really this is a vague no-tailor thing. I do have some questions. I'm excited about the housing trust fund and its actual getting off the ground. Thank you, NORA and Finance and the Housing Trust Fund Advisory Committee. The point of the housing trust fund was really to support smaller projects and not necessarily the larger projects that we've supported in the past. I know the advisory committee has a rubric to determine how funding goes. Separate from the housing trust fund, how are we prioritizing funding of bigger projects? Is there a rubric that we're looking at? Is it just willy-nilly? How are we looking at those larger developments? Yes, it's a great question, and I know there's going to be some robust comment and discussion about this. One thing I want to be crystal clear about is that the housing trust fund and the affordable housing bonds that were approved by bond proposition last November by voters is agnostic on us funding larger multi-family affordable housing projects from the more granular projects like working on everything from fortified roofs to working with small contractors, small landlord, under-occupied rehab, etc. It is absolutely true that if the city's budget situation wasn't what it currently was, we would love to have the problem of deploying the affordable housing bonds on the larger multi-family projects via a NOFA process, a Notice of Funding Availability, and I can say more about that in a minute. And then reserving the housing trust fund funds for those more granular programs and projects that are, again, fortified roofs, under-occupied rehab, small landlord, etc. The reality is that we do not have $16 million in general fund money in this year's budget or probably for the foreseeable future to just be able to fund the housing trust fund out of the general fund. I think that's a statement that most folks can agree with. And what that means then is that we have to make some tough decisions about what to fund and when. And so on the multi-family side, the last time the Office of Community Development made a NOFA offering, so the Office of Community Development doesn't pick winners and losers willy-nilly. We go through a HUD-prescribed process for allocating what is frequently federal resources, and we basically put out an open call. It's essentially a request for proposal, but it's called a NOFA and it's structured a little bit differently, where affordable housing developers apply to the Office of Community Development for scarce gap financing money in order to be able to see their project be able to close on their financing, to put together a full capital stack, and be able to develop their project. And so that looks like, over the years, everything from B.W. Cooper, the Esplanade DeLisle Apartments, the Naval Support Activity, you name it, there have been countless, dozens of projects that have created thousands, if not tens of thousands of units of affordable housing in our city over the years through that NOFA process. Typically the Office of Community Development would release a NOFA every year or two at the most, and it just was based on the funds that are available. And I think it speaks volumes that we have not been able to release a NOFA since 2023, which means that if you are developing an affordable housing project anywhere in the city of New Orleans, you have really nowhere to turn, because as everybody who knows affordable housing knows, affordable housing is not affordable to build. It costs just as much as market rate housing to build. What is affordable about it are the rents that are charged to the residents in those buildings. And so that means that there is always a need for public investment, and sometimes that investment can come from the state, but it almost always requires local investment, and that is what those NOFAs are for through the Office of Community Development. As of right now, I don't know when the Office of Community Development can do another NOFA. Right now, we haven't had one since 2023. We do not have enough resources available, except for maybe doing some small ones related to preservation of units. We do not have $20 or $30 million to bundle up into a NOFA offering, and so I hope to be able to do that in 2027, or Sheree and Ziva and I are going to scour our books and try to identify all of the places where we might be able to cobble together resources, but we do not have the resources right now to do a NOFA. And all of that is relevant because what we did in the proposed 2027 Housing Trust Fund budget was say, in 2026, we made a $16 million investment in programs that are very much about homeownership, which are about small, multifamily, owner-occupied rehab, the preservation of rental units, the work that, as you noted, Councilmember Harris, was very much about what the Housing Trust Fund was originally intended or thought to be used for. But we had to also take a hard look and say there are a number of affordable housing multifamily projects that are dying on the vine, and those include the Royal Maize Ant project at 4100 Royal Street, which we can talk some more about, the Barone Lofts project, as well as a couple of other projects. of other preservation projects that collectively represent hundreds of units of affordable rental housing that if we did not identify a source of funding to get those projects to a financial closing, we would lose those projects. They would not be able to move forward and that's hundreds of New Orleanians, New Orleans families that are not able to return here or stay here because we did not build those units.

And so what we did was we made the tough decision working very closely, and I can't shout out the Housing Trust Fund Advisory Committee enough, team members of mine, especially Elizabeth Holman, who did yeoman's work to identify a way that in 2027 we were able to do both. And it's, I want to be crystal clear, funding multifamily projects is just as legitimate and legal of a use of Housing Trust Fund dollars as funding home ownership and rental supply expansion and those smaller, more granular programs. So we believe that this is, it's a tough decision, but it's the right decision in terms of being able to make the critical investments in affordable housing that are most needed in our city next year. So I know that was a lot of background, but I wanted to explain for folks who might not be as familiar with this landscape exactly why we came to that decision and how this, how the two relate to each other. Thanks, Jeff. I don't see any buttons pushed. Council Member Willard. Thank you, Jeff. That was a lot of information, but you did a pretty thorough update, so thank you. Looks like we have about $72 million in CDBG funds available. Are those already dedicated for next year? They are, and so that, it's important to remember that that represents a combination of different sources of funds, and the short answer is yes, it's current year and prior year money, and it is already entirely spoken for. Those dollars are, they go to a range of programs. Can you talk about some of how it's already dedicated, like where some of that money's going? Yeah, absolutely. So I have a full breakdown here. I'm happy to share this or, you know, this is reflected in the budget. So we have about $41 million in CDBG funds itself, and those are going to a whole range of programs that goes into some of our prior multi-year funding commitments. So we have projects that, you know, had received CDBG funds that are on a reimbursement basis. We have a range of programs that are being funded out of that work. This is inclusive of emergency services grants, which go to all of our homeless shelters, not just Low Barrier, but Ozan Amin, and the, you know, Family Justice Center, and a range of others. It includes home funds, which are a subset of our entitlement dollars. It's about $18 million of current year and prior year commitments. Those are going directly into affordable housing projects, like I was mentioning previously. Home funds are typically one of the sources that we offer when we do ANOFA. We have RSIP, which is the Resilient Cities program. This is about $30 million that's coming down from the state following Hurricane Ida, and it was explicitly for community economic development projects. And so we're putting $5 million into food incubators, and we're administering those funds in partnership with the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority. We're going to not only invest in existing kitchens, like we have a number of food entrepreneurs who actually operate their own culinary kitchens, we're also going to be partnering with NORA to develop a new commercial kitchen incubator at the corner of Claiborne and St. Bernard on a NORA-owned property. So we've allocated precious resources, about $5 million to those programs. We have the NDR program. I can't shout out Bianca enough on my team, as well as Korshari and also Megan Williams. That's, again, $141 million program. That's technically HUD money that is reflected in some of these balances that you're seeing. And those are dollars that we've had since 2016-17 that we are now deploying. And we have, I think, over $50 million of those are under contract now in terms of projects in the Gentilly Resilience District. So that's St. Anthony, that's Blue Green Streets, that's Mirabu Water Garden, et cetera. Hopefully that gives you an example, a sampling of the range of where these funds are going to. Okay. Thank you, Jeff. Of course. Council Member McCarron. Jeff, I noticed Right to Council is not funded in this budget. Can you talk a little bit about what that would mean if we are not able to find funding for that program? Yes. This is, I know, one of the most beloved and respected programs that the city invests in. This was a priority of now Mayor Moreno and several council members here and is an ongoing priority for all the council, I know. This is a program that is administered by Southeast Louisiana Legal Services. It started a number of years ago and the city made an initial investment in this program through some one-time ARPA funds that we had. And this is a critical service that is offered. SLLS goes out every day. There is a court being held for evictions. They go out and represent folks who are in danger of falling into homelessness, who are in danger of being evicted. And we all know that there is a whole range of reasons why that's the case for folks. And if they were just able to ably negotiate with their landlord, explain what their situation is, how they can get back on a path, we find that this is one of the wisest investments that we can make in preventing future homelessness, right? This is way upstream of what we have to deal with when we see street homelessness and unhoused people. This is a relief valve. This prevents the low barrier shelter from being oversubscribed. And I know Taylor and Dr. Vegna will talk about this later. So make no mistake, this is a critically important program for the administration as well. I know that there are representatives here from SLLS today to talk about this. As the budget is currently proposed, you can see that it is not. It was historically funded last year in our general fund budget. I know that Council Member Morrell worked tirelessly with you all to identify about $750,000 of one-time money to make up the gap this year because we were not able to fund the $1.3 million in our budget from 2026 either.

We worked really hard in OCD to be able to use some expiring CDBG COVID money, about $575,000, that combined with the dollars that the Council found made up the full budget this year. But this is a perennial need. And so those dollars are not currently in our general fund budget. It is one of the really tough cuts that we've had to propose. And I think that we would love to figure out a way to be able to continue to fund that work next year and beyond. Yeah, thank you for that. I mean, I think you have our commitment that we're going to work hard to do that too. I think it might come down to we are going to increase the short-term rental nightly fees. And that's a fund revenue source that comes in annually. And that could be a way that if this Council can look at that and see if that's an opportunity to change the way that we use that fund to help fund this program annually instead of having to come back every single year and be like, where's the money coming from? So, you know, you have my commitment. I know other Council members feel similarly about this program. So we are going to work really hard behind the scenes to kind of get that. And hopefully we'll have some good answers for everybody. Thank you so much. Council Member Green followed by Council Member Morrell. The right to Council program was voted unanimously by the Council because we are strongly supportive of providing support to those who are in danger of being evicted or homeless. But I do want to ask you a general question because I think that sometimes people feel that the Council or the Mayor is just holding back. It's not going in certain areas with funding because of choices that we're making internally. Could you talk about the role of the federal government cutbacks on your office in terms of what is going on? And I know that it was not a prepared question and that you're not going to have numbers. But I think it's important to recognize that between state cutbacks and federal cutbacks, these budget challenges are real. And the many times they're created by external factors. Could you talk about at least the federal government role? And if you have dollars, you can talk about the money or you can share with the public afterwards. How much have the cutbacks affected the city? Affected the city? Yeah, there's, I mean, it is profound how a lot of the changes in the turmoil at the federal level filter down through the state and then end up impacting the city. And I'll give two concrete examples. One is in the homelessness space. So in typical years, Unity of Greater New Orleans has been the umbrella organization that has helped manage the Continuum of Care program. And I know Taylor and Dr. Evagneau will speak much more in depth about this in their presentation. But that has largely been a settled matter, right? Since the Housing First model was implemented under the Obama administration, there's largely been the same framework under which homeless services and permanent supportive housing and transitional housing dollars have gone down to local service providers under the Continuum of Care model. And recently, there have been at least, I think, two interventions by a federal judge that actually stayed the release of new, it's essentially a NOFA. It's a request for proposals that HUD is doing. HUD administers those funds as well. And we know that it has created turmoil at the local level. This is a stay on pretty dramatic rule changes about how the Continuum of Care is funded. This is throughout the country. This is not just locally at the New Orleans level. And it has also opened up the door for other policy changes at the state and federal level to also have an impact. And so it's meant that folks are having to scramble. There's lots of work and uncertainty about what 2027 and beyond are going to look like because we have been unable to stay on this typical timeline and where longstanding programmatic policy and design is being upset and without a lot of clarity or direction. So that's a really concrete example that impacts our most vulnerable residents and folks on the street. So that's one area. Another area is in affordable housing finance. And I mentioned before at length about our NOFA process and how we invest in multifamily projects. I'll give a very good example, two examples. One is the Rivada project, which just closed thanks to the hard work of Councilmember Harris and the whole council, the administration, the developers, the convention center. This is $115 million affordable housing. project that's going to have 220 units of affordable housing in it in a neighborhood of opportunity in the River District right on Chapatulas adjacent to downtown. That project could not have happened but for 16 million dollars of federal disaster money, post-item disaster money that came down to the city from the state through the Louisiana Housing Corporation. And those dollars are dollars that we prioritize just like any of our departments leverage state and federal grant dollars when we determine where we're going to place our precious bond dollars. When we do that with streets, we do that in health, we do that across our programs. The same is true in affordable housing development. We will prioritize where we can make our precious public investments in affordable housing for projects that we know are going to receive these federal dollars so that they can get to the finish line. That project was able to successfully get to a closing. Same with the Naval Support Activity which is another 194 units of housing, excuse me 294 units of housing, a 200 million dollar project in the Bywater. That project had 20 million dollars of federal money through the state in that project. Just several weeks ago, there was another round of state funding of programming federal dollars called Prime 4.

Prime 4, we had been looking at two projects, one in the Lower Ninth Ward, one in Council Member Harris's district adjacent to Turo for some additional affordable housing developments and the state, partly because of some changing rules at the federal level, canceled that program at the very last minute right before they were supposed to give an award and so those dollars are no longer available and that has created turmoil. Those projects do not have a path forward. The city in no way has the the amount of resources that will be needed to fill the gap that we were anticipating federal resources to fill and so you know that is when we look around and say why are we not seeing the development, the affordable housing, the investment in our communities we want to see, there were 32 lots in the Lower Ninth Ward that we were hoping and almost expecting we're going to get those resources and that is not moving forward currently because of those changes. We've had to make changes even in our resilience projects because of loss of federal money. Absolutely. Could you talk about that just for a second? There's a theme that I have here and it's clear. I just want people to know that we there are tough decisions that you have to make in government and at the end of the day our urban area just like other urban areas was reliant on federal resources and investment because that was a policy of the federal government to make money available in the population centers so that we could have development taking place in those urban areas but could you talk about the impact on the resilience projects that we have right now which is why you can't the Gentilly Resilience Project is going well but there are some others that are held up because of that. Yes and certainly Deputy Mayor Nelson and Megan Williams can speak much more in depth on this but yes I mean Gentilly Resilience District is in some ways protected because it was a federal grant from a prior administration however that doesn't mean that those dollars you know if we don't deploy those quickly enough or if we give any reason for the state or federal government to look too closely those dollars can absolutely be in jeopardy and I think we see the impacts on on projects like Gentilly Resilience as well as other resilience projects. You know it certainly impacts our joint infrastructure program. I think we all now know and appreciate some of the issues with the budget crisis that we're facing are because of some of the turmoil at the FEMA level nationally where a lot of our joint infrastructure program the state reimburses the city for in some cases it would be like 90 million dollars a month of contracting work that was happening in streets around the city and resilience projects and drainage projects and because of some of the turmoil that was being proposed at the federal level related to FEMA last year and sometimes saying that FEMA was going to go away. JRR is a settlement with FEMA and so the state started to get you know skittish about whether they would be reimbursed from FEMA and there was a compounding effect on the city's budget crisis because we were essentially again fronting money that we were expecting to be reimbursed from the states and the feds. So yes Megan and Steve can obviously speak much more in depth on it but you're absolutely right that you know you you name it there's challenges at the at the and the workforce development landscape as well that's related to some of these these changes at the federal level and it just makes it certainly makes the work even more challenging.

Yes and Megan and Steve did talk about it yes just recently and I asked you again because we can't talk about it enough talk about it because the administration is not making decisions to not fund particular things because they have no interest in it sometimes the federal changes and even the state level changes we've lost a lot of revenues as a city because the state law changes well relative to traffic speed cameras and other matters so it's just important to recognize what you say break tags break tags and things like that all of those if all those impact our budget and I just want to see more lobbying also on a state and federal level because I think that it's easy for entities such as that to stop funding to the city of New Orleans and to other urban areas because they don't get a lot of pushback there needs to be a little bit more pushback and I just want to close by saying the soft second mortgage program is a tremendous program I look forward to the day that we can provide hundreds of soft second mortgage opportunities because if you want to if you want to bridge the wealth gap in our city and if you want to create more wealth creating more homeowners people who have a stake and in 15 years they're going to own something worth 250 or 300 maybe 15 years from now five hundred thousand dollars that's the way to really generate wealth in our city to make more homeownership opportunities available and we talked about it and I look forward to working with you and everyone associated with the housing trust fund and continuing your program because that's an area in which we can create more opportunities absolutely I would love to see more people investing in communities that have been ignored such as the desire community and the ninth ward community using soft second mortgage programs so I look forward to working with you but what you're doing so far right now is being recognized we need to quadruple the number of houses that are available to our citizens through that program thank you council member absolutely we budget just for so that folks know him every year we budget a minimum of three million dollars of precious resources for soft seconds and you know every year we have to up that right now we're digging deep and finding some more resources to make sure we can get through the end of the year for everybody who's applied for a soft second okay thank you for your presentation councilmember moreau thank you um jeff i just want to focus on right to council for a little bit i mean i think it's important as we talk about the budget season that we reiterate to i know you know this but to everyone the tens of tens watching at home that even with a millage roll forward there is no way to avoid cuts that's full stop that is the reality of where the budget currently sits and i think it's also important to note that even as we are working with third parties on things like uh and i know we're going to talk about during the health department with things like the low barrier shelter even if you want to get third party commitments you have to get them to be multi-year commitments so we don't run into the risk of one-time revenue for reoccurring expense i really appreciate councilmember mccarran highlighting the short-term rental fees because when you're looking at fees and allocating fees for things to create revenue streams for things like right to council there's a direct correlation between short-term rentals rental displacement and why we need to provide services to people who are being displaced but i just want to highlight something that i think that we don't highlight enough right to council is in a very different place than many other things because the city codified right to council it's in section 50 150 so the city of new orleans prior to my time on the council obligated itself to say that the right to council is a right in the city of new orleans so it is something that essentially we have to find the money to pay for because we have codified it as a right that does not mean that it won't be painful to figure out a way to get there because the reality is that in all likelihood to fund the right to council we are going to have to cut something else and i think it's important because we're being intentional what i'm committing today as a council member is to find the cut necessary even if it has to be from a different department to fully fund right to council because it's important to be intentional because we have a finite amount of money and a finite amount of runway to raise money so part of us the importance of having these hearings and hearing how these departments do more with less is that there are many departments that will have to do even more with less because the money is finite and it is highly likely someone's gonna have to do without for us to fund necessary programs like the right to council and i certainly appreciate you championing here today i know they're here today as well but i just want to highlight the fact that unlike a lot of programs in the city there's a codified law that actually is tied to this that is still the law today so thank you thank you and i totally echo that sentiment that nexus between strs for example str fees and and funding the program i think that's it's elegant right if we could think about more ways to fund essential programs with sustainable sources of revenue like that i think that's that's really elegant all right with that let's go to public comment just a reminder everyone gets two minutes to speak uh state of your paid actor and your address the first step is monique blossom followed by christopher kerrigan and if you could line up so we can get through these quickly that would be great good morning first of all thank you to deputy deputy mayor schwartz and the entire staff at ocd for all of your hard work and for um all of the information that you just provided you made my job a lot easier also everybody has really covered a lot of my

talking points so i'm going to keep it brief thank you councilmember morale i was going to remind everyone that this is one of the best housing policies i've ever had the honor to work on because it's created by ordinance it does obligate the city and i really appreciate that you're all taking that obligation seriously um it's a difficult budget system but the right to council program really is a win-win and it's in balance imbalancing um correcting an imbalance in the court system and it gets favorable incomes favorable outcomes let's talk about incomes now favorable outcomes for tenants and landlords alike and it's also hugely popular i'm going to claim everybody in the room is here in favor of right to counsel i'm sure that they all are um i all right i didn't mean all that i'm here as a resource to all of you please be in touch you know how to find me so that i can be an asset to making this work for 2020 Thank you. Thank you, Monique. Christopher Kerrigan, followed by Hannah Adams, followed by Elizabeth Harvey. Thank you. Good morning, members of council. My name is Christopher Kerrigan. I'm a staff attorney with Loyola University's Medical-Legal Partnership, but I'm speaking today here in my own personal capacity, and the views I express are my own. Before joining the Medical-Legal Partnership, I spent five years working in the housing unit at SLS, where I represented families facing eviction. I also love New Orleans. I'm fortunate enough to have met my wife here. My wife and I have bought a property here, and we manage a small rental property ourselves, so I speak to you both as a landlord and a housing attorney. I also want to personally attest to the extraordinary professionalism of the attorneys and staff at Southeast Louisiana Legal Services. I've worked alongside them and these individuals, and I know how hard they work and how deeply committed they are to serving the families that they serve. But I especially want to emphasize something I think that we sometimes overlook when discussing eviction, and that's the impact on our children. Housing instability is deeply traumatic for children who bear the consequences of an eviction through no fault of their own. It disrupts their sense of stability, their sense of self, and their sense of stability. And I can tell you firsthand that having an attorney oftentimes makes an enormous difference. Sometimes an attorney can negotiate a resolution that allows a family to remain in their home and avoid the trauma of an eviction proceeding altogether. That's why funding the Right to Counsel program is so important, because it's not simply about legal representation. It's about preventing unnecessary displacement, protecting our children, and keeping our families healthy and stable. And I encourage the City Council with this awesome responsibility to continue your work in funding this program. Thank you. Thank you. Hannah Adams, Elizabeth Harvey, then Alexis Eckert. Good morning, Councilmembers and Deputy Mayor Schwartz. My name is Hannah Adams. I am a senior attorney at the National Housing Law Project, where I work with eviction defense attorneys all around the country. As some of you know, before my employment began there in 2024, I was a Right to Counsel attorney here in New Orleans for a number of years. And before that, I defended evictions in New Orleans for seven years prior to the Right to Counsel ordinance. My opinions are my own today and not given on behalf of my former employer. I urge the Council to find a way to fund this program in full at, I believe, $2.5 million. Defunding this program will be catastrophic for New Orleans' most vulnerable families and costly for the city, which will have to handle an influx of homelessness. Before Right to Counsel, only about 6% of tenants were represented in eviction courts in New Orleans. For years, I was one of four eviction attorneys covering all evictions in New Orleans in addition to four other parishes. We could only take a fraction of the cases that came into our office. As a result, most people went to court without a lawyer. Louisiana eviction laws heavily favor landlords and put tenants at a serious disadvantage. Without a lawyer, tenants cannot raise critical defenses and enforce their rights to proper notice and process. This is especially a problem for public housing and Section 8 tenants who stand to lose not just their housing but also their subsidy. Before Right to Counsel, a high percentage of these families went to court without a lawyer, lost, and ended up on the street. What's more, they ended up with an eviction record, which made it nearly impossible for them to find future housing. We do not want to return to that status quo. Now with Right to Counsel, tenants have access to lawyers, and those lawyers are incredibly effective at helping tenants avoid eviction and often negotiating solutions that save both sides time and stress and money. I wanted to mention that the Right to Counsel program is also critical in enforcing the city's Healthy Homes Ordinance and ensuring that tenants are not evicted in retaliation for... Thank you, Hannah. Elizabeth Harvey. Alexis Eckert. Elizabeth Harvey, Southeast Louisiana Legal Services. The Right to Counsel Ordinance is something we have all celebrated, we have all championed, and we're seeing the desired results. To lose the city's investment, the inertia, the progress from the last five years of intense work would be at a great cost. The ability to have and the stabilization of affordable housing for New Orleanians is a crucial necessity, and the Right to Counsel program is one smart part of the city's solution to the affordable housing crisis, and it has been working. Prevention works. This is real help for our mothers, our elders, and so many of those that make New Orleans so special, so singular, so inviting to all of those visitors. As we are all aware, everything has a cost. But the costs of being without a home are giant.

Disrupted housing displacement often leads to homelessness, interruption to children's education, job loss, a deterioration to mental and physical health, an increase in violence, a continued population migration out of this city, and the trauma that can carry over not only in one's lifetime but generations. As a former public defender at Tulane and broad, the necessity of stable housing and lack thereof became a crystal clear issue and an underlying problem for so many of those in this system. One small example, for even of the most minor of offenses and where a person could have gone through the criminal justice system without being housed in the jail, if a person did not have a permanent address, those defendants were kept exponentially longer in Orleans jail, longer incarcerations, more compounding cost. The Right to Counsel program is helping slow and lessen those many costs. Prevention works. Thank you for your continued support of this critical program. Thank you. Alexis, followed by Laura Tuggle, and then John Kipping. Good morning. Alexis Urquhart, Southeast Louisiana Legal Services. Under Louisiana law, an eviction judgment requires that a tenant move in 24 hours. It's not possible to move in 24 hours. When you drive around the city and see a pile of furniture and someone's belongings on the curb, that's likely a family that received a 24-hour eviction judgment. Realistically, eviction judgments on that timeline render members of our community homeless. Before City Council unanimously passed the Right to Counsel ordinance, 60% of tenants facing eviction in New Orleans received 24-hour eviction judgments. Before Right to Counsel, eviction rates in New Orleans were double the national average. I have the privilege of supervising the Right to Counsel program at Southeast Louisiana Legal Services. And I can tell you that no one works harder than our attorneys, social worker, and the other staff on our team to prevent the eviction of Orleans Parish residents. This is the fifth year that the city has allocated funding for Right to Counsel, and our team is now 98.5% effective in preventing evictions. Thank you. Whenever possible, we negotiate payment plans to get landlords paid, other consent agreements, and work to preserve housing subsidies for the low-income tenants that can't otherwise afford market rent. When we can't prevent eviction, our social worker helps our most vulnerable clients get rehoused. The cost to run this program is $2.5 million. In the first eight months of 2026, our team has prevented the eviction of 2,798 Orleans Parish adults and children. The majority of these were black, women-headed households, and in 25%, the head of household identified as having a disability. These are real people, and it's as a result of your continued support for this program that they remain healthy. Thank you. Wait. Hold on. Okay. Go ahead. Go ahead, Laura. Can you hear me? Yeah. Now we can. All right. Hi, everybody. I'm Laura Tuggle. I'm the director of Southeast Louisiana Legal Services. I want to thank the council and Jeff and Madeline and all the team for your support. You guys came to the rescue this summer when we were in jeopardy of potentially having to dismantle this highly effective program, and thank you for doing that and helping keep the true promise of the city's right to council ordinance in effect. The same is true right now as where we stood several months ago. This program works. It's cost effective. It's well run by the incredible team behind me and our community partners, and it's just a proven strategy, and even when times are tough and budgets are tough and you're checking the sofa cushions to try to find funds, this is a very wise investment. As noted, this program actually cost $2.5 million to run. The city invested $1.3 million this year. We dug in our own sofa cushions and found a million bucks, but unfortunately, we don't have that for 2027. So we're going to do our part. We're going to keep running the most effective eviction prevention program with whatever resources may become available, but without the $2.5 million, it won't be the true right to council program as the city has relied on the past few years. Our average cost per tenant assisted is $380, far less than the thousands of dollars it costs if a tenant has to relocate or if the city has to help bear the cost of a family becoming homeless and having to rehouse them. So I just want to thank you for your support, and we stand ready to assist in any way we can, and we're going to do our part. Thank you, Laura. John Kipping, Y. Frank South Hall, then Ava Scott. Good morning, Councillors. My name is John Kipping. I'm an attorney. I'm a community member of New Orleans. I'm a renter. Today, I'm speaking in my personal capacity. The renters of this city hear your words of support for the right to council program, but we need to see your action. I know that City Council has the data that shows, without a shadow of a doubt, how effectively this program serves the New Orleans community. The legal protections and remedies available to tenants in this state are few and far between and right to counsel is oftentimes the Only mechanism to make sure those protections are observed Right to counsel is homelessness prevention healthy homes enforcement tenant organizing protection Insurance that New Orleanians are staying in this city Right to counsel is the only resource available to a single mother trying to make sure her children aren't sleeping in a car tonight The only conversation we should be having today is how we can expand this effective program not cut it as Councilmember Morrell said This program is a right it must not be hollowed out by austerity measures As of 2026 New Orleans is one of 19 cities to pass a right to counsel in evictions hearings Cutting this funding would be a historic step backwards that must not be allowed to pass.

Thank you Why Frank Southall Avis Scott and then Nellie Katzen All right, good morning everyone, my name is why Frank Southall Organizing communication manager at Jane place and we're a proud member of the big easy budget coalition First I want to thank you to all the tenants residents advocates are coming out today Okay All big easy budget coalition renters rights assembly members people's council renters stand up or wave your hands If you're a part of that coalition of folks, please, you know, give yourself a round of applause The second I want to thank you to All to see council members to supporting right council over a past four or five years But especially thank you to council members Morrell and McCarran for coming out and speaking to the big easy budget coalition Antitendants around the city. Thank you for your advocacy. I've worked in renters rights issues for almost a decade in our city I've seen the transformation of how our city holds slum lords accountable Most of this due to advocacy organizing tenants or the rights, but it has occurred with legal Assistance from right to counsel if it wasn't for legal assistance to Southeast, Louisiana legal services Oakmont tenants wouldn't have been able to take down the notorious slum where Josh Bernal if it wasn't for legal assistance direct counsel attorneys Elders at complexes won't have gotten assistance. They need that piece like the willows Russell properties other apartment complexes run by slumlords Right to counsel attorneys and staff are the hardest working people in this city They deal with crushing caseloads and they still get the job done A lot of stats have already been mentioned by me over the years You guys know how black folks are impacted by housing disparities. And so we must fund it right to counsel touches thousands of people in the city via legal assistance Education outreach and we got to keep it going as councilman Morrell mentioned Literally see council vote for it It must be comprehensively funded if we're gonna protect the working-class people of our city We're gonna protect children black children right council must be funded. Thank you. Thank you Hello, my name is Ava Scott and I am glad to be here. I also like to Agree with him and in reference to right to counsel My second thing is I am a tenant of Gus high-rise and I also would like to request that Gus high-rise Be in the funding to assist the tenants To receive an environment assessment. Everyone know what what is going on with us? We was in the news and it still is a continuing problem mold is there they have a A Claim that is supposed to be having a hearing on November the 19th about mole and mole is still there So I am requesting that you guys put Gus in the budget to allow all tenants at Gus home to be tested for environment assessment and also to allow us to have and And and IV therapy treatment to remove all the toxin from our body, thank you very much for that Thank you, Nellie and Lashana Williams and Nadia Muhammad Are we got it Good morning. I'm Nellie Katzen I serve as executive director for the Committee for a Better New Orleans and I'm a proud member of the Big Easy Budget Coalition I want to start by thanking the people behind me as You all know Committee for a Better New Orleans helps put the information into people's hands that they need in order to show up for The issues that matter to them and the people behind me have showed up. So thank you all What we do with our own money matters We are The departments in front of me are reliant on significant amounts of federal funding But that doesn't mean and the departments that we're going to hear from today are the same But that doesn't mean that they don't deserve our own investment of our own money and the people who have spoken to the Effectiveness of this program. I will let them speak for themselves about the effectiveness. You know me. I'm here to talk about money There's a lot of opportunities Revenue opportunities when asked by the now CAO former Councilman DeRusso Big Easy Budget Coalition put together several page memo of recommendations for revenues for the city the city has Been able to cash in on about 25 million dollars of those recommendations including cost-sharing from the courts and from the assessor's office And there are additional Revenue recommendations in there that we could be taking advantage of that don't put the burden on vulnerable people We could be investing more in Enforcing our labor standards and short-term rental laws In enforcing safety and permits, although their department budget is being cut by nearly a million dollars Even with the fee increases that are being proposed. So I think that's an area to look I also noticed in my deep dive into the budget about 1.3 million dollars of 2026 general fund revenues that are not listed in this year's budget book. They're not zeroed. They're missing In conversation with Miss DeLarge in front of me. I learned that that wasn't included in this Nellie that's your time, but we will circle back with you. Lashana Williams, Nadia Mohammed, John Sullivan Hi, thank you for another opportunity to share my thoughts on a crisis that we're currently facing My name is Lashana.

I am an advocate for a lived experience people I'm a part of the People's Council and I am a participant who has received the right to counsel which without it I would have been unhoused as you know going through homelessness We don't talk enough about the mental strain that it takes on us Jumping from house to house or like me living in storage units living in my car Hopping from sofa to sofa just to find some stability as I rebuilt my life ultimately as I was working through my mental health challenges I was able to get housed and Unfortunately as many of you know We have an overwhelming amount of slumlords who take advantage of this system And we need the right to counsel to be able to protect ourselves in the process sometimes even with the housing not being up to healthy home standards that can also be an additional strain on our mental health and ultimately a lot of a lot of landlords Use that to retaliate against the tenants when they express things are not working like for me I didn't have an AC for an entire summer During my time living with the pertain your properties and their known slumlord who has changed their names and completely navigated the process of trying to Not be held accountable Ultimately I was on I went to a bus station and that's where I saw a flyer for rights to counsel With that I was able to go to court literally after getting out of a hospital stay for my mental health And was able to get what I needed and a vulnerable time to be able to stay house So I wouldn't be back on The street are back in a shelter and that helped me so I would like free Thank you Nadia Mohammed John Sullivan and Jamaica Morris Good morning councilmen and women. My name is Nadia Mohammed. I'm an advocate for human rights I wear many t-shirts and today. I'm with the big easy buzzy coalition as a member I've heard a lot of speak of on slumlords and on and on the talk about what my brother spoke on when he's when he spoke on saying that the landlord if You take and give him some money that he'll do it as of today I am homeless. I am homeless and That's something terrible for me to say because I have never been My landlord six years I paid my rent on time every time He decided that Because I took in my grandchildren That was this place that was homeless my grandson living in somebody closet And not in the home That he decided that he didn't want me in his house anymore My September rent on September the 10th They give me a letter saying that they don't want partial payment. No payment. No payment from an organization No exception get out Because of Discrimination against myself Against my Islamic belief a bit against me telling him to button up his shirt when he walked in front of me. Oh And did I say he's a pastor? As-salamu alaykum, thank you John Sullivan and Anika Morris Maxwell to your doula Good Morning John Sullivan with enterprise community partners Happy to be here. I want to first say Appreciate Jeff and and your team at OCD for doing a lot of hard work over the past year and and and Having a lot of good results we are a hundred percent in favor of Right to counsel and the funding for that program I did want to speak a little bit about the housing trust fund And in support of the fund, I wanted to emphasize particularly the leverage that that program is going to be able to achieve. These funds are really usually seed funds for larger investments. And so while we have a significant investment here in about $13.5 million, you're really looking at 10 times that amount in total construction costs. So these developers, they're bringing other public dollars and private financing, equity and bank lending to the table to really multiply the impact of the city's investment. So that's a real strong part of this program and part of those investments. I'll put the number through our economic impact calculators. And based on number of units, we're looking at more than 500 jobs created just through this tranche of funding that represents $60 million in wages and business income. And those benefits will flow to local contractors, tradespeople, suppliers, neighborhood businesses. So I've heard entrepreneurship talked about. This is a big way to build entrepreneurship. Nora has been doing it for years, cultivating smaller developers. F&O is emphasizing that as well. So the economic development impact is huge. Thank you. Thank you, John. Anjanika Morris, followed by Maxwell. And then after Maxwell is Lou Anne White and then Joe Herron-Mueller. Good morning. Good morning, Council. My name is Anjanika Morris. I'm president of the Greater New Orleans Housing Alliance. I'm here this morning to set the record straight on some of the things that we've heard today and to talk about why the Greater New Orleans Housing Alliance is so disappointed in some of the decisions that have been made or the proposed decisions that have been made. First of all, we want to make it very clear that we certainly do not object to investments in multifamily housing. But what we do object to is the Housing Trust Fund, the People's Housing Trust Fund, going for anything other than the most pressing needs that this community is facing. The most pressing needs that this community is facing is keeping its citizens housed. We have lost thousands of people in the last seven years. We are on track to lose more. The New Orleans School Board is looking at closing nine schools in the next three years. That is directly tied to the thousands of homeless children in our school system. Last year's estimates put it at 2,200 homeless children in Orleans Parish's school system. These are the most pressing needs, keeping our homeowners and our renters stably housed. That means looking at the entire market and recognizing that we also have thousands of vacant homes, thousands of homes that people have been displaced from, they have been evicted, which is why we do need to continue to fund the right to council.

But we cannot make investments. We can't take $9 million and leave it in the hands of the city of New Orleans. And to be clear, the people who voted for the Housing Trust Fund did not want any of this money to stay in the hands of the Office of Community Development. That was clear. They were insistent on that. And they wanted to invest it in their needs as quickly as possible. This is what you can do. We can be disciplined. And we can stop earning Fs and failing the people of New Orleans. Maxwell, followed by Lou Anne White. Max, your job is getting tougher, huh? Everything just moves a lot slower. All right. Thank you, Councilmembers. Maxwell Chartulo. I'm on the Housing Trust Fund Advisory Committee, 3702 St. Claude. I just want to start by echoing everything that everyone has said about right to council. We did a ton of work to put that in place. It has been incredibly successful. And I really appreciate y'all's pledges to make sure it's fully funded. But the crisis moment that we're in, that everyone has been talking about, is exactly why our 2027 Housing Trust Fund budget doubles down on creating as many units as quickly as possible and at income levels that people actually need so that we can keep our residents safely housed. And creating units quickly was a priority we set out last year. And there is absolutely no quicker or more efficient way to create units than by saving the 370 units of affordable housing that the city owes money to and that are ready to break ground tomorrow as soon as we get them a check. There's just no easy – there's no quicker way to do it. So if y'all can find $9 to $10 million somewhere else in the budget so that the Housing Trust Fund doesn't have to fund those developments, that's great, we'll take it. But I'm not willing to let them fail. And I hope that you aren't either. And those developments meet every priority in the ordinance that governs the Housing Trust Fund, including serving lower income households and meeting our civil rights obligations. And then, Council Member Green, I put this in here just for you, we've also balanced that investment with $10 million in homeownership programs over the next two years. And that will serve lower and middle income homeowners, those programs will help existing homeowners make repairs and put on fortified roofs, as well as create new resilient homes for first-time homebuyers, including wealth building opportunities that allows them to learn to manage a rental unit too. So I'm happy to go into more detail on any of that, but I know there's a lot of bad news in this year's budget, but the Housing Trust Fund is a good news story. We have everybody pulling in the same direction. And so I hope that Right to Council can be a good news story too. Thank you all. Thank you, Maxwell. Luann White, followed by Johann Mueller, followed by Morgan Clevenger. Good morning. I'm Luann White. I am co-chair and founder of Lubus Services. We are a volunteer-led nonprofit organization that builds affordable housing for folks who are unhoused. And we're working in building in the Lower Ninth Ward. We support homeless prevention programs like the Right to Council, and we are working for creation of housing opportunities for our unhoused neighbors. As Council considers 2027 for the Housing Trust Fund allocations, we ask you protect the opportunity for small and emerging developers like us in neighborhood-based development. We ask you continue supporting our small and emerging developers. Small developers can create affordable housing on scattered sites and smaller properties that may not work for like the larger developments. We face very different challenges, including access to capital, infrastructure costs, insurance permitting delays, and the capacity required to navigate complex funding programs. We ask that you evaluate the first year before changing any direction. The SMART Multifamily Program is just beginning. The money hasn't really been allocated yet. We support the idea of looking at the results, who applied, who received the funding, what barriers did small developers encounter, were qualified projects left unfunded because there wasn't enough money. We think large developments are important, but we know that that money should be allocated for both. We need both. I also want to put this discussion in a larger context on what's happening around homelessness. We are seeing movement towards shelters, criminalization, and institutional responses at the very time when we should be investing in housing, affordable housing. For years we've heard- Lou, that's your time. Joe, followed by Morgan Clevenger, and then Ethan Elsted. Good morning, Council. I want to express my gratitude to all of you, to the Deputy Mayor and staff at OCD for your attention and work to address housing insecurity and homelessness in our community. I certainly echo everything that my colleagues before and fellow residents have said in support of the Right to Council program. I can certainly attest in my many years of working to address homelessness in this community that this program is critical to ensuring housing stability and preventing homelessness. I also want to applaud the work that OCD does to address homelessness in a variety of ways and to address the need for affordable housing. I want to remind the Council that the largest gap in our housing market is for those people living below 30% of the area median income. And that's the same demographic for which homelessness is most likely to creep up when crises arise, whether that be a health crisis or whatever it might be. I want to encourage OCD to remain vigilant in finding opportunities to thoughtfully apply incentives that can help really rebalance this substantial gap.

And finally, I want to bring to the Council and to OCD the need to include people with lived experience of homelessness and housing insecurity as they look at planning and redesign or addressing the location of the low barrier shelter. Because in an environment where criminalization of poverty and unsheltered homelessness is a very real threat and a reality for many people in our community, we should be very thoughtful about how our attempts to bring people out of homelessness, that they do not inadvertently carry people into those same environments of incarceration that they are trying to avoid. Thank you. Morgan Clevenger, followed by Ethan Elstad, followed by maybe Daphne Jones from James Place. Good afternoon, Morgan Clevenger, New Orleanian, renter of many, many years. My parents were renters as well. I didn't become a homeowner until after Katrina. But we want to talk about generational wealth and aspirational to homeownership. And we know that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 started to desegregate neighborhoods and afford new housing opportunities. But the big push... particularly for those fighters like Jerome Bigdup-Smith. He was about homeownership, generational wealth, community economic empowerment. So I'm here to say that we must absolutely flip this grip because we voted for a housing trust fund that was focused on homeowners and small landlords. Low to moderate income homeowners, especially seniors, have doubles. They've been hit over and over again. Hurricane Ida and the pandemic has caused a huge loss in the viability of our homes. And that also means a loss of that rental. So if the roof is compromised for five years and they can't win the lottery or meet this other obligation or challenge, we need to flip the script. This money needs to go to homeowners who can provide small rentals as well. And I think that if we don't do that, we are going to lose the tax base of this city. Because that 40 percent who pays the property taxes for all the tax subsidies, giveaways, and property tax waivers, it's on us. And so we have to pass those costs down to renters as well, making an unaffordable circle that has to stop. Invest in our people. Strengthen our communities. Thank you. Ethan Elstad is in favor of rights of counsel, does not want to speak. Mr. Jones, come on up, followed by Michael Hawkins and then Titana Sanders. Hi, I'm Zachary. Jones with Jane Place. So I was talking, I said this earlier, but I was talking to a tenant. She was elderly, she had a hard time seeing, and she was barely in her place because of the amount of mold that she kept breathing in. She needed assistance very badly, but refused to level any complaints against the landlord for fear of being evicted. I've been at many apartment complexes where tenants have this fear. It's an inherited fear for decades of living in a city where they did not have a right to counsel. They didn't know a program like that even existed. And when I tell them about it, it's a great relief. Having, you've seen me before in a case with Oakmont Apartment Complex, without Hannah Adams and SLS, we wouldn't have had that victory for tenants. People wouldn't feel like they're able to voice their concerns. Concerns like a hole being above your shower are, again, many tenants have issues breathing because of mold. And many of these tenants, not only are they looking out for themselves, but most of these tenants are also looking out for children, taking care of their elders, and to remove A crucial element of keeping them housed is more expensive for the city, of course, but it's also more expensive for the residents living here. I know there are loss of federal funding, but if you take a pay cut, you still have a responsibility to feed the mouths of the people who look up to you. You have that responsibility. So it's pretty simple. Keep right to counsel funded. Thank you, Mr. Jones. Michael Hawkins, Titiana Sanders, and then finally, Aquanette Barnes. Good morning, Councilwoman. I'm Michael Hawkins. I own a house at 3134, 3136 North Velleret. Before Katrina, I came back here and didn't have no buying money, but they were talking about buying money, and they sent a guy to fix the roof, but the roof is leaking. I can't afford to fix the roof now, so the house is vacant, but the citizen went up on the taxes three or four times, and then they took my—somebody came in and paid the taxes on my house. I'm Michael Hawkins, Sr. So how can they do that? We don't know your exact situation, but I'll have a staffer come talk with you, okay? All right. All right. Titiana Sanders, followed by Aquanette Barnes. Titiana? All right. Aquanette Barnes? All right. Hello, how you doing? I want to ask first, okay, because when they talk, they mostly talk about infrastructure. They very seldom talk about the homeowners in the community. Are we not part of infrastructure? But also, what I'm saying is that the mold and everything they're talking about, if they would give us the money to renovate our property, it would eliminate all this complaining about mold. Now, they're redoing St. Charles Street. I don't know how many times they're doing St. Charles Street, but y'all say y'all are in debt, but I don't know how many times you're doing St. Charles Street. That's money that's coming out of our pocket as well. That's money that can be spent on homes and everything. It's a lot of things that are going on that is going to affect us. They got SpaceX coming here. They got the data center. They're talking about a training center for NASA. They're talking about the nuclear plant. We don't need a nuclear plant, because the first thing they do is they go after nuclear plants, so we really don't need a nuclear plant down here. How is that going to affect? How is that going to affect us? You say Fortify Homes is going to bring down insurance.

Well, what's going to happen is our insurance is going to go right back up, but I have a full plex, and since Katrina, I've been trying to get that full plex renovated, so I really feel discriminated and left out. I think what it is is they're trying to force me to sell my property, and I wonder how many in a city council, even a news reporter, has real estate as well, because that can affect you, too. My property is on 1st and Zanier, right there by Central City, right there by the Y. So, you know, that's prime property. So, I'm going through a whole lot with my property and vandalism and everything else, but also, there was talking about rental. There was a rehab program. That's your time. All right. We're going to make an executive decision. We're going to put Nobick and Noor at the end so we can get to the health department. We'll finish out, Jeff, your departments, because I know that folks are here to talk about low barriers. So, why don't we go ahead to 1C, Workforce Development, and try to get through these quickly. Ms. Barnes, we've got to get to the next presentation, so we're not holding everybody up. So, let's talk about Workforce Development. Jeff, go ahead and get started. Thank you, council members. We're aware of time, so we'll be brief, but obviously, feel free to ask any questions. Jeff, let's get going so we can move along. All right. No need for preamble from me. You have Deputy Director Tammy Washington. Wait, wait. Hold on, folks. If you could exit quietly, that would be great so we can get through these. All right, Jeff. All right. Thank you. I'll turn it over to Tammy, Sabrina, and Carmen to present on the Office of Workforce Development's budget. Good morning. I'm Tammy Washington, the Deputy Director for the Office of Workforce Development. I have Sabrina Johnson, the Fiscal Manager, and Carmen McKinley, the Director of Youth Initiative, who also manages the Marist Summer Youth Employment Program. In our office, we have five full-time employees who are mostly grant-funded. Carmen, who does the Marist Summer Youth Employment Program, is funded with a general fund and also the federal funding. With the proposed budget for 2027, the general fund, we had $500,000 in other operating funds that has now been eliminated, decreased for 2027. That funding was for an external partner organization that provides summer internships to approximately 200 in-school youth. The budget was eliminated as a part of the city's cost-saving measures to help close the budget gap. Youth will have access to the Marist Summer Youth Employment Program for summer opportunities. However, with the loss of this funding, less youth will have access to summer employment. The non-general fund proposed budget, we have $1.18231 for 2026. The proposed budget for personnel for 2027 is $738,136. The variance is $1,080,095. In other operating, it was $22,000,000 in 2026. The proposed budget for 2027 is $7.9, with a variance of $14.2. So there was a deduction in personnel in other operating. The personnel deduction was decreased due to a decrease in personnel funding. Several grants that we had are now ending at the end of December 2026. And with those, that resulted in a staff reduction. On the other operating, we had the decrease in those grants. Previous one-time funding or other supplemental funding is not being renewed for 2027. Certain grants had strict expiration dates that could not be extended or carried out. And the 2027 budget was adjusted to meet the actual grant amount award in 2027. And also the 2026 budget includes... offer funds of approximately $9 million that was not directly managed by the Office of Workforce Development. So budget efficiency, vacant positions which have now since been removed from the budget were unfilled to generate personnel cost savings while still maintaining essential operations. The current staff is cross-trained to enable the department to maximize personnel resources, maintain operational coverage and reduce the need for additional staff. Office supplies were decreased to a minimum and the purchase of food for our board meetings was eliminated. 2037 goals, our goal is to have Job 1 to continue to achieve or exceed negotiated performance goals for the Federal Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act Employment and Training Program. In program year 2025 which ended June 30th, 2026, Job 1 exceeded or met all the federal performance goals which included employment placement, median earnings, credential gaining, credential measurements and skill attainment. Another goal is to expand partnerships with New Orleans libraries and recreation centers to bring workforce development, employment and training service to additional libraries and local communities. Since we only have one job center which is located in Central City, we try to bring our services out to other communities such as Algiers, New Orleans East and the Ninth Ward. Currently, on every Tuesday, on the first and third Tuesday, we have a staff go to the Norman Meyer Library in Gentilly. On the second and fourth Tuesdays, we have staff at the Algiers Library to bring our services to those communities. Also, in program year 2025, we conducted job fairs in different communities. We went to the Ninth Ward, Algiers and New Orleans East to bring our services and employment opportunities to those communities, so we will continue to expand those services. We also want to enhance visibility and impact of the Mayor's Summer Youth Employment Program to target engagement and outreach and diversify the internship placements to align with the future workforce needs. This past summer, we had a successful youth employment program where we enrolled over 1,000 youth in which 215 were college interns and we engaged over 200 employers. If I can just interrupt, Tammy, they won't sing their own praises, but I just want to celebrate Carmen and Sabrina and Tammy.

The absolutely heroic work of getting the 1,000 young people internships that your office directly manages, there's another 1,000 that this office partners with at New Ward in order to make sure close to 2,000 New Orleanians, young people are employed every summer. It's heroic work and I just want to applaud them for that work that they do tirelessly. Carmen and her team, since the program ended, they have continued to meet with new employers to try to bring in some new industries, because as youth came in, they expressed their interest. They had a lot of health care and the sciences, so we want to bring in those employers because our goal is to give them a career exploration experience during the summer, so we want to try to meet their interest, so we're constantly trying to engage new employers for the program. Also, the Mayor's Summit Youth Employment has been working with the city IT department to kind of streamline the application process to see if we can do more of it online and see if there's a possibility that we can upload some of those documents online and we can save those documents from year to year, so participants won't have to bring in everything if they're applying for the next year. So we're trying to see if we can get that work. Hopefully we can get some improvements in 2027 with that, but we're constantly working with IT to see what we can be able to do. And we're also trying to expand and strengthen partnership with industry leaders across industry sector to better prepare and connect our customers to high growth and high demand industries, and that's for our adult customers also with the Job 1 program. And that's it? Short and sweet. Great. Thank you. Council Member McCarron. I just want to talk about two things. Can you talk a little bit about of the partnership with the libraries, like how many people are you seeing and how you can expand that to provide more workforce development and trainings and access? Yes. I don't have the exact number. We can get that from you, from our career center operator, but it's usually they see around 20 to 30 when they go there. And so our goal is to actually do more outreach in those communities too so they can know that we're there and what services we have to offer. Okay. And I want to get to also summer youth employment. Obviously Youthforce NOLA has been cut from this budget, and the city's been partnering with them since about 2015, I think, to fund the intern stipends. And really, that program has shown great success. You know, 97% of kids that go through that program, they continue on to higher ed. They have job opportunities. They typically make, you know, $3.10 more than other kids that haven't gone through this internship program. And I think the biggest part of that is 75% of them, the alums remain in New Orleans, which is what we are trying to keep people here and grow those opportunities. So can you just talk about that program and what we would lose if we don't continue to partner with such a wonderful opportunity there? Yes. Youthforce NOLA, they have been a partner for a couple of years now, and they work with our in-school youth mostly, with certain high schools. And so without that funding, there's over, like, 200 internships and direct industry occupations that those youth have been, like, trained in or going to, that we would lose those 200 placements with those direct industry placements. And there's no plan to kind of expand that within the city if we don't have this partnership? That's correct. That's correct. If we don't have the funding, yeah, that partnership, it would be difficult, I think, to identify how to fully bad fill that through city or other sources if the city isn't investing through the general fund. I think a couple of just quick points on Youthforce. Obviously, they are a key partner of the Office of Workforce Development. I think the over 200, you know, that's an essential part of the 2,000 or the 1,000 young people served every summer directly through the Office of Workforce Development investments in the summer youth employment work. And I think we've been in active discussions with Kate Swinburne, their leader, and some of their team members about how do we cultivate that partnership and actually grow it. And so I think, obviously, losing that funding would be really impactful in a negative sense in the short term. And I think it also doesn't necessarily allow us to invest in and grow that partnership in future summers. You know, just as an example of the types of things there are that we're exploring in partnership, obviously, some of the heroic work that I was referencing that Carmen and Sabrina and Tammy do every summer is there's just a lot of logistics associated with getting this many young people paid, and they're paid through the city's payroll processing system. And there's some good reasons for that, but some real challenges associated with that. And, you know, one of the things we would like to identify is how can we either outsource that or streamline that. We're obviously looking at ways internally, as Tammy mentioned, with our own IT department, but we think that youth force and partners like them, you know, will have some really key roles in that work going forward. And then also on sort of the programmatic level, how we cultivate partnerships with employers and schools and others that youth force have, you know, exemplary relationships with and a track record of success, you know, working with, you know, how we coach young people each summer. All of that is work that we would love to continue to partner on and grow with youth force. But yes, right now, obviously, that $500,000 is not proposed in the general fund. Yeah, let's keep talking about that because I just think it's such an opportunity.

I mean, I know today in particular, we have so many programs that we have funded over the past that we've seen real results of keeping people in their homes, providing job opportunities, especially for our youth, and that's been a priority of the mayor, this council. So I really, you know, want to continue to figure out a way that we can continue that partnership that's been so successful. I think it's, you know, if we are not providing workforce investment opportunities for our youth and even adults here, then, you know, we're not going to keep people here and we're not going to continue to grow our population. So I think that's incredibly important. One last thing about workforce development, because I talk about it all the time with Department of Public Works, but Office of Workforce Development should also be working with our unions, specifically IBEW is one that, you know, we are trying to hire electricians as part of, you know, growing the Department of Public Work in-house. So I really, really would encourage you all to explore our partnerships and apprenticeship programs, anything that you can do to get that out. Maybe you can have IBEW or other union partners attend some of your events at the library to help, you know, provide those opportunities for people. I think that would be great, and I'm happy to, you know, work with you all on making that connection if you need it. Yes, and we do work with the unions. We have two of the members on our Workforce Investment Board from IBEW, and we do partner with them for training and apprenticeships. That's one of our main training partners. Good. Well, let me know if you need additional partnership from my office. Thank you. Council Member Willard, then Council Member Morrell. Thank you, Madam Chair. I echo Council Member McCarran's sentiments. It looks like for 27, the entire operating budget is funded by federal funds. Is that correct? Yes. Can you walk through what those funds are being proposed to be used on for 27? Well, the federal funds, they fund the Office of Workforce Development with the five employees in our office, and also Job One Career Center. The Job One Career Center is ran by a contracted operator, and so they have like 24 staff, but it funds the whole infrastructure for Job One, the rent and all the services that we provide through the Career Center and the staffing at the Career Center. It refunds training scholarships for participants on the job training that we do where we pay half the salary while the employer trains. It also funds work experience where we work with participants and employers to give work experience like an adult internship where individuals do not have a lot of experience. We're trying to build their resume, and we pay their wages while they're doing that, and it funds that. So all the services that we provide through JobOne is funded through that money. So it's mostly the salaries for the employees in the office and then JobOne? Yes, and all the services. Okay. What's being allocated for the Mayor's Summer Youth Program? Do you know, Jeff? Yes. Yeah, right, so overall it comes from a couple of different sources. Actually most of it does not come from the WIOA funds. So Office of Community Development actually pays for a significant amount of the position. So historically it was $450,000 that OCD invested of Community Development Block Grant money to NORD. And those were for their 1,000, those stipends for their 1,000 internships. And then we also invest, I think it's $100,000 into OWD directly for summer. Yeah, OCD funds. Yeah, OCD funds. And Randy says approximately $1.8 to $1.9 for the Mayor's Summer Youth Employment Program in general funds. Yep. Okay. I think the cut to Youth Force NOLA, not ideal, but that's the environment we're in right now, right? We don't have enough money to do everything. It got me thinking though about when we make that investment, are we investing into career readiness, setting someone up, a young person to enter into a career versus just, you know, putting money in their pocket during the summer? And I think as a council working with the administration, that's probably something that we need to evaluate as we move forward. Also, I wanted to know if there was any type of analysis done kind of on the cost and the return on the investment as it related to, you know, the city doing it through the Mayor's Summer Youth Program or working with a nonprofit like Youth Force NOLA. Have we done anything like that? Those are good questions. So I guess a couple of thoughts in response and certainly a lot to follow up on there. One is I think Dr. Vagno and her team can certainly speak to some of the impacts outside of the direct workforce and economic development impacts on having 2,000 young people having a place, you know, especially in summertime and making sure that, you know, they have meals and a safe place to go and a productive place to go. I'm not aware of an overall sort of program level analysis of the entire Summer Youth Program. Do you want to speak to that, Carmen? Yes. We do have a return on investment with our Mayor's Summer Youth Employment Program. The whole goal of it is not to just put money in the kids' pockets during the summer, but we also try to focus on our interns who are coming to gain career exposure, get experiences in the arts and the sciences that they're already going to school for. And then we also push that some of our kids are actually obtaining permanent employment. Like we've had four to five kids that obtained permanent employment through the City of New Orleans. That was with the EMD, through our public works, and the list goes on and on. We've had people that were employed through the law department. So that return on investment is happening year to year, and we are focusing on permanent employment within the City of New Orleans that our young people are retained here.

Our interns basically go off to school in various areas such as Lafayette, Baton Rouge, but they rely on the Mayor's Summer Youth Employment Program to come back home so that they can return home and have those career-based industries available to them. Okay. It sounds like a situation of where it's really good to have both of these programs running simultaneously. J.P. and I were just talking about the extent of the Mayor's Summer Youth Program, and as we talk about the City of New Orleans being in one of its safest points in our city's history in decades, going back to the 60s, one of the things that has contributed to that effort is the reduction in juvenile crime. And so when we provide those opportunities for our youth during the summertime where they have a lot of free time on their hands, that is a good move. That is a good step in the right direction. So thank you for everything that y'all are doing for the city and for our youth. Thank you. Councilmember Morrell. Thank you. I appreciate all the work that y'all do, honestly. I think it is important to note that when we're all trying to do more with less, your budget efficiencies are directly on point. I think every department is trying to find ways that may make our daily lives a little more uncomfortable, but allow us to continue to provide the services that people have come to expect. I did notice in your 2027 goals that there was some language about expanding opportunities with the libraries. I do think that's a worthwhile goal, because when you're talking about efficiencies, our libraries, first off, they have their own funding, which makes it easier, because when we're doing a partnership with them, we don't have to do it necessarily with the expectation they need money from us, because for the most part, with the exception of some of our libraries being offline because of HVAC, which is a whole separate issue, but for the most part, they are community spaces that communities have access to, and the Job 1 Workforce Center is fantastic, but a lot of people can't get to it necessarily. So whenever you're able to maximize trained opportunities at libraries, it makes it easier for people who want to get additional training or advanced training, they can get to a local library. So I would encourage you, and the council would be happy to work with you in promoting those opportunities, because we want to make sure everyone can get access to what y'all provide. When it comes to, like Councilwoman Wohler was saying, when it comes to opportunities for kids, particularly job opportunities for kids, I've had the opportunity during the summer to interact with some of your interns, and it is amazing how eye-opening it is for kids, especially high school age kids who are entering the workforce to see what job opportunities are available to them in a practical way, because people often don't understand that when kids are in high school, they look at jobs in the abstract. It's the goal when you graduate from school to get a job, but not every kid is taught how to get a job. They're taught if you graduate from high school, you get a diploma, there's a job waiting for you. They're not actually taught that there is a process and how you have to interview, how you have to fill out a whole lot of paperwork. We had a whole year, I think it was two or three years ago, where payroll was completely foobarred because we had not properly educated children and parents how to set up direct deposit correctly, and the issue is that for almost all jobs that you have now, very few give you a check. They expect you to have a bank account, they expect you to provide the accountant information, and their payroll system puts that money directly in the account. So it was an embarrassing period for the city of New Orleans when we messed up all those paychecks. That's because we made the assumption that parents and kids would know that basic skill or requirement, and that was a learning curve for us, but it's something that y'all have incorporated in, and when I've talked to kids who are exiting the program, it's like one, they know the basic skills on how to enter the job in the workforce, but also many of them set their aspirations slightly higher because when they leave high school and they aren't properly trained on how to get a job, they settle for a job. They get discouraged, they don't know the soft skills they have to have, and they settle for just getting a job to get by. When you expose them to the types of jobs that can be available to them, if they just know how to go about getting it, they aim higher, and I mean, it's hard to put a value on that. It's something I'm sure we study and others will study because setting that bar higher and letting those kids know that with the skills you have, with that high school diploma, you can do more than get a job at Burger King, that you can do more than work at a gas station. Not that those aren't important jobs, but the problem is that when you look at where we came from, from 2021, 2022, when crime, youth crime, was at an all-time high, when you would talk to those young people, they were so discouraged about the lack of opportunity in the workplace, they just gave up. And so even though I know that Youth Force NOLA has 200 placements, you guys have your placements, when you look at, like Matt and I were saying, when you look at all of those individual kids setting their aspirations higher, seeing a future higher, that's less kids jiggling handles of cars, that's less kids getting involved in dirt because they go, listen, I see a future for myself and I don't want to risk it. And so we have a lot of hard decisions to make. We appreciate everything y'all do, but we certainly are going to see, and I tell people all the time, at times like this, in a lot of instances, it's triage.

And even if we can't get back to where we want to be, we're certainly going to look at with cuts and other things, how we can get you back to as close as where we can get you. Because you've already shown, whenever we give you an extra dollar, you're going to find a way to use it wisely. So we certainly hear what you're saying, appreciate all the work you're doing, and we know the impact. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Green. This is a tough time, certainly, for the city in terms of budget considerations. I do know that the mayor, as a member of the council previously, was a strong proponent of the Mayor's Summer Youth Employment Program. And it certainly pains her and her administration to have to put forward any budget, she can speak for herself, that has to have these sort of cuts that are being proposed. But at the end of the day, I want to speak for the Mayor's Summer Youth Employment Program because I've had an opportunity to have a couple of workers in my office during the summer. And it's something that you'll never really be able to measure in terms of the value to our city except for this, talk to the young people who participated. Talk to them at the culminating exercises, for example, when they're at LSU New Orleans on that campus, and they're talking about how pleased they were to have had an opportunity to even be part of government for a short period of time. I've been invited to speak at classes, for example, at LSU New Orleans that extended the invitation to me because a member of the class, the civics class or the public relations, public administration class, participated in the Mayor's Summer Youth Employment Program. And also, members are also participating in the Civic Leadership Academy. Some of those things are difficult to measure, but you can measure them by this, talk to the people who participate. And we're going to do everything that we can to make sure that there is not a zero budget for an important program like this. And I think that we all are going to try to work a little bit more with the state, federal government, and private sector, because those are resources that can help us, and maybe because in the past the money was there through the federal government, we didn't work as hard to try to get money out of the state with its $47 billion annual budget. At the end of the day, there are resources, but this is an important program, and the city council and the mayor have shown our support in the past. We're going to continue to show our support in the future, but I just want to say that you are doing a great job. But talk to the young people. Talk to the 2,000 young people. I see a lot of them in various settings. There are nine high schools in my district. I say that all the time. Not just because there are nine high schools, but because I go to them. I talk to young people who participated in programs involving the city, and they are appreciative. They're talking about staying here in the city to go to our colleges to maybe do work, because they've seen successful people in certain sectors. So this is an important program. We're going to do everything that we can to continue it. But thank you for the work that you do. It makes a tremendous difference in our city. All right. Kate Swinburne, followed by Jordan Rogers, followed by LaShauna Williams, Nellie Katzen, and then Morgan Clevenger. If you all could just line up so we can go quickly through comments. Ready. Good morning. Kate Swinburne with Youthforce NOLA. As has been discussed, we fuel a movement that equips our young people to graduate high school on a path to career success. This past summer, in 2026, our internship program trained 224 young people from our non-selective public high schools and placed them with 76 regional businesses, earning satisfaction ratings above 90% from youth, employers, and families. A survey of alumni over 10 years shows that 97% of them are staying connected post-high school, and they're earning up to $6,500 more per year than their peers under 25 across the state. Youthforce has partnered with the city since 2015 to fund stipends. Our contract this year is for $500,000. This $500,000 represents about a third of the total internship budget and was leveraged to secure federal, state, and philanthropic support. Now, the amount, the $500,000, was a 41% reduction over the prior year, which led us to reduce internship program enrollment by 25%. This year's operating budget, as discussed, has eliminated support for Youthforce NOLA. I am super sympathetic to the budget challenges. I'm facing a philanthropic cut to the internship program, so I understand it's the times. I do want to share also, though, I must share that an elimination of city funding for the internship program would require us to further reduce enrollment by up to 50% more than what we were able to serve this summer. We have been in active discussions with the city about a more robust collaboration. We would like to be as helpful as possible. That would not be possible with budget cuts. So we do ask that funding for Youthforce be reinstated. We're actually, we've been aiming to rescale to serve 275 young people or more. And all with that, we look forward to collaborating with the city to chart a strong path forward. Thank you, Kate. Jordan Rogers, LaShawna Williams. Jordan? All right, LaShawna, followed by Nellie Katzen, followed by Morgan Clevenger. Hi, it's me again, LaShawna. I'm part of the People's Council, someone with lived experience. I am also a former foster youth, so I really want to make sure that it's being put in consideration of connecting these programs not only to local youth, but also to former foster kids because they are some of the most vulnerable when it comes to being able to visualize what their opportunities are outside of the neglect that they've experienced or the abuse that they've experienced.

I know when I aged out of care, I did not have the opportunity for this program, and it was a trial and error to find the resources that I did gain access to to even get myself this far, and it's still a journey to develop. I also want to bring some awareness to some of the challenges because I have been approved to receive the WOA grant, but I don't think that there is enough ADA accommodations for that program. When you actually go into the Job 1 and you get approved, you get connected to the link to where you can find the job opportunities, and then you're kind of given your own will to look through it. It's 64 pages of 50 opportunities each, and there is not enough connected to the opportunities that a lot of us want to go into. I know for me I have a desire to develop my public speaking and wellness around recovering from trauma, and I don't see those skill sets on the site yet, and I would love to see those things expanded. And then I also feel like some of the list kind of is adjusting where there's some entrepreneurial things, but they're not within New Orleans city limits, so it's like how will we actually get connected to the training and how will we decide if that's the program that we want. Also, I do agree that expanding Job 1's training to the libraries would be essential because sometimes it is difficult. That's your time. Thank you. Thank you. Nellie Katzen, Morgan Clevenger, and then I have Noomi Washington. Hi there. Nellie Katzen with Committee for a Better New Orleans and the Big Easy Budget Coalition. We're here to support jobs for young people. The lining of teenagers' pockets generally goes towards groceries. We learned that when the city did a 2023 universal basic income pilot, and they found that like 30% of the universal basic income that young people received went straight to their basic needs, and so giving them the training to not just receive that funding but also earn it is well worth the investment, and it's supporting our most vulnerable people and setting our young people up for success. When we go out and survey people and teach people about the budget, what we hear most regularly is people want to see investments in housing and health and mental health, but also in young people, and young people need more than just sports facilities and programming. They also need opportunities to create their careers, to create their jobs, and to earn money to support themselves and their families. Some of these young people are themselves parents. And so we're in partnership with the Children and Youth Planning Board, which has done a ton of work to support the wraparound services and investments that young people need, and this is one, and we support it. Thank you. Thanks. Morgan, followed by Noomi Washington. Hey. So I really appreciate Nellie and everybody else's comments, and, yes, we do need to continue to invest in our youth. And what's unfortunate, though, Council President Morrell mentioned the libraries. There are seven libraries closed, and they've been closed for most of the summer, and we know in our communities this may be the only way that a young person or any person of any age can apply for a job. One young lady missed a training opportunity for a job she had already secured, and she lost that job because the library was closed and she had no other way to access that training program. So while the library is a separate budget, we all need to make sure all of that is working together as well as NORD. But I also want to ask, you know, back to economic development and how this all ties in. You know, we can't just say we're hoping for the future because $7.25 an hour jobs are not enough. And these hotels that are coming in, and we see a hotel with property tax waivers and tax subsidies and, you know, all of this. Where's the community benefits agreements that would help fund some of these things that we direly need in this city? So if they get a 40-year tax break or if they get a $200 million subsidy or a $10 million subsidy, they must have community benefit agreements that support what we actually need here. Thank you. All right, I have one last card from, I think it's Noomi Washington from Saratoga Street. Hi, good morning, council members in attendance. Thank you. I would like to first address the idea of these programs putting money in kids' pockets and why that would be considered an unproductive outcome. As a 23-year-old college graduate, I'm not too old to remember that school services are expensive, sports are expensive, extracurricular activities are expensive. How many times have you seen young people fundraising on the streets, in buses and grocery stores selling candy to earn money for the programs that they need to keep their time occupied and themselves out of trouble? I also wanted to speak a bit on the threats to public education students face in the here and now. In a world where the federal government is actively making it harder to secure funding for an undergraduate degree, and not to mention the loss of the graduate plus loan for postgraduate education, we need to provide young people with a way forward in the uncertainty that we are seeing today. And I believe that lies in funding the youth programs currently on the chopping block. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Ashley? Up next is culture, economy, and film. Oh, goodness. Lower shores. Yeah, sure. All right. Greetings and good morning, council members, and thank you for the opportunity to join you. I think all of you know me, Frederick Delahousie, affectionately known as Wood. It's my pleasure to serve as director for the Office of Cultural Economy. And let me say it's a privilege to be with you here. Because I do truly believe that the history and culture of our city is the reason why all of us are in this building right now.

So let me first thank the culture, the culture bearers, the artists, the creatives, our partners and collaborators, the small but extremely mighty team at the Office of Cultural Economy. As you are fully aware, our city is defined by culture. It is not an accessory to development. It is the foundation that drives our economy, attracts millions from around the world to our city. And although that investment cannot all be measured in dollars, too often the very people who carry forward this legacy are our own. Artists, our musicians, our culture bearers, they get priced out, they are consistently underfunded, pushed to the margins, and unheard of decisions that really shape their own neighborhoods. Our office believes that culture should be at the forefront of every policy, housing, zoning, public safety, education, economic development, because you cannot separate the spirit of New Orleans from the people who create it. And culture cannot live without space, without support, without protection from criminalization and displacement, and it must be nurtured and not just celebrated. So we can get into the slides. Here's our org chart. We suffered a 67% reduction in staff. We currently have three members, three full-time employees that operate the Office of Cultural Economy. One grant allocated and two within the general fund. Deputy Director of Arts and Culture, Lana Harris, who is also a culture bearer, she's a baby doll. Her father, who we all know, Al Harris, the French Quarter Fest is dedicated to him every year. She also has lineage to Aritha Castle Haley. So we have somebody in our office who has deep cultural ties to our city. Our Executive Administrator, Ms. Lynette Myers, also has deep cultural ties to the faith-based community, the cultural-based community. We call her our Minister of Finance. She works very closely with Brandy to make sure my decimal points don't move when they're not supposed to. Our office acts as a liaison for the city with major events and festivals. We are charged to host all these events, and we also support numerous cultural gatherings, exhibitions, openings, festivals, et cetera. We attended last year 31 of 36 Second Lines. We try to support whenever and whenever possible. So currently we serve as international relations as well for the city, and that department has come on us to be that space. We have hosted 39 countries at Gallia Hall to date this year, and we also just recently hosted a delegation of 65 people from Italy as part of our Embrace the Culture conversation, and we've been doing that work, trying to do that work, as diligently as possible. You can go to the next slide. So Adopt a Budget from 2026, this is our general fund dollars. You can see that we took a loss in terms of personnel. We do have a few dollars that we're moving around from different spaces to try to allocate for different opportunities. Next slide. We have no planned reductions for our staff. We are hoping to add on in 2028 for a digital media person. While we don't have the resources to provide for cultural folks in our city, we do try to provide as much support marketing-wise as possible. So we're working on that. We can go to the next one. Non-general funds. So you'll see that we took a major reduction on this side of things. We have $335,000 that's been vetoed by the governor's office, and we're going direct support, especially in Councilman District East and Councilmember Hughes' district, that were VAM programs for schools, VAM programs for church and faith-based opportunities, as well as social aid and pleasure clubs. One of our wins this year, of course, was that we were able to use those state appropriations to support the 39 social aid and pleasure clubs. We gave $125,000 across all social aid and pleasure clubs to support them with their details for the NOPD. We lost all that funding from the governor's office. So we're scrambling to find what we can find. We facilitate the Mardi Gras Advisory Council. We facilitate the cultural districts, actually on behalf of the council. You all are the governing body for the state LDOA cultural districts. The cultural economy facilitates that program. We also facilitate the Mardi Gras Social Aid and Pleasure Club Task Force on behalf of the council. Although you are the governing body, we are charged to meet with those folks regularly throughout the year. Normally, we are able to go and meet these folks where they are in council districts. Due to the funding cuts, we are not able to engage with them as much as we used to. I think Councilmember Harris, you've been to a few of those meetings. We were tempted to be as creative as possible with funding, but we had to suspend the cultural economy grants program. We suspended our Embrace the Culture initiative, and we've also suspended the New Orleans Poet Laureate program. Just programs that had to go away because of the funding cuts. Along with all the events and programs mentioned, we did have some significant wins this year around the Super Sunday celebrations, around the Super Sunday soiree that was a fire of our mighty, mighty ancestor, Jerome Big Duck Smith. As I mentioned, those funds have gone. We were able to restore three Katrina Memorial monuments. I don't know if you're all aware, but there were 19 monuments that were put up in dedication to Hurricane Katrina. They were supposed to be up for about six years. They've been up for about 20 years, and a lot of them are falling apart. We were able to move some funding around to dedicate Mandala, which is by artist Rashida Ferdinand, Scrap House by artist Sally Heller, and Flood Marker by Chris Sassito. We refurbished all of those this year, and we hope to work to try to fix the rest of those so they don't fall out on people.

We worked closely with the Arts Council, of course, to produce these beautiful artworks that are behind us that represent each district so that the folks of our city can come in and see themselves reflected in the House of Government, not just always come and hit an event, but also see themselves. We were able to collaborate with Council Member Greene's office to establish an honorary intersection for Big Chief Donald Harrison, Sr. We coordinated with the Henry Coulson Foundation for the CEA on the sale of Tuba Fat Square. I don't know how many folks know that Tuba Fat Square was up for sale. This is a cultural space that means so much to the Treme community. The gentleman who owned that space can no longer take care of it, so he sold the space. We were able to step in, along with Jeff and some other folks, to make sure that that space stays a cultural space in perpetuity. We collaborated, of course, with the airport on the MSY music program. Our Embrace the Culture concert series continues, but we've seen a decrease in a lot of funding, as I mentioned. 375,000 estate appropriations have been vetoed, and also we have a major decrease in our NOTCF allocations. With that, I'm privy to your questions. Thank you, Wood. As you said, we are nothing without our culture, and we need to invest in it, and you do a lot with a very small team, Cousin. I see you over there. Again, these budget cuts are hard, but let's look to the future and see what we can do to make sure that we can get you staffed up so that we can support the culture properly. We look forward to it. Thank you. Council Member Green. Yes, the budget cuts are hard, but in the midst of it, you have continued to fulfill your commitment to the City of New Orleans and to our culture bearers, and whether it be participation in the Jerome Smith observations, whether it be supporting those initiatives such as the Donald Harrison Square, I just want to thank you for your commitment, because it's genuine with you. It's not just that you have a job. You want to see our city continue to thrive, and one of the ways that we continue to thrive is to emphasize the unique culture that we have. Some things can't be measured that your office does or that our city's culture does. A lot of people come to our City of New Orleans, and they spend a lot of money. Here I go. That goes to the State of Louisiana, and they stay in hotels. It goes to the convention center when they rent the convention center. It goes to the Superdome when they have major events, because the city's collections are so limited based on state laws, but it's important to recognize that benefiting the state benefits the City of New Orleans, too, so I don't want to just bash the state. At the end of the day, we have work to do to enhance our economy here, our cultural economy, but I saw this weekend, I saw the folks from Atlanta come in and have their big culture parade. Second line. You can call it what it is. They tried it. It was a second line, and they thought that they were really doing the right thing. They were doing a good thing because they came to the City of New Orleans, but just the number of people who came from Atlanta, they don't go everywhere else. They come to New Orleans in big numbers. We have cultural connections. We have political connections and the like, but it reminded you of how important our culture is to the City of New Orleans in terms of people enjoying themselves and coming and investing by spending money in our economy, but thank you for the work that you do. I hope that working with the State of Louisiana especially and maybe some private sector sources, we can get back some of the funding that has been taken, but no matter how much funding is taken, it won't take away from the fact that our culture is extremely important to our city and that we have people like you and Elena and others in the office who are committed to our city, who are doing great work. So we're going to find some additional resources, but thank you for what you're doing with what you have. Thank you, sir. Council Member Morrell. Thank you for being here today. I know just I have had some preliminary conversations with the Mayor. I know that there is an appetite to revisit the New Orleans Tourism and Culture Fund and create some additional flexibility within it. I think that when they look at the programming that you're able to do through your office and how it affects a multitude of people, I think that there are aspects of that fund that could be better utilized with your direct involvement. I think that the days of kind of doing the individual grants to people versus the days of you trying to implement and continue the culture preservation on a larger scale, I think that we need to really look at how we can best maximize that. And obviously, you've been a pleasure to work with. I know that there has been a lot in the last couple of months as far as direct engagement from outside people at the City of New Orleans. You more than anyone has to deal with the mess that is Essence Festival every year and try to figure out how we're going to deal with Essence Festival every year and how to make sure to maximize that our local vendors, our local culture bearers are respected during Essence Festival every year. And we really appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member McCarran. Thank you, Wood, for all your office does, like everybody else does. You do a lot with a very little budget. Brandy, is there any opportunity, the Gallier Hall fund, since y'all do a lot of work at Gallier Hall, I don't know if that's another opportunity for a funding source for their budget, but I would like to take a look at that as we go through the next couple weeks on funding. Sure. Thank you. All right. We have two speaker cards. Morgan Clevenger followed by Ethan Elstad. Thank you. Thank you, Wood. Morgan Clevenger. Let's go back.

When I was coming up in this culture, it was for the people by the people. There were no permit fees, police fees, parade fees, float fees. It was for the people by the people, and it was self-sustaining. And it wasn't until we lost oil, we lost the port, and those jobs, and the economy turned to tourism, that all of a sudden the tourists started coming. coming out. And then all of a sudden we had all these fees that these clubs and these organizations and Indians had to pay. And it becomes a circular situation when we're saying a social and pleasure club has to pay $5,000 to $10,000 to parade and we have to get them a grant to pay for that. That seems very, very strange to me. But I really appreciate what was said about how connected this is to housing, jobs, and everything else. Big Chief Tootie Montana was an artisan. He was a lather. He was a plasterer. And his culture was spiritual to him and it was a spiritual thing. And it wasn't until Jazz Fest came along and started paying people to get up on a stage and he refused to do that. He never went to Jazz Fest and was paid to perform because he came from a different era. So now we have the hotels and the tourism industry and the festivals. They're making the money, but they all want a culture bearer. And before Katrina, that term didn't even exist because the culture came from the neighborhoods. Everybody was a culture bearer. Came from the families and those families, those neighborhoods lived in houses next to each other around the corner. They played on their steps, on the stoops, and on the corners. They learned from their elders. And we've lost that. So this office is important, but we have to do it right. Thank you, Morgan. Ethan? Hey, good afternoon, culture members. Ethan Elliston, music and culture co-host from New Orleans, 1762 Paul Morpheus Street. First, I wanted to come down and express my strong support for Office of Culture Economy and the Office of Nighttime Economy, and particularly I want to uplift Wood and Elena. I've been working with this office since the Landry administration and this is the first time that the office has been led by people that come directly from the culture. And I think that's really important and really speaks well of the office and the work that they do. I also appreciate that by moving to the Office of Economic Development, we recognize that the culture is an economic engine for the city. But unfortunately, the way the budget is set up, there's not much gas in that tank. If you look at the combined budget of Office of Cultural Economy, Office of Nighttime Economy, and Office of Film based on the original presentation, it's actually less than the grant that was recently announced for rebates for e-bikes. And I think that tells a story. And that we need to really figure out a way to invest in the culture of both these organizations, but also within the city itself. Not only are these offices facing budget cuts, but if you look at what's happened in the culture and organizations, individuals in the spaces, from federal cuts to state cuts, to national foundations pulling back, to losing the Recreation Cultural Fund, there's been a lot of money that has been lost over the past 18 months in the culture community, and people are feeling it. It's organizations, individuals, and I would say we're really kind of at a crisis point. And so we may not have the resources directly now, but we really need to start planning together. So I know there's not going to be windfall coming in 2027, but let's get ready for 2028, be strategic and do it. And to Council Member Morrell's point, we do have a large organization with millions of dollars that's kind of on an island that we could figure out how we could bring that money back and make it to the highest and best use. I would say maybe fewer galas and billboards and more direct support to the community would be beneficial. I know they're up in a couple of weeks, so we can come back and talk. Also, real quick, I support Right to Council and the Lower Area Shelter. Thank you all. Thank you, Eason. Thank you. All right, Ashlee. I believe the Film Office has a presentation. Yes. Oh, we should mention that the Film Office is no longer under the direction of the Office of Cultural Economy. We have a separate office now. Thank you, Wood. Yes, while Carol's coming up and I pulled the deck up, I think, you know, as I started out the morning saying, and I think we're in the afternoon here now, these are all small but mighty offices. And you can see, you know, I keep using the word heroic, the tremendous work and commitment of all these directors and team members to uplift the city and do this work. They're deeply committed to making our city all it can be. And that is certainly true for Carol. Let me pull this up for you here. Thank you. Of course. Thank you. I'm Carol Morton. I'm the director of the New Orleans Film Office, previously a department in the Office of Cultural Economy, but the mayor made a decision to move the Film Office into its own office, reporting directly to Jeff Schwartz and the Office of Economic Development. So I will start with going through our finances because I think you will see that we are also operating like the other departments on a very thin budget. So the general fund only funds my position and this is my position with my benefits, $108,617. The second position that we have in the office is a production manager and I will speak about this a little bit because we directly issue all of the film permits and I think the City Council is probably aware of that. We also manage all of the impacts of film, which can be pretty substantial. So the general fund supports my salary and does not support any operating expenditures or the second position. So the operating expenditures, we've been talking about the NOTCF fund, the New Orleans Tourism Cultural Fund, and just like cultural economy, NOTCF provides the film office with $125,000 a year.

We have never received general fund money for the film office, only salaries. So the second position, because we permit, we hired a production manager who manages all of the permitting. I was doing the permitting myself and loading everything into LAMA from January until the end of June because I only had me as the only employee. So I had to learn LAMA pretty quickly and had previously managed filming in communities. So I was able to pick that up quickly, but we hired Jen. Jen's salary, of course, you can see that she is at $93,334 for her salary and fringe and that is all paid out of the $125,000 of the NOTCF fund. So the remaining amount of money that we have in the fund is utilized for, I mean we intend to utilize it for it to relaunch some social media. We no longer have any social media. We have no communication. We want to continue to build on our success. At the height of the film industry, and I think that most people in this room are certainly at city council, know we've had an enormous reduction in the amount of filming in the city and that is a broader national, international shift in the film industry that, you know, we can, if you have questions about that, I can speak to that. But it has reduced the amount of filming at our height at a pretty close to a billion dollars was the most that we brought in. So last year the revenue from film was $56 million and since January we have been able to increase that to $185 million, which is not what it was, but it's still increasing our opportunities. So what do we need to really support and expand the film industry here in New Orleans? The reduction in filming in the United States is really what's caused the result of New Orleans not hosting as much filming and that reduction has gone down about 60% of employment for film jobs, excuse me, in Los Angeles alone. The recent merger, you might have seen that with Warner Brothers and Paramount who produced about 125 films or television series a year, that will reduce it to about 60, over half. So that is less filming that will take place in the United States or in major film cities. But I will highlight that why the other reason that we have such a reduction in film is that the state no longer markets, promotes, or supports film outside of the existence of the film tax credits. We are about two and a half years in monetization, whereas other states are monetizing tax credits in a year or less, which is also another barrier that we have for hosting film production. We also have absolutely no marketing whatsoever in New Orleans or Louisiana, and so we've just slowly disappeared from a prime location for major production companies and also studios. So just to compare the number that I just gave you, which I'm I'm proud of, 185 million, Georgia right now is at 2 billion. And we used to be right behind Georgia, so we are probably dropped from a fourth major production hub to somewhere around 10. Yes, it's dramatic. And what I also want to add, so states and cities are also aggressively investing in their film offices, both state and local film offices. They are aggressively going after the business, and I would say that's been successful for them, and we don't do that. We don't market, we don't promote, we don't show up anywhere. But we do, I will say this, the film office has continued to do an incredible job of in taking all of the permitting. We also issue film drone permits. We've converted that into an approval. I work with the police department to do that, and drone filming is, you know, accelerated. So we have continued to work very hard in the permitting side and in communication, but without any kind of a marketing budget, it's very challenging. Yeah. Are you ready for questions? I'm ready. I have a lot, but I know we have a lot to get to. Yeah. Have we done a study on the return on investment of marketing dollars to get filming up in New Orleans? Absolutely not. Okay. Can we talk about doing that offline? We can. We need funding for it, but yes. I don't even know if we need a study because I have all the data that I can provide to you for the last 10 years, and I think that would be actually very informative. And we can make a decision if we should go for it with a study. Cities don't generally have to do that because we permit. I mean, everybody comes through us. So on the permit, how much do we charge? So we charge $275 for permitting a block. Okay. And how is that comparable to other cities in Louisiana? Well, other cities in Louisiana do not issue film permits. People just film. You know, in Baton Rouge, they just, I don't know, they just close the street for $25 and they film. It is competitive with national rates. Yes, it's absolutely competitive because I actually established that rate and I did it to be competitive. Jeff and I worked together on that. That's right. And yes, it's important to note that that's not per production. That's per, that's essentially each site or, I mean, Carol can share more about this, but that's, you know, a block base or a location. Is there an opportunity to raise those fees or will we lose a competitive advantage if we raise those fees? That could then go into your marketing. Right. So we passed a film permit two years ago. It hasn't been implemented yet and I think we're sort of holding off because we're looking at maybe replacing or, you know, modernizing LLAMA. But we did establish the rates and those rates were established by ordinance. So I don't know if that can be raised or not, but I think that would be amazing if we could do that. We can raise rates. Great. Great. Thank you. Okay, look, let's have this discussion offline because I know that we're not here for the film. I don't think all these folks are here waiting to talk about film in New Orleans. Council Member Green, do you have any questions? Yes, I have one question.

If you could work with the state of Louisiana to make a change that would make us more competitive, what would you say? Would you, if you were talking to the legislature now, what would you propose? So what I would propose is that the state is very slow to monetize the tax credits, about two to two and a half years. So I think if they could accelerate that to a year or faster, I think it would make us much more attractive to attract film production. That would be the one thing I would... And extend the credit, right? Extend the sunset? Well, the sunset is 2031 right now, but if we could get a longer sunset, that would be amazing. Yes. Yes, that would help. So you're able to work through the administration through the liaisons to the state to ask for those sort of changes? No, I am not. Why? Because... See, let me tell you your answer. The administration has a liaison to the state of Louisiana. I know that we have our other challenges, but at the end of the day, Chuck, Tony and others work with legislators to ask them to introduce anything that we want to see introduced. Is this something worthy of introduction? I think it is worthy of introduction, but the current governor is not supportive of the film industry because it's mostly 90% of it is in New Orleans, possibly. So I don't know if that's a barrier, and it is, you know, a mixed support within the legislature. But there are some legislators... There are, yes. ...who have influence in other areas. Yes. Everything doesn't revolve around just the governor. I mean, you have to get a majority vote within both chambers to be able to pass legislation. And I'm not saying that this can happen, but I think that sometimes presumptions are made, maybe sometimes generated by the media, sometimes generated by the particular official, that there's opposition. There's a lot going on in the state of Louisiana right now, a lot more jobs being created. I think that we want to be competitive in many areas. I certainly will assist, but I would hope that the administration, Jeff, will ask if that's something that we think is something that can benefit the state of Louisiana and the city of New Orleans, that we'll ask and get rejected if we need to. We might find some sort of favorable response. Absolutely. There's also a film entertainment association that does an excellent job of telling the story of film. Carol's absolutely right that there's a perception in some reality that New Orleans disproportionately benefits from the credit in Louisiana. And it is true that the lion's share of filming happens here. I think what is also apparent is that there are other communities that absolutely benefit from the credit. And so working strategically with them to build a base for political support in Baton Rouge is something that we certainly think about a lot at the appropriate times, which is legislative sessions, when the credit is up for renewal, et cetera. I'll just say that I'm not sure what the numbers are currently, but one of the things about the film industry that's so attractive is that at its peak, we were not only the fourth largest film production hub in the entire country behind only Atlanta, LA, and New York, but it was supporting direct unionized employment of over 2,000 Niazi and other members. And those jobs are extremely low barrier. And so folks, even without high school diplomas, are able to work in a true career that's paying unionized wages. These are productions that the union skills are set at a national level. And so there's the direct employment benefits, there's the benefits to the catering community, the carpentry community, the set builders, the designers. So it is a true industry, and it's one that Carol and Jen do, again, heroic work. I think it's important to note that this is permitting that doesn't happen through safety and permits. This is lot and parcel and parking space specific permitting that Carol and Jen do every single day. And so we absolutely wanna work with council both on the political strategy side of this, of how do we continue to support and market this. And council member Morell's point about rethinking some of the strategy around the tourism and culture fund and how we can be making systemic and strategic investments in culture bearing industries is a fantastic idea. And thinking about how we can better support the industry to market itself. You know, so much of this is about, the industry has not only left New Orleans in an appreciable way, it's also left the country. And so we have to be more competitive about getting productions back into the city. And, you know, Carol and Jen do that work as best they can, but I think there are partnerships with New Orleans and company and others that we've been exploring as well about how we can better do that. So yes, those are all fantastic points, council member Green. There's an initiative on a federal level to incentivize film production here in the United States. How can we take advantage of that as a city to encourage vendors to consider New Orleans and to take advantage of it? It's a federal tax credit, so you can do it anyway. But even if you haven't thought about it, you didn't know I was gonna ask you about the federal credit. I happen to be aware of it, but it's important to recognize that I think that Congress sees the numbers and they see the challenges. We once as a country dominated the film production industry and we're losing it one film after the other because there are more incentives in other areas, including low labor costs and the like. I don't wanna get into deep. That's why an incentive sometimes makes it available. But how can the city's delegation help to lobby to make that film credit possible? So I am working with a team that has been able to successfully get that film tax credit proposal up to the federal level. So Katie Pryor, who's the Baton Rouge Film Commissioner, actually spearheaded that with the Motion Picture Association.

Jen and I were on a call last week about that. So it has been elevated to the federal level and has bipartisan support. It even has the president's support. And so it's expected that it will pass. I have a copy of the actual statute on my desk right now. So it will be a tax credit of about 20% and it's anticipated that states will begin to lower their tax credits. But combined, it would have a huge difference in attracting production back to the United States. It's going to pass. Oh, absolutely, it's going to pass. I want us to be first. Well, I mean, we have the Speaker of the House from Louisiana. We have the second-in-command amongst the majority. And at the end of the day, it's a tax credit that's going to provide 20% on a federal tax obligation. I just want us to be first. Well, it's 20% on any production that films in the United States, so it covers that. Same as our state tax credit. Jeff, let's make it happen. Let's make it happen. I would just say that, right, I think the idea here that you're making an essential point on is that will reshore film production to the U.S. And then how Louisiana and New Orleans continue to compete for the work that we were previously getting, I think that's the essential task. And we'll obviously work really closely with IGR to make sure that we're positioning not just Louisiana, but New Orleans specifically to win when that work comes back. You know who the biggest beneficiary of the state, I already revealed it, of the city's film production? The state. All of the people who come to the city and pay state taxes and sales taxes, they use production facilities that involve publicly state-owned buildings. They stay in hotels, and the city gets so little, but the state gets a lot out of that. Well, I would also say that the greatest beneficiary is the city of New Orleans directly. It's not something we've ever had the capacity to really follow through, although I have done that over the years myself, but it's time-consuming. The amount of hotels that they stay in. We have five film, or we have had five film studios in New Orleans and the region. When productions are here, even if they're not filming in New Orleans, generally they're staying here. We have an international airport. The television series Carry On shot their entire television series there, and that's all revenue into the city. Not to pass up our restaurants and all of our other cultural opportunities that they take advantage of. One of the reasons they come to New Orleans, even though they're not here in great numbers, is they love our city, and if we had more resources to support them, I absolutely have no thought that they would rather be here than be in many of the other states that they're in. I just ask these questions because I don't want us to have a bleak presentation. I don't want the headline to be all film industry is on its way out. At the end of the day, it's a federal tax credit, and there's opportunities available, and I know that we're going to work on it at the city. I hope that we can work with the state because that industry benefits the entirety of the state. It does, yes, it does. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Morrell. Yeah, I'm sorry I took a moment getting out of here, Carol. I want to say a couple of things. One, I really appreciate you and the work you do. I say that because, as you know, I've worked on the film Tax Credits in the state of Louisiana for over a decade, and almost everything that's been set up here is completely wrong, and you have tried to explain how it's all completely wrong. State of Louisiana hates the film tax credit. They hate it. They have always hated it. Legislators from across the state hate it. What is interesting is that when the initial film tax credit was conceptualized in 2004, we led the entire country in film development. Yes, other than LA and New York. Right. That's true. And the mistake that we had as a state, there was some tremendous problems with fraud in the program. And rather than address those problems under the Jindal administration, they basically pumped the brakes on it, which is what allowed Georgia to leap ahead of us. They implemented the exact same program we had. And what you saw was a tremendous investment by the Cathy family, Pinewood Studios, and the like. And they built the infrastructure to support the industry. And by the time people like Carol and I could limp the film program back up, because the infrastructure was there with the tax credit, everything went to Georgia. That's why every Marvel film is filmed in Georgia. Now since then, we have had to fight tooth and nail every single time there is a fiscal crisis in the state of Louisiana, because the film tax credit is disproportionately believed to benefit New Orleans. Now in some ways it does. To Carol's point, the direct spend that you use on the credit, a lot of it is done to hire New Orleans people, provide benefits to New Orleans. So much so that in the last version of the credit that we were able to get the legislature that hates the credit to pass, we had to give a 30% bump to film outside New Orleans. So just so you know, under the current version of the film tax credit program, as you're computing your tax credit, you get a bump to film outside of New Orleans because the rest of the legislature was so upset people kept filming in New Orleans. Now I say all of that because the reason why the program works and the reason why people still film here is because people like Carol make it so easy to film here. And I say that because, as we know, when you were briefly not here, your office has done such a fantastic job of making the process of filming seamless. You deal with the permitting. You deal with NOPD. And so when people want to come here and film, you're a one-stop shop. They know that if they have to block out a block or block out a part of the city, you do all the legwork to get that done. And that is why we punch above our weight.

But I want to dismiss any idea that we're going to go to the legislature and lobby them and they're going to change the credit. Anytime you highlight this credit, you put a bullseye on it to die. 100%. Because you remind the legislature it exists, and then they try to bury it and kill it in the backyard. I can tell you that, due to the work we've done over a decade, we've gotten the ROI to a point where it's even. Because the biggest problem we had initially was that the return on investment for the film tax credit was always less than what the state put out. Because of all of the years of reform that we did, it now breaks even, which puts it in a healthy spot. But do not think for a second that the legislature would not murder the film tax credit, murder the digital media tax credit, murder every non-oil tax credit if they could, if it meant horizontal well drilling would get two more dollars. And so part of the political theory of the film tax credit is, just keep it alive so that IOTC and that all these organizations that benefit from it, that we can use it to punch above our weight. But any idea that anyone's going to go to the legislature and tinker with that credit at this point is not only naive, it's dangerous, because you will end up murdering it. Because there are so many people that when you remind them, it is like a talking point for every legislator that is above the I-10 or west of Baton Rouge. If you remind them it exists, the first they do is try and kill it. So I appreciate the work you do. We're going to continue to hope it flies under the radar so we continue to have a film tax credit. And I certainly hope the federal government passes one. But as you know, until we develop more robust infrastructure, until we develop the ability to do post-production locally, we're never going to fully maximize the industry. Because we do the film on location, post-production still happens in California. I would say it happens outside of the country now. Right. Not even California. I mean, California is also, you know. They're hemorrhaging. I mean, I know from my contacts in the industry, they're not even going to Canada anymore. They're fully leaving North America. Central Europe. Yeah, Central Europe, Prague. Interview with a vampire shot, their first season here, and the last three seasons in Prague. Thank you, Carol. And that is why the president and the Congress are going to pass the tax credit, because they recognize that we can't continue to lose that. I hope that we'll be optimistic about the legislature and recognize that part of the problem that we have in Louisiana is that we assume that certain things can't change. OK. All right, I have one comment card for Morgan Clevenger. And look, while Morgan's coming up, a quick programming note. If you're here for NORA or NOBIC, we are moving that to October 28. So y'all can leave if you're here for NORA or NOBIC. Yes, ma'am. Good afternoon. I want to thank Carol very much. I started in the film business here in the 1970s. And over that 30 years, we built three deep crews, right? We changed a lot. We built the first film office under the Mayor Mark Morial's administration. We saw the creation of the Louisiana Film Commission. And I was there for the debacle of the first state credits in that phase. But I also want to say that those 30 years, I was able to change what producers were coming to New Orleans for. And at that time, Swamp, jazz musician, Voodoo Queen, Steamboat, that was it. That was the storyline. And so as a producer, a production manager, location manager, I was able to influence what stories were being told. And that helped promote the business even further. And we also marketed as a generic location because it was important to say, oh, producers, you can't film here because it only looks like New Orleans. We had a whole array of locations just to say generic. But one of the biggest things I'm proud of is that at that time, film producers were hiring SAG actors out of New York and LA to play New Orleans musicians in Culture Bearers. And I was the one that changed that. So promotion and marketing is everything. And I think the tax credits, that's a fight that I think J.P. Murrell just explained why that's such a big fight. We know it's a big fight. But I do believe that investment into the marketing promotion, because we used to go to NAPI. We used to go everywhere. Because direct and indirect spending is huge. It's huge. So we need to bring it back. Thank you, Morgan. Ashley has gone. We are moving on to nighttime economy. Thank you, Carol. Thank you. Thank you. Small but mighty team, number four. Right here. All right. House members, if you all are ready. Michael, you ready to take us away? Let's go. Great. Good afternoon, everyone. Mike Entz. I'm the director of the Office of Nighttime Economy, which have a great privilege of representing both workers and the best that is the city, which is our hospitality businesses. Just as Jeff had mentioned, as a small but mighty team, we are a team of three. We are very aggressive in nature, I would say, in making change happen quickly. We keep a restaurant's pace and address issues in real time, much like an owner or a worker that faces the daily challenges of living and working in the city of New Orleans. As you're all very much aware, a single power shutoff or a bowl of water advisory not just affects a business, but it impacts the entire down the line staff, everything from being able to pay a triple net lease to a property owner or being able to make your way home on a bus or salary. So we take our job with a great deal of pride and aggressive nature, of course, because that's what the people that work in this industry deserve. We see you, we hear you. And the best thing we can do when we put these goals together is seeing and hearing everyone. And so the goals that we have in our presentation day are a reflection of the strategic plan that we released this past November.

Getting into the proposed and adopted budget, of course, you can see some differences in our personnel as well as operating costs. Mostly, our operating costs were buoyed on one time expenditures from 25, mainly around our tune-up grant that was created in-house and partnered with Loyola University. That grant program has since been absolved. But even though it has been absolved, we'll talk about it a little bit more. We're going to try and get creative to continue that program on because of its growth. Our personnel, there are three of us, of course. Being the director, I spend quite a bit of time out in the field on my feet, seeing what's happening in businesses, addressing quality of life issues, permitting issues. As you can imagine, anything and everything that happens to a business in the city, we get out in front of it and see it. We have two staffers. One is our policy and outreach manager, which has since vacated the position as of recently, which was a huge force in the office. So many of the items that you'll see, whether goals that we have for 26, 27, or things that have been accomplished, were conducted with that position. So it has left a wake within the office, of course. So we've shifted duties onto ourselves. But we also have the third position, which is Robert Henry Bell. And he has conducted a lot of community outreach. And to put some praise on him is the staffer who built the downtown discount parking program from the ground up, which I can't express how impactful that has been to our service industry workers. Many of our business owners or managers spend a considerable amount of their own money. paying for service industry workers to get to and from work or to get home and so that program has been an incredible you know endeavor to start from the ground up at a simple ask and just see it's positive benefits now has been has been fantastic and so thank you to him and his work. The operating cost that you can see the difference from before is of course what we had mentioned around the tune-up grant where we were going to be expending some funds to try and continue that on with their in-house professor audio engineers so that we could get into some of our venues and address quality of life noise complaints in a much more technical manner rather than being reactive to issues we wanted to be much more proactive and address root cause issues so that's where you see the difference in the operating funds. Getting into into our goals much like I said before our goals were really worked out throughout our strategic planning process that we conducted internally over an eighth month period towards the end of 2025 beginning in 2025 ending in the beginning of 26 but over eight months of time spent working with business owners and potential you know or past business owners to find where our our gaps pain points were and in the permitting process. I will say that the safety and permit stream let team led by Susanna Kirby has made a huge improvement which has made our life a lot easier but we do spend a considerable amount of time in many ways shepherding business owners existing business owners or new business owners through our permitting process. As you can see here we have released the first ever set of nightlife business resource guides built them out in 2025 and then reformed them to add a couple new templates to be to be used by proprietors or potential businesses every step possible that you would have to go through to open a restaurant a food pop-up or you know a nightlife business in general mainly a live entertainment business to when you can see with the the sound management best practices which have been really really positively received from our proprietors and of course you can get direct feedback from your neighbors and if they have any noise complaints. But we also account for a lot of different things we have hurricane preparedness checklist we have police incident reports we have insurance best practices parking behavior anything that you experience as a nightlife business we have addressed in in both our strategic plan as well as this really robust business guide that we've created in-house.

Further nightlife business support and visibility what we would like to do is is place a lot of our businesses on a map so it's easier for visitors to be able to engage with with businesses in our other districts rather than just downtown of course that our downtown core is incredibly important to us it is the highest concentration of nightlife businesses but much like you all would express yourselves getting an opportunity to go out into our neighborhoods and experiencing nightlife you know bars restaurants and live entertainment venues is a direct reflection of us as a community and so we found it to be really important to be able to assist those businesses and get tourists and locals a bird's-eye view of what is also in our districts and so that's a big goal for us in 2027 we don't really see any expenditures around that much like we have done with other programs we have you know attack that problem internally and and work with other departments to address it as you can imagine we spend a considerable amount of time working with current business owners or new business owners to rectify zoning violations or holds and trying to get them into a into a path of compliance so that they can do what they want to do which is operate and and and and be a part of the comedian so we spend a lot of time you know doing that and that's kind of where we see the potential gap with having any kind of impacts to the amount of staff that we have just because we we probably on average take five to ten business calls each week where we you know work through those business compliance issues and shepherd them back into back into compliance so I know that this has been discussed you know it's ad nauseum every where is experience this when it comes to a summer slump so to speak in the hospitality industry I do believe that we probably face the greatest amount of impacts of this because we are such a hospitality centric city is that we found in that strategic plan that we really needed to dedicate a lot of our staff time to being creative for our businesses and provide some support for them during the summer at summer season whether that's offering opportunities for training for service industry workers or businesses on deferred maintenance it was an opportunity to try and promote and market and advertise businesses that do not have that money during the summer months they cannot budget for it so what we decided to do is use our offices platform as well as our existing relationships to try and ask for some favors and see if we could promote businesses by working with with counsel as well as your staff to connect you with influencers and using their reach and their platform to be able to support these businesses and express as to why you as council members or neighbors of that district go to these businesses why do you go there after a graduation why do you go there with friends in town what are these spaces mean to you and why do you want to share that with others we have a very difficult time you know calling spaces such as this you know bars of course we do these are alcohol outlets but as you can see with drinking patterns not everybody is is going to these spaces to drink they're there to you know experience community and build relationships watch the Saints game and so what we wanted to do was provide a space that we could that we could share the reasons why people go to these these businesses and it was very well received we can't thank you all enough for the staff time that you dedicated to working with us we had some really good return data on those those events we held not at five of course that included 943 businesses that were advertised in the voting process we visited 28 businesses with 151 receiving votes total votes of 2,000 over 21 social media posts from our offices also 45 influencer posts so again getting back to that that amount of reach or views from influencers local influencers was a big shot in the arm of businesses and we saw a lot of residual patronage after we had conducted the districts after dark series we had over 640,000 touch points which again you know getting back to it summertime is not a time where any hospitality business can really put their their their budget into marketing the business that is really saved for the fall football season moving into the holiday season is the sale season so what we're going to do is we're we're hoping to expand that with y'all support working directly with you again to see how we can prove upon it as well as getting more reach to newer businesses and not you know our businesses that we all seem to think of in our districts so it's a great program very proud of it and it costs us nothing so just like mentioning before the downtown discount parking program which we're incredibly proud of which just started with a general ask to our private parking operators and how we can get these empty spaces filled and put the right people that needed to be in those spaces that were there for work in an advantageous position and so it's been it's been a fantastic program you know you may have seen the recent press releases about it as well as our social media posts that we have gone on to expand that program to now include musicians we're piloting that program on Frenchman Street just went live so we have worked with all the venues on Frenchman Street to to be able to work with their their regular rotation of musicians as well as ones that are coming in on tours to be able to go park it substantially reduced parking rates there next to Frenchman Street once we've measured that we are going to measure it after a six-month period and see if we can expand that throughout the French Quarter and throughout the rest of the city of course many of y'all are aware we have the existing musician loading zone program that was created a few years ago it's had some some hiccups of course it's very very difficult to to manage or to enforce those freight zone areas for

that 15 minute period so what we're going to hope to do is expand upon that program and use some of our our partners best practices namely Seattle who has moved on from their loading zone program into a permitted pathway for our venues so that we would have multiple options for musicians to be able to get their equipment out and park for free and so you have a you would have a discounted option in the lots and then you would have a free option that would be paid for by venues directly in front of that that space and so we're hoping to work on that this year so I'm sure we'll be sharing more information about that as well but a lot of the work that we've also conducted in partnership with the Department of Public Works, State DOTD, our friends at Bike Easy as well as the Bywater Maroney business owners group about how we can improve the safety on St. Claude Avenue. It's a state highway which has many challenges as you can all you know detail is that St. Claude during the day is a completely different street than it is at night and it's a good thing and what we want to do is is make it as safe as possible for those patrons because there's a lot of distractions and there's a lot of you know traffic calming safety measures that just not have been addressed over over the many years and so we want to harness that we want to support those businesses and so we we meet with them quarterly and and communicate with them and so we're directly involved in that initiative and I'm very proud to be a part of it. Of course being very supportive and included in the Canal Street Renaissance executive order it's a long time coming and we're very excited to be a part of that process as well. Public safety and quality of life I think probably the most important issues that we address in nightlife or you know is is how we can make sure that our areas are safe you know not just outside of the venues but inside of the venues we need we need patrons and staff to feel as safe as possible that's what we all why we all go to these spaces is to is to feel safe and build community and so we've done a lot of work in this past year internally and that's directly reflected with our partnership with the Safe Bar Network that is a free partnership they are a fantastic organization that provides no-cost violence de-escalation training as well as sexual harassment training active bystander training how to engage with individuals that have been drinking and preventing issues from arising anything from you know paying attention to somebody being over served before they get into the bar or maybe sneaking drinks somebody that may be sequestered off from a party active ways to have soft soft point-touch measures to be able to engage in a way to where people feel safe, seen, and heard. So we're very proud of that partnership. We've, since, you know, January 1st of 26, we've trained 17 venues so far, which has been fantastic. We have 10 to 12 new venues that are that are in the pipeline to get this no-cost training. That's amounted to 246 service industry workers trained at no cost to them. This is a cost that is paid for by the distributors and liquor companies, and so one of the things that we've openly discussed about a benefit of this program is that service industries, they transfer jobs, right? And so this is no-cost training that they can take with them to other venues and make a direct impact in those venues and make sure that people feel safe again. Going back to before, you know, I spent a considerable amount of time in the Medi-Agnola program addressing 3-1-1 noise complaints, all types of quality of life issues, anything from sanitation, road abatement, you know, of course noise complaints, which I spent a considerable amount of time on, and I think we've gotten very creative again at addressing, but we spent a considerable amount of time making sure that proprietors and venues and staff know that the best customer is your neighbor. We have to make sure that that is the top of priority, is that any businesses within a neighborhood or just in the city needs to see our residents as your first customer and not as a turn-and-burn type of sale. You know, we need to have some diplomacy amongst, you know, proprietors and neighbors, and I think we've done a very good job of being effective of that because these situations, as you've all experienced, are very contentious. So we're very proud of that. If I can jump in just really quickly, I know we're getting to the end of the presentation here, but, you know, I think that framing nighttime economy's work on a couple of different fronts is helpful. One, it's obviously the policy and strategy, right, of supporting all the businesses that participate in the nighttime economy, which very much is about supporting, you know, culture and culture bearers in our community because so many of these issues interface with what Wood and his team do every day, but also, you know, countless advocates and stakeholders. I also just want to make the very essential point that I think Mediate NOLA highlights, which is that Mike and Rob and Julia formerly, they are an arm of concierge services for the city. I know that when council offices, when the administration, when we get the phone calls, when we get folks who need help navigating any number of processes or just interfacing with their neighbors, that's work that the nighttime economy is out there doing, and so as we think about what concierge means, you know, can mean a lot of different things, but helping folks navigate different processes and systems, that is the bread and butter work that nighttime economy office is doing every day, so I just want to applaud you all for that. Great, thank you, and I can tell you that in District B, you've been a great help to resolve many, many issues with neighbors who are complaining about venues, and I really had a good time doing the District's After Dark, so hopefully we can keep that up and expand it.

I do have one suggestion. Can we do some programming around the LEH building? You know, may pop one out of business, maybe just to do an event there. I'm happy to, happy to. Yes, that is a fantastic suggestion. We will absolutely do that. Okay, great. Council Member McCarron, then Council Member Morrell. Thank you, Mike and your team. We have worked together many times and had, you know, midnight phone calls about bars uptown causing problems, but we've worked through those together with the bar owner. That bar is open, and there's now an open line of communication between that bar owner and neighbors, and things are going well, and that's, you know, directly related to you and your team and my office working together to make sure that, you know, we don't want places to close. We want businesses to thrive and stay here, so I think that's a direct result of the work that your office does, and I appreciate that and look forward to continue working with y'all. And thank you to Rob and you guys on the Districts After Dark. It was a wonderful event. You know, we had two places that were advertising, trying to get votes for the Council to come. So, you know, we really had engagement from neighborhood bars, and I think people really appreciated that. Even the places that we didn't go to still got highlighted, and I think those can be on the list for next time, and, you know, I'm certainly open to doing it more consistently because it also makes us get out of the office, out of City Hall, and interacting with people in our business, in our business community more, so really appreciate that. And, of course, the work that you're doing with the harm reduction, you know, we've got, I've got a lot of college kids in my district, and we need to keep them safe as possible, and that really is a significant thing that you guys are doing, so appreciate all the work that y'all are doing. Thank you. Thank you. Let's take these two comment cards, Aline Laspania and then Morgan Clevenger. Hello. Thank you for having the space for community to come and speak. My name is Aline Laspina, Executive Director of Bike Easy, a local bike non-profit. Some of you know me already, but I'm here today because I want to share a little bit about what the Office of Nighttime Economy has meant to our work on the ground. At Bike Easy, we talk a lot about making bicycling easy, safe, and fun for everyone in greater New Orleans. One thing we've learned over and over again is that you can't work on transportation in isolation. You have to understand the businesses, workers, residents, and culture that make a street function. That has been particularly true through our Safer St. Claude campaign, which Mike brought up. St. Claude is a state road running through our city, but it is also a neighborhood commercial corridor with restaurants, bars, music venues, small businesses, residents, people walking, biking, driving, and taking transit. We've been trying to bring all of those perspectives into conversations about what a safer St. Claude can look like. The Office of Nighttime Economy has been an important partner in that work. They've helped us connect with businesses, owners, and have created opportunities for conversations that we might not otherwise have had. And I want to give a shout out for Mike and his team because they came out to one of our late night bike and walk audits in the corridor. Those conversations have been incredibly valuable because we're not just talking about bike lanes and or street designs in the abstracts. We're talking about the people who actually operate businesses and make their living on that street. That's how it's changed how we think about our advocacy. So lots of lessons learned and really support the work of Office of Nighttime Economy and they've been a great partner. Thank you. Morgan Clevenger. Good afternoon. Last one, y'all. Growing up in the French Quarter in the Treme, my parents had two bars, restaurants, and of course 40 years, 42 years of the Upper Line Restaurant. And one of the key pieces of how a local business stays open because we're seeing way too many businesses, restaurants, bars, and hospitality businesses close since the pandemic and still today. But the the secret formula was to try to have a balance of locals and repeat tourism. And my mother was very, very good at that. But unfortunately today what we see, what we know is that the citizens of New Orleans are up against it financially. And where some of us used to be able to eat out or go to a club twice a week or a couple times, you know, in a month, it's once a month, maybe, maybe not for six months. And we've turned from a 24-hour town where you could eat great food and hear great music to everything's closed at nine o'clock. Literally closed at nine o'clock. The other thing I want to talk about, I really want to integrate with our neighborhood and this gentleman because we've had a long-term problem on Gentilly and North Broad, which is also a state highway. We have so many serious wrecks and fatalities. And we just had three major crashes last weekend. But also Gentilly, Bob, by the fairgrounds, that seven block stretch is enormously unsafe. And we have a bar down the street and the ABO, the giant ABO, where people are coming out of four exits drunk. And that is a major crash site right in front of the fairgrounds. We have a pop-up food vendors who are literally setting up in the street. We had two pedestrian hit and runs on that corner last year. So we really want to work with you guys and the work that Eileen is doing on St. Claude, we want to see that happen here. But let's get our locals, don't increase the safety and permits. Thank you. Council Member Green, you have your button pushed. I do want to thank you for the work that you do. I also want to thank you for Districts After Dark. It was great to visit those new businesses.

But I do want to emphasize one thing because sometimes we walk away from these hearings and I'm not always just focusing on the positive just because. But in my district alone, we've had nine new restaurants open in the last four years. You've had a chance to visit them. We had one who was wiped out by Hurricane Ida, who came back, Good Time Sushi, I might as well mention that name, and invested significantly, yeah, invested significantly in their location. I also want us to leave with the positives where we can. On Districts After Dark, we went to a restaurant called Koshan, for example. Guess what? Since then, they've also announced that they're going to be doing business at LSU New Orleans. So they're going to have two locations. We went to Cajunlicious, a restaurant opened by a family on Paris Avenue at Mirabu, who couldn't be more pleased to do business in the city of New Orleans. We had an opportunity to see people locally who've invested in their businesses, who, guess what folks, don't require one visit from a tourist to do well. There are local businesses in our city that need to be given more attention, but our business owners need to be recognized for the investment that they've made. And your office has provided support in a variety of ways, working out permit issues, working out issues relative to community concerns, keep that up. But your office is important to helping us to recognize, especially the locally owned businesses that are doing well, that are feeling good about the future of the city of New Orleans. So I look forward to continuing to work with you. Thank you. And if I can add on to that too, one of the, you know, the things that was so important from especially your district's After Dark event was that, you know, visiting Cochon King, we were able to connect them since they have a vendor permit, is it connecting them with the new Audubon Park opening so that they can go and vend out there as well. And so without that happening, you know, we wouldn't have been able to make that connection for them. So it's fantastic. Thank you for that work. It resulted in very productive development. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Murrell. Thank you. I appreciate you being here, Mike. Two quick things. First, obviously part of the benefit we saw in moving towing and parking enforcement to NOPD was them being more active during the night. How, have you seen that increased enforcement yet or is that something NOPD is working towards? It's been a huge help. Thank you to, of course, everyone who made that happen, to Captain Misha and his team and the parking enforcement team. That is a very difficult job, right? To be out in the streets at night, people engaging in alcohol and everything, nobody's going to be happy about a parking ticket, let alone a boot or being towed when you're out trying to have fun. But from a public safety standpoint, our corners, intersections, sevens, fire hydrants, driveways being blocked, it creates a really difficult or challenging public safety issue. Our fire EMS police cannot get through in some of these tight corners. What ends up happening is people end up not wanting to go into the venue, so it creates a lot of quality of life issues surrounding the venue. But they've been a fantastic team. So we've actually begun to work with Captain Misha and the DPW team on some prototype options to preventing parking at those corners, specifically in nightlife areas or venues that do experience a lot of patronage, which we love. We don't want to inhibit that in any way. But from a public safety standpoint, it has been a huge help. Just for the public's understanding, part of the challenge with that was, particularly in the French Quarter, CBD, is that when you have illegal parking, for example, at corners, it can prevent fire trucks from making the corners if there's a fire event. And it has been tremendously problematic because before the transfer, when towing and parking enforcement was under DPW, they did not do night towing. So part of the justification the council made for moving towing and parking enforcement to nighttime was because we need to make sure that vehicles are not in thoroughfares, they're not double parked at night. We have a lot of accidents that occurred, not just vehicular, but pedestrians being struck because sightlines weren't maintained. So I appreciate you working with NOPD to bring that up. The other thing is, as we are entering the end of the IZD and looking at the transient lodging study, there is going to be a definitive position on commercial STRs. And I know that's something that your office will be involved in because obviously, when we talk about a neighbor at an STR, those complaints will go to typically code enforcement. But when you're talking about commercial STRs that are going to be in nighttime, be in commercial corridors where a lot of other things are happening, do you see yourself and your department as interacting with the platforms to try to address those issues? Because in those instances, you almost never have an owner on premises. You're dealing with a platform at that point. No, absolutely. And I would, you know, first up, what I would express in that situation is the increased liability, right, is that we spend a considerable amount of time talking with our business owners about insurance premiums. And so as a, whether it's a residential or commercial STR, removing guardrails, so to speak, and allowing, you know, proprietors to allow certain activity to take place is going to increase a lot of liability for them, but also surrounding businesses. And so if you're engaging in that manner as a business owner, you would want to be complementary to the other surrounding businesses.

So we'll absolutely work with them to try and make sure that, you know, when there's not any large-scale house parties or, you know, miners or leasing STRs in some manner and having that type of generated activity, because it can get out of hand. Okay. That's all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Ashley? The last one I'll use for economic development is supplier diversity. And again, a quick programming note. After this one, we're going to take a 15-minute break because I know y'all have been here since 9.30 this morning before we get to Dr. Vegna. Thank you all. Last but certainly not least, thank you, Sean and Rhonda, for being here. We have the Office of Supplier Diversity. Good morning, everyone. My name is Sean Charles, Director for the Office of Supplier Diversity. Today with me is one of my team members, Ms. Rhonda Allen, our Compliance Manager. And our Certification Manager was here, but she had to leave. LeSabre Ventress runs that operation. So I just want to, before we get started, I have a few opening remarks. I'd like to start by acknowledging the hardworking team members of the Office of Supplier Diversity. Without the dedication and service of individuals like these, it would be impossible for the City of New Orleans to award over $133 million in contracts to small and disadvantaged businesses. It would be impossible for the city to monitor and manage 400-plus contracts daily and to certify 345 small and disadvantaged businesses. The team's tireless efforts have contributed to a few notable achievements. At the start of the year, the City of New Orleans and the Office of Supplier Diversity were featured in a major contract compliance vendor's communication channel. Later in the year, the Office of Supplier Diversity was honored by the Propeller with the Outstanding Partner of the Year Award. This award highlights outstanding collaborations and committed partnerships with their community partners. This work alone demonstrates that the Office of Supplier Diversity's team is fully committed to advancing our department's mission. OSD has used the recent shift in our structure as an opportunity to train, reorganize, and adjust to our new capacity. While there is an unavoidable performance and service degradation due to capacity constraints, OSD remains committed to the city's mission, and we're hopeful that our capacity will be prioritized as the city evaluates resource allocations and essentially sustaining high-quality service delivery. All right, we can go ahead and get started with the presentation. So what you see on the screen is the 2026 org chart for our office. As you notice, several positions have been removed for several different reasons. And then what you see next on the screen is what we expect for our 2027 budget year. All right, the proposed 2027 budget versus the adopted budget. So there was a bit of an increase in personnel, but I think what we have here will be sustainable to our current team. As it relates to other operating budget, there was a bit of a dip there. We went from $205,915 down to $17,815. All right, and so the personnel budget will support six full-time employees. As you notice, there was also a vacancy listed there. And then in other operating, those funds will go to support outreach and training, communication and technology, and general maintenance and supplies. As it relates to budget efficiencies, the Office of Supply Diversity's team has been consolidated from 13 to six members and four went any other operating expenditures in 2026 to respond to budgetary constraints. The team maximized existing resources through technology and process efficiencies, enabling a 35% increase in SLDBE certification submissions, improved alignment with city procurement codes, and enhanced monthly contract compliance oversight without adding additional operating expenditures. We have some goals, 2027 goals. Keep going. I think we have a few technical things. Okay, all right. So in 2027, the Office of Supply Diversity plans to streamline the SLDBE certification application process within our B2G Now system, whereby increasing efficiency and reducing processing time. We also plan to institutionalize our annual post-award contract compliance training for prime contractors and subcontractors. This will make sure that all of our participants are fully aware and fully informed of the city's policies and processes in order to ensure that they have a contract term that is successful. And then lastly, we want to engage, I'm sorry, enhance community engagement and outreach efforts. Previously, we hosted, I think, over 50 outreach seminars and sessions, and I think that allowed us to touch about almost 1,000 businesses. In recent times with the reductions, we've not had that capacity, but moving forward, we anticipate reaching those goals again. Thank you, and I'm open for questions. Thank you. Any questions from the dais? Okay, we do have some public speaking cards. Ernest Stolbert, followed by Deborah Gould, followed by Geneva Coleman, followed by Edward Parker. Good afternoon. My name is Ernest Stolbert. I live at 5106 Marin Street, New Orleans, and I'm representing the collaborative today. We're here in full support of the Office of Supply Diversity. They have done not only a tremendous job in terms of carrying out their mandate, but they're all over the community, and businesses now know that there's a disadvantaged business program. You guys have been around for a while. The perception of the program 20 years ago is totally different from what it is today. It is looked upon as a very, very helpful program to small businesses and disadvantaged businesses. We are in support of that. We've been supporting that concept and that program for many, many years. We've seen it grow to where it is today, but I will tell you it is very, very difficult, in my opinion, to achieve its mandate with the staff levels that it has.

They've gone from 13 people down to 6 people, and they've got contract compliance to do. They've got to bring on new, certified new DBEs. They've got to recertify all the current DBEs, and that is not sustainable with 6 people. We are encouraging the council and administration, and we understand that there's a budget crisis. We understand that we're not naive, but you've got to rebuild that department over time, and what we're doing is here to make sure that that happens, make sure that you guys understand the need for it, and more importantly, it's not just a nice thing or a good thing to do. It is in the law. These things are mandated as a requirement for that department by law, so I thank you very much. Thank you. Deborah Gould? Members, I am Debra Washington Gould, President and CEO of Debra Gould & Associates, Inc., a management consulting firm. Today I stand on behalf representing the collaborative group that is close to a 14-year organization. We are the policy or advocacy for small and minority businesses with much success because of this council and particularly because of the Office of Supply Diversity. They have been functioning operational very well with 13 staff. It was devastating to hear, and I echo what Mr. Stalberg just shared, to lose six employees. The tremendous work of the Director, Ms. Joan Charles and Ms. Rhonda Allen in terms of certification as well as the compliance from Ms. Sabra. Ms. Sabra, it's just been amazing. There is not a day or week or during the month where I, as a business owner, have had a question regarding the BRAS system or either the B2G now or just questioned that I was recently as a firm received my recertification. It was much longer this time because they're not working with the capacity that they are accustomed to. So my request today and approval of this budget that we staff this organization, the business community that you all are seeking opportunities for small and minority businesses. We need the certification. We need this particular Office of Supply Diversity. This team of professional, talented, skilled, and experienced individuals are doing their part, but they can't do it with less staff. So my request is that we provide them the budget in 2027. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Geneva Coleman followed by Edward Parker. It is said that the state of municipal, federal, and state economies rest on the shoulders of small and minority business owners. That has proven true. The collaborative decided that we needed to have policy with a purpose. And therefore, ordinances were put in place so that there was a law in order to maintain the level, quality, and consistency to sustain small and minority businesses. The Office of Supply Diversity has proven itself. We had no way of just creating something separate from the city. And Sean has worked diligently with our organization, which we truly appreciate, to try to improve and to continue to grow the Office of Supply Diversity and the changing needs. I implore you to please continue your support of us because we have been on the road show, what we call our road show, talking with each of our council members individually. And we know that we, in the past, have gotten just 100% support. We look forward to the same thing again and going through 2027. I just want to remind everybody that those of us who are standing here right now, we've got those that are coming along behind us. They should not have to start where we did. Thank you. Mr. Parker? Afternoon. Edward Parker, Concerned Citizen. I'm not a business owner, but I know these guys pretty well. They've taught me a whole lot about what is going on in this city when it comes to economic equity, the disparity study, which I hope all of our council people are very aware of, and also the minority set-aside program that this particular Office of Supply Diversity has to look over. You are the policemen when it comes to making sure that the contracts and the opportunities, especially for our small minority and especially black businesses, need. We have to grow our black middle class, and it starts with our small black businesses. So please, let's get a robust Office of Supply Diversity. Thank you. Thank you, Jeff. You've been sitting here for a long time. Thank you to everyone on your team and your departments. Really appreciate you. You're integral to this city, so thank you. All right. So I said we were going to take a 15-minute break. We're really going to take a five-minute break, so everybody stretch their legs, get a drink of water. We'll be back in five minutes, and then help will be up. Just one minute, too. I'm trying. Eugene, I'm sorry. Are you good? Department, and I believe Homeless Support and Services combined within this presentation. Well, okay. Thank you. Well, thank you. Thank you, Council. We're grateful to be here, and I just want to say we're really grateful to everybody that's been here since 9.30 in the morning. A lot of them could not stay, but they are why we are here. We are here for and with our community members and our community partners, because we know that they are the truth of the challenges that our families are facing and the safety net they depend on, and we are here for them. I'm incredibly proud to be presenting our budget on behalf of the 120-plus staff in the Now Health and Human Services departments. We are immensely proud of the work that we do, and I hope that will come through. We look a little bit different than we did last year. This is about as good as we could get it, but if you recall, last year we took about a 30% cut, but also absorbed several offices, the Office of Homeless Services and Strategy, Youth and Families, and several functions from OCJC, so this is what we look like today. I'm a physician, and so when you're a physician, you learn that the best way to deliver bad news is to be honest and transparent, and so that's what we're here to do in discussing our budget.

We know these are very difficult times for the city, and we are here to do our part, but we also want to be honest about what that means. So if we're looking at our budget, you can see, and I'll explain these all in more detail on the next slides, our personnel looks like it's flat, that there's actually a cut in there that I'll explain. We present our budget with the low barrier shelter. It was not in the 2026 budget, but it was moved in early January to ours, so it is ours, and so I think it's really important that people see the magnitude of the cuts that are being proposed with the low barrier shelter. So let's go through those in a little bit of detail. Our overall personnel budget, as we showed, did show a minor increase, and there are some reasons for that. We did bring on one OCJC staff, and we moved one OHSS from ARPA to general funds, and absorbed OHSS in general, and of course, everybody is paying increased health costs. In our proposed budget, there is a proposed personnel cut of about $338,000 that would eliminate three to four existing positions. If you notice on our org chart, there are only two vacancies right now in the health department that are general funded. Remember, we are majority grant funded, and those are in the Office of Homeless Services. When we look at the proposed operating cuts, when we include the low barrier shelter, our operating budget shows an 87% reduction from 2026, which was itself a 30% or so reduction from the year before. These cuts span the gamut of core safety net programs. They include maternal child health, youth and families, violence prevention, mental health, homelessness, of course, domestic violence, and some of our GL diversion. And what this does is it shifts our budget back to being 90% reliant on grant funding, the bulk of which is federal, and I know Councilman Green made good points about the instability of federal funding, and it also puts us on a funding cliff, because federal grants are for generally time limited, and so we are always chasing a deadline. And so what I hope to do, again, in the spirit of transparency, is just make sure the public is aware what these cuts mean. I think the low barrier shelter is why a lot of people are here today, and certainly what that means is that close to 300 individuals will be displaced to street homelessness and encampments. We don't have encampments in the degree that we had them just a few years ago, and Councilwoman Harris, you know this more than anyone else, because we have worked tirelessly to reduce our street homeless, which since the low barrier shelter opened in 2018 has been reduced significantly. We're at a time where nationwide street homelessness has risen. I think that no one wants to go back to those days for a number of different reasons. But there are also other, and I do want to say, you know, these are not district cuts. These cuts will be felt citywide. The number one thing I get emailed from our Councilmember, every Councilmember's office is homelessness, and we have our Director Taylor Dials here, his team is the one that tries to go out and find solutions and make it work. So we know this is not just in one district or another district. Right now, our violence prevention program, our core community violence intervention prevention program was not included in the budget ordinance. We believe that was an error, and I'm understanding that there might be some money from it in the CAO budget. budget, which is great, but I just want to highlight the consequences of that. What they do is broad, and it has expanded just in the last year, and it significantly has contributed to our historic lows in crime, and I think if Chief Kirkpatrick and her team were here, she would say exactly the same thing. As much as we all love what law enforcement has been able to do, we all know that the credit goes to those who prevent and intervene in the immediate aftermath. Our maternal child health programs have been a real source of pride for us, for our community, for you all, particularly our Family Connects postpartum home visiting programs. Because of their success, we convinced the state of Louisiana, that's right, if Councilman Green is still here, the state, to expand statewide private insurance and Medicaid coverage, which will start to roll on next year. So losing that capacity at a time when we are held up as a model for the state certainly doesn't make a lot of sense. We know that our mobile crisis unit has, since it started in 2023, encountered more than 10,000 patients. Those are patients who would have had to have a law enforcement response. Now they don't. It frees up our police to do the things that they need to do, makes us all safer, and it gives the individual being served the care and the responder that is right for them. There's a lot of people facing personnel cuts, and we understand that, but we do want folks to know that it would reduce our ability to, again, continue to mitigate, largely fall on the burden of our homelessness services. We do a really great job at getting a whole lot of grants, and we are very, very proud of that. We hustle, we have some, the main bulk of the money that you're seeing, because it looks like an awful lot of money, and it is an awful lot of money, is in restricted programs. Our big four, Ryan White HIV, Healthy Start, WIC, and Healthcare for the Homeless. Those are prescribed programs. That is not flexible money, and we are really proud of the accomplishments that we have with that, but there is almost no flexibility to sort of move. I can't fund a DUI program with a Healthcare for the Homeless grant, even if I wish that I could. We continue to go out and solicit grants, and I do want to remind everybody that when we get a federal grant, the city recognizes indirect costs as part of the general fund revenue. For many, many years, it's been about 8%.

That is far too low, and I want to thank Brandy and her team for working to hopefully get that up. The more grants we get, if we have even a 10% indirect cost, that's $5 million to the general fund, so we're really proud to be able to play that part. We are able, we did just get a new grant that I'll talk about, and we're actually able to move a general fund FTE onto that grant. That doesn't happen often, so we're excited to do that, and that'll help with our general fund spend. Again, the majority of our employees are not coming through general funds. How do we weather our cuts and our consolidation? Last year, we did a lot of work. Again, we absorbed several offices and lost staff and funding when we did that, so doing more with less. We continue. We have either applied for or successfully gotten multiple new grants that we've never had before. We have gone almost totally paper-free, because who wants to pay for paper? Any time we can shift things onto non-general funds, whether it's programs or initiatives or flyers or buying water for our department, we have done that, and again, we've really worked for all of our programs that might be eligible for Medicaid. Our team right here has worked tirelessly to get them ready to bill Medicaid, and we will continue to do that, but understanding that not all public health can be funded that way. As we have successfully started in some areas to bill Medicaid, we are rolling those costs off of a general fund, so we anticipate that will accelerate, but it doesn't happen overnight. If you've ever dealt with Medicaid, it takes months, if not over a year, to really get them to accept the billing and to reimburse in the way that they should. We have shaved off funding for most of our big programs. We would prefer to try to do more with less than to cut programs wholesale, because we know every time you cut a hole in the safety net, a lot of people fall through. If we can make those holes tiny, then we can catch as many people as possible. So we have shaved and moved and done whatever we can to maximize our operations without cutting core services to people who really need them. I want to thank Odyssey House for good faith negotiations to be able to reduce some of the spend for the low barrier shelter, despite all of the challenges that they face in the building that they're in. So that was a win for the general fund. We've been working with our local delegation. We've been able to direct some state appropriations that actually did not get vetoed, if you can believe it, to support some of our work in bike safety and violence intervention. And we don't do overtime, ever. And we're looking at our grants to see how they can extend our work. We had a grant-funded program that was paying rent. We moved them into City Hall so that they could spend more of those grant funds on the services for folks that needed it. Even if it was little, it was still meaningful to those folks who need it. And we're consolidating other offices in city buildings to allow one of our clinics in the Ninth Ward to expand, right, because we don't want to hold anybody's progress back. So despite all this, we are undeterred, and when it comes to our commitment to finding ways to serve our residents from birth until death. And so we continue to have really robust goals and plan to execute on them. Our number one goal is – not number one, but one of our major goals is to continue the work that our team has started in the past few months to bring a program pilot to New Orleans East, which would be a direct child cash transfer for every pregnant woman and family in a defined geography. This program in Flint and other places in Michigan has cut infant mortality in half and provided an economic return on investment for up to $3 per dollar it expended. Mississippi is about to do this, y'all, so I don't want to let them beat us. If Mississippi can do it, we can do it. And it will be tremendous with all of the gains going on in that area. This is a force multiplier, and we want to prove this so that, again, we can get the state to give us the support we need to make this citywide. We want to preserve our Family Connects coverage for all New Orleanians, because that is where we see population-level effects. When we provide this service for everyone, that's where it saves money, it reduces hospitalizations, it increases the likelihood that a woman's going to get diagnosed and treated for postpartum depression, and it also ensures that she'll have higher rates of continuing to go to her doctor, among many other benefits. So we are the leaders in the state. They recognize us as this, and I think we need to continue to do that. We have a really ambitious goal at our WIC clinics. At a time when federal funding is under severe threat for SNAP, WIC, and Medicaid, our team is working really hard to increase the number of patients they've seen and to do add-ons. Our environmental health team is working to start routine lead testing at city WIC clinics. We haven't had this, if ever, it's been a really long time. So again, not asking for new money for this, but trying to peel off what we have because we know it's a priority. We have a $4 million grant that our team successfully won from federal HHS to launch a one-stop shop for all our maternal child health programs, so that when you enter a WIC clinic, you are seamlessly pulled through to Healthy Start, Family Connects, Early Childhood, Training Grounds, Thrive Kids, all of that. So you don't have to figure out five different places to go just to get the benefits that you deserve, so we're really excited about that. I spoke about Medicaid billing. All of our Healthy Start case managers, again, that's a federally funded program, are now doulas and trained in doula and lactation services, which is a wonderful benefit. We should be able to start billing for those services.

It's a big lift, but Mishan here, Mishan Siddiq, who's our family health director, has been committed to do this for several months. We have really ambitious goals in violence prevention. Our teams, our partners, whether it's our community partners at Ubuntu, whether it's our hospital partners, whether it's the other smaller partners we work with, are a major reason why crime is down. We think that whatever our total number of murders is this year should be the new baseline from which we drive down further, and we've already seen different ways of how we can expand what we're doing. The Ubuntu's 4x6 Neighborhood Initiative, where they flood a neighborhood, West Bank and then Councilwoman Harris in Central City, has become the model such that DPW is now using it to do their routine repairs. So imagine what more we can do. Our Domestic Violence AIR Program, which is a best practice, serves several thousand residents a year. We know we can serve more. We know we're breaking through. We finally were able to stand up a victim services program with some grant funding attached so we can actually provide some material support to those who are victims of crime. I know this was a real passion of Councilman Greene's. We have that ability now, as of last week, so we're going to continue doing that. Today we're going to celebrate distribution of our 5,000th gun safe with Manning family children. That's in three years, and that is thanks to some seed money federally, some money from Rep. Carter and the buy-in from the Council and the administration. We know that has saved lives, particularly the lives of young children. I think everybody in the room would probably agree with me that one of our highest priorities is to preserve our low-barrier shelter operations and move the facility to a more dignified, cost-effective and functional building. I trained in the VA in the late 90s as a medical student. It was in bad shape then. It is in really bad shape now. We want and we must find a space that is holistic, that is healing-centered, and that is just compassionate for those who need it. And this is the linchpin of our Homelessness Sustainability Plan and Strategy. Without it, then we can't do all the other creative things that we're doing to get folks connected back to housing. I want to thank Unity for bringing up the point of involving people with lived experience wherever we go in the design. We absolutely plan to do that. Our homeless outreach teams right now are confined to the French Quarter, and Taylor has been on the streets at night helping to offer services at all hours of the night. That shouldn't just be in the fringe corner. That should be citywide. And that's something we would love to do. The sustainability plan is out, it's live, and it is a meaningful document that shows us the way to continue to drive our numbers down. So I encourage everyone to read it. We plan to implement it to the best of our ability. As we do with our complex casework, those incredibly challenging individuals who have multiple medical, behavioral health, substance use, you name it, problems for whom no system has ever worked and no one person has ever stepped up and said, I'm going to get this person to what we need. We have done that with no money and trying to get people together to do the right thing. And in the year that we've done it, about half of those people are now in a permanent solution. Not all of them, but we're going to keep trying. Our mobile crisis intervention unit responds to at least 3,000 calls a year. We want to up that. They have recently taken on more types of calls. They routinely take about a third of all mental health calls from the police. And the police have to respond to the ones where there's violence or a gun or an active threat, right? That makes sense. But they have slowly expanded so that they can handle what they do best and police can go and do what they do best. Our substance use mobile resource clinic, which is funded by our opiate settlement funds, has provided just in the first six months of use several hundred visits with health care providers in areas where folks are and for folks who would never walk into a clinic voluntarily. And so we want to continue the success there. And our overdose rate decrease has been a real success story in the last several years. We have to keep going. It's still way too high. It's still close to 300 people as of last year. We have flooded the city with Narcan, with bystander training. We look at the overdoses to learn what to do to help with our partners avoid them. And so we've got to drive that down just as we've driven our homicide rate down. Our community health improvement plan, our new improvement plan is ready for launch. You'll soon see our community health assessment. We surveyed 1,000 residents, multiple focus groups, providers, community partners, and all of them told us what they think is wrong with health in New Orleans and what they think we can do about it. We looked at data. And so we have a really great roadmap for how we're going to do the work together. Our healthcare for the homeless clinic, it's our only clinic that we oversee, but year over year they are on track to increase patient volume by 25% because of some really dogged work by our staff there. And we want to keep going. One of the other priorities for us is in the face of looming federal cuts and restrictions to SNAP, WIC, and Medicaid, we know that's going to hit so many people hard. It already has. Already about 20% of folks on SNAP have lost their benefits, largely because of bureaucratic hurdles and other really challenging times, but at a time when affordability is a concern, these benefits are more critical than ever. We have a grant-funded person whose whole job is going to be to go and sign up and enroll and re-enroll as many people as possible.

We would love to work with you on where you think they should be and where we're going to get the biggest bang for our buck. We're excited to work with OED. We've just applied for some funding for some food financing funding that we hope will finally allow us to bring a grocery store, hopefully in the lower nine, but then spreading to other areas that desperately need it as well. And then our environmental health team, I can't believe I didn't put vaccines on this slide, but they are really carrying the water on vaccines, both respiratory and spreading the science and the facts about childhood vaccines as well. They're also working really hard on heat. They assist us with all of the disaster prep, homelessness services, and now they've moved into how do we finally get funding to do some really deep mitigation for lead, whether it's in our parks, our playgrounds, our WIC clinics. We've been unsuccessful getting federal funds for decades, but we have to try something different because we know how important it is. You've probably seen our eBike, our Safety First eBike rebate program. This is actually an Office of Sustainability grant that we are managing the safety part because as much as we all believe in alternative modes of transportation and giving those who don't have access to a car a way to get around the city, we want to make sure that they are safe and we're all safer for it. So that's launched up. Same with our DUI prevention. We do a lot of extension of what our partner's goals are. So that's what we're planning. We appreciate all the support you've given us over the years and we look forward to finding solutions so that we can preserve the work that we're doing. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Vagno. On our agenda, it has Office of Homeless Support and Services as a separate agenda item. It's not. It's all rolled in. I don't see any lights up from people on the dais. You'll wait till after public comment? Okay. Council Member McCarron, you want to speak now or after public comment? I'll speak now. Okay. I just want to talk about Family Connect's program because I think it's an important program. You know, postpartum is one of the most vulnerable times in a mother's life. When I was having my twins, it was a very traumatic birth. Went through postpartum depression and a lot of focus is always on the babies and never really on the moms. So I just want to, you know, give a shout out to you guys for your work on that. It's something super, super important to me and I know to many moms and families in the audience listening. So whatever we can do to help support that, let me know because it's something that is a priority for me and we're going to find the funding. Thank you. And what you're saying is what we hear over and over and over from moms. I didn't know anybody was going to ask about me. You know, I couldn't believe the nurse was coming for me to help me and how important and transformative and how that helped them better heal and bond and sort of be able to go through those rough early weeks. So thank you for saying that. Yeah. Council Member Willard. All right. Thank you, Madam Chair. Dr. Avegno, your entire team, Jeannie, me, Sean, y'all do phenomenal work. I've actually had the privilege of working with you guys for a few years going back to my time in the legislature and, you know, I just wanted to touch on Family Connects as well because I remember when we were first talking about launching that in the city of New Orleans, like immediately I envisioned, you know, scaling that throughout the rest of the state. And there was actually what legislation last year to do just that. And I think it's a very important program for the city and for the state because if you're not aware, Louisiana consistently ranks as one of the worst states for mothers and babies in all kind of categories, but particularly as it relates to outcomes during the birthing process. And so Family Connects actually goes into the home. It provides assessments. It helps fathers and mothers with jobs after the delivery. I mean, it's just social work. It's a huge program. And I don't even know how you really quantify the impact of that. And I know it's still early, but I wanted to know, is there any preliminary data that we have on Family Connects right now? Oh, yes, there is. I'm glad you asked. I think we're on our fourth evaluation. So thanks to some funding from Kellogg, we have evaluated it every six months since we launched full-time. And consistently, and Michonne, I don't know if you want to speak to the outcomes, but we consistently see significant outcomes. I think that's how we convince the state, because the program costs less than it's saved in our Medicaid patients. And that's through reduced hospitalizations. And then the connections, the increased ability to diagnose postpartum depression, because as anyone who's had a baby will tell you, it's often silent. And if nobody asks, then you don't know. And then even if they do ask, getting them connected to treatment. And the whole premise of the program is that it is a warm handoff. If you screen positive for food insecurity, domestic violence, postpartum depression, anxiety, that nurse's whole job is to find you the place that it's going to treat you. Did I miss any? I don't think you missed anything. I think one of the biggest aspects, to add on to what you said, is that it takes community connections. And so all of these people here, getting them into those services for bonding, for making sure that they have breastfeeding support, but also housing. You mentioned the fathers. We have one of the stories they shared that you help the father and you help my child get into camp. So it's a whole family and thing that we are a part of. And I don't think there's too much that we can be doing to help families in the city, especially around young families, the birthing process.

Me, Sean, actually helped me draft my first piece of legislation related to doulas and midwives in the state legislature. So this is really a big area I'm passionate about and certainly want to see that program fully funded. With the idea, right, in the next few years that this rolls over, really, to be covered entirely by Medicaid and on the state's dime. And I think after we get a few years of data, the numbers will show that it's actually cheaper for us to do it this way, as opposed to neglecting our mothers and our babies and paying for extended hospital visits and all the other costs that are attributed with terrible birthing outcomes like we've had for a while. With the Department of Health, I mean, this department probably, you know, is the one who knows how to go after federal grants and other funding sources. And I feel like to some extent, you know, you're getting a little punished here because you do so good at that, you know, but like you were saying, Dr. Avegno, it's not like you can just swap it out for general fund allocations. So, you know, we know about Family Connects, we know about Low Barrier Shelter. What other programs that the Department of Health administers could be negatively impacted if the cuts remain in place as they are right now? Well, it sounds like, you know, we have assurances that violence prevention is going to be restored. And that was through Ubuntu? That was through Ubuntu, yeah. I mean, that would be high on the list. But even that, it still has to come from somewhere, right? Because we have to have a balanced budget. The expenses are higher than revenues right now. So any changes we make have to be accounted for somewhere else. And I don't want to pick a favorite child, because we have so many children. But I think the core things that what New Orleanians told us in our community health assessment, they care most about are mental health, internal child health, access to care, and then economic stability, right? So we try to plan our budget and everything we go after according to what the data shows and to what New Orleanians really want. And so the mental health, if mobile crisis is having a cut, I would hate for that to not be 24-7. I would hate for it to have reduced capacity, right? Because again, the downstream effects of that. We have other programs that have taken a haircut and or gotten cut altogether that we really wish we could. Some of them are violence prevention programs. We are working to find other sources for them, right? Because we don't want to leave anybody hanging. And I think, too, our staff cuts. Cutting three people might not seem like a lot. But if it's in that homeless response field team, people are really going to feel that. So the low barrier shelter is a big ticket item. And while I'm encouraged, because I know conversations are being had with business and civic organizations to help fund that, and that's how it started with those folks chipping in, it can't be, well, if we fund half of it, it'll be fine, right? That's kind of an all or nothing. After that, our other cuts are pretty small but have a meaningful impact. Huge impact. Thank you, Kareem. Well, I appreciate you guys coming down today and all the work that you do. Everybody in the health department, you provide a valuable service to people across the city of New Orleans. So thank you. Thank you. Council Member Morrell. Thank you. I changed my mind. There's a lot of stuff we have to cover. And there's a lot of people that want to speak. I want to make sure everyone out there has time to speak. So I'm going to get my stuff out the way first. First off, I know when we met, it is very frustrating for me when the city develops a program that is received and has such great outcomes that the state mimics it, and then we defund it. And that's not a great place to be, and Family Connects is that. I mean, it is a program that has changed the trajectory of so many families. And there is a national reckoning right now on postpartum and how people fundamentally do not understand how serious that condition is and how much help is necessary to even help people struggling with it realize that they are going through it. And Family Connects is a tremendous way for people who don't even know they're suffering from it to not only help identify it, but put people with resources. And it is essential that we find a way to keep that program intact. Because as I said, nothing's more embarrassing than being a leader on something and then having the state make you look bad because they're doing it themselves. The low barrier shelter, it is absolutely essential that we figure out a path forward on it. I know that we are talking with a variety of different partners. One of the big things I want the public to understand is that the budgeting model is not to use one-time money for reoccurring expenses. So it's not just the issue of going to partners and saying, hey, can you give me some money? It's, hey, can you give me a multi-year commitment to some money? Because what you don't want to have is have people say, hey, I'll give you a couple of bucks this year, but next year you're right back on the chopping block. Ideally, what you do is you get a three- to five-year commitment for funding. So that way, when you're in year two or in year four, if that funder says, I cannot fund in year three or year five, it gives you a runway to find replacement funding. That is why the process of securing reoccurring funding is so essential. So I know that working with the council, working with the mayor, we've already tried to re-engage some of the prior groups. Because as Dr. Avegno alluded to, originally the low-barrier shelter did have some groups, exterior groups, that provided sources of funding to offset what the city put in. Right now, the city's taking the full cost. And in this budget environment, we cannot afford to take the full cost. So I know that I've been engaging with some groups.

Other council members have as well. Council Member McCarran engaged with downtown development and got that ball rolling with them, as far as searching a hard commitment. I've worked with Council Member King, with the French Quarter Management District, to figure out what they can do. But it's going to take us talking to all those groups. Now, I want to point out something. I know that Matt's going to kind of twitch. But we received these lovely letters from legislators saying how much they want to help with the low-barrier shelter. I will tell you something. As a former legislator, letters are meaningless without work. And for a legislator to say, please save the funding, my response is, please find some funding. Because right now, this is something that's important to the city of New Orleans. It provides a regional benefit. Because as Dr. Avegno, and you can attest, what's your name again, sir? Taylor. Taylor. As Taylor can attest, a lot of people at low-barrier shelter are from New Orleans. And it's a regional benefit. And though we provide the service, it would be nice, as much as some of my Republican colleagues like to say the dollar should follow the child, it would be nice if those regions, that that money followed as well. Because Unity receives money from a variety of regions to provide services. And it would be nice if the state, at the very least, would provide a vehicle saying, if we are providing services to a person from Port Allen, it would be nice if Port Allen would send their homeless services money to New Orleans to take care of their homeless. Because right now, if you drive in Jefferson Parish, you see these beautiful signs by Unity saying, don't panhandle, paid for by Unity. If I'm the one in New Orleans servicing a Jefferson Parish homeless person, I think we could better use that money than putting up signs. So though I appreciate the letters and I appreciate the overtures that they will help with future state funding, actions speak louder than words. We need the actual funding. Because what you're providing now with the $5 million we have is adequate. But if we actually had the state give us money, we could provide better services and have better outcomes. So I appreciate they support this. I would encourage them going into next year's session to send us some money. Because that would mean that we probably wouldn't be here in this catastrophic situation that we're in now. Additionally, with victim support services, I cannot tell you how important it is for our domestic violence partners and what they do for survivors and how important the symbiotic relationship is between the city and our providers. Because we lead the state of Louisiana, has led the nation in deaths by partners, and we as a city have led the state in trying to reverse that trend. And when you look at that coupled with things like violence prevention services, the services you provide from cradle to the grave, to survivors, to individuals who are trying to help us stop retaliatory killings, all these things are part of why crime is so low. And it's a constant, ongoing thing that we have to do to educate people. Crime being this low is not because of NOPD. Let me say that again. We have the same amount of police officers, more or less than we did in 2021, when crime was at an all-time high. What we have done with all the work that the chief has done is stabilize attrition. We are still not above 1,000 officers. The change is we have gotten much smarter in having holistic approaches. So you are doing policing with services and outreach and other things to have crime be this low. As I've told people who have kind of pushed back on, because like I said, there's no way, even with millages rolling forward, that we are not going to have cuts. The goal is to look through every department to try and preserve the key functionality. And if you're looking at the machine that is the city of New Orleans that has kept crime low, you cannot remove widgets from one end and hope the whole thing functions. It will not. It will crash. It will burn. And we know this year going into next year, if we don't figure out a way to keep the entire engine rolling, it will go off the tracks and it will explode. So we're working on a low-barrier shelter, obviously, with trying to get partners and other groups involved. But every other aspect of this is also under consideration on how we get back to where we need to be. It's just, as I tell everyone, there is no money tree. Oh, sorry, let me correct myself. My 10-year-old makes me say this now. Money is made with paper, but you can't use trees to make money. So there is no money tree in the city of New Orleans. We are going to have to find ways creatively throughout the budget to spread cuts to restore services. So just because we spare pain here does not mean there'll be pain elsewhere. We just need the public and the people out there and the audience there to be patient with us to know that we are doing our best. Just like you manage your book every month at home trying to make ends meet, we're managing next year's book to make ends meet, and we're going to have to go without somewhere else to get these services restored, but they are important. So we're going to find a way, as a council, doing this budget to get the key services back in place, though it will likely result in some pain elsewhere. But we understand that, and part of us working together to fix this budget is sharing that pain. So I want to publicly thank Dr. Avegno because you wear your heart on your sleeve when you're not doing Clay Higgins' witchcraft. You wear your heart on your sleeve, and you really believe in everything that you do, and we are going to work to give you the resources so you can continue to do your work. Thank you. Thank you to my colleagues for expressing their support for the low-barrier shelter. Dr. Avegno, you and I conceived a...

of the Office of Homeless Services and Strategies together at a coffee shop in the prior administration. And you've done, Taylor, a yeoman's job of keeping us on track, making sure that we're supporting our unhoused folks, and keeping your eye on the low-barrier shelter, which, as Dr. Bagnall has said, the physical state of it is not conducive to healing, to getting back on your feet. It's really a terrible place. So I can't wait to work with you on finding a new spot for the low-barrier shelter. My team and I have also been in contact with possible funders, including New Orleans and Company, the DDD. I just wanna remind people that when our prior operator of the low-barrier shelter pulled out, I reached out to Ed Carlson at Odyssey House to say, can you please bid on this, because we need your help. So my commitment to our unhoused population is strong. It continues. It's been there for the past four years. It'll be there long after I exit this council, because it's so important that we support our neighbors, not only who are from New Orleans, but we know about 50% of folks who are in the system come from outside of New Orleans. You guys have been sitting here for a very long time. I don't want us to be talking heads anymore. I wanna hear from you. We have a stack of cards, and the first one is from Ed Carlson. Look. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. I really appreciate all of the support from the health department, also all the council members who I've had the honor and pleasure to work with for many, many years, also all the wonderful people who are here behind me, who are here supporting the work that we're doing. My name is Ed Carlson. I'm the CEO of Odyssey House. I'm obviously here to help to advocate for the funding for the Low Barrier Homeless Shelter. One of the things that Odyssey House was able to do in turning around the Low Barrier Shelter when we took over was to make a big change in how we provided services. And the way that we provided the services is using best practices in a shelter environment. So not only do we really focus on treating the individual and working with people individually, we help them to move on to the next level and help to make it that the shelter's not their home. It's only a stepping place to a home. So I'm gonna give you some numbers here. One thing is interesting. We did an economic impact study at Odyssey House, and one of the things we looked at was specifically the shelter. And it showed for the $5.8 million that is currently being spent on the shelter, it estimated a saved cost to the city of around $40 million. And so those are important numbers when you're looking at how this, the impact that it has and what the shelter does in the way we provide services. And just since we took over the shelter in 2025, 930 guests received case management and care plans, 279 moved into more stable, permanent housing. We made nearly 2,000 referrals to local service providers and nearly 3,000 referrals to OHL's health centers, resulting in nearly 1,500 measurable care encounters. And 88 individuals were directly referred to intensive addiction treatment services. Additionally, with the first six months in 2026, we were able to get over 53 guests to secure employment, but a third of the people at the shelter are employed. And we help. Thank you, Ed. Thank you. Lonnie Granier. Thank you. Thank you. Lonnie, you're up next, followed by Shira Bessonette, followed by Dalita Wilbank. Good morning, council members. Thank you, Lonnie Granier, Odyssey House, Louisiana. A slight correction to Ed. 379 guests, not 279, were moved into more stable and permanent housing in the last fiscal year. While I have the time, I do want to commend Dr. Abegno and her team on the Family Connects program. I think that the council should prioritize that, particularly as long as fatal overdose continues to be the leading cause of death for pregnant and parenting women. Relative to the economic impact, something that is not measured in the $40 million in savings are the guests' employment and them making a valuable contribution to the community, which has been enhanced with our partnership with Job One and coming on site and providing job fairs at least once a month, as well as the increased economic vitality and reduced reliance on hospitals and jails. And so I want you to look at that $40 million cost savings as the floor, in addition to approximately $10 million of economic impact by just the shelter being an operation. I also want to thank Dr. Abegno, her entire team, and Council Member Harris and your team for coming to the table with us and allowing to work with you to find ways to reduce the shelter budget, improve efficiency without sacrificing quality or bed capacity, and so many, many thanks to you for that. I also want to revisit some data that we shared with you, Council Member Harris, earlier in the year relative to the shelter population. We can verify at any particular moment, about 45% of our shelter guests are from New Orleans, and about 65% overall are from Louisiana. And we can verify that about 20% of the shelter guests do come from out of state. And so we do pledge our support and partnership as Odyssey House in trying to work toward braided funding through city, state, and federal partnerships. I've also included in the packets that you've received some client testimonies from guests who were in the low barrier shelter and have since exited. And so I just want to draw your attention to that and celebrate those success stories, and I'll yield to the folks behind me. Thank you very much. Thank you, Lonnie. Thank you. Ms. Bessonnet, followed by Delita Wilbank, followed by Sarah Parks. Good afternoon, members of the City Council and Mayor's Office. My name is Shana Bessonnet. I urge you in the strongest terms, do not cut funding for our low barrier shelter. That shelter was a lifeline for me for five months.

It gave me a safe place to sleep and the stability to rebuild my life. Low barrier shelters meet people exactly where they are and they restore human dignity when everything else has fallen apart. Cutting this budget doesn't save money, it shifts the burden back onto our streets, our emergency rooms, and our public services. Every bed you defund is another neighbor pushed back outside. Low barrier shelters are the bridge between homelessness and housing. You cannot build a safer, healthier city by tearing down bridges that help people rebuild. I learned through the grapevine of a possible relocation of the low barrier shelter being a detention center and I just want to say that people who have been incarcerated, like myself, will most probably decide to sleep on the streets if that's the case. A jail setting works against the trust that gets people to come in at all. So I'm gonna pray for healing center vibes instead of incarceration vibes. And I respectfully ask that you include people with lived experience in any decision of where it goes and please protect and fully fund our low barrier shelter. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Hallelujah! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! And then Sarah Parks and then Renee Blanche. Good afternoon city council members. My name is Dolita Wilhike and I'm a case manager at the low barrier shelter. I want to speak specifically about the young people that we serve because most people aren't aware of that. This shelter is not simply a place to sleep, it's a place where young people, many struggling with mental illness and substance use can find stability, support, and a path forward. I'm especially proud of our housing outcomes. Every young person we have helped transition from our shelter into permanent housing has been able to maintain that housing. That is because our work doesn't end when they receive the keys. We make sure that they leave with the support, resources, and connections they need to remain stable in successing with their housing. I want to share one young woman's story. She typically hangs at Chick-fil-A and Hurts Donuts. I'm sure every outreach worker knows her, every mobile crisis unit knows her, but before coming to the shelter, she had 38 hospital stays in one year. Since coming to our shelter, she has not had one, and this all can be verified. Today, she is making strides, she has support, she has stability, and she has hope. And this is what the shelter provides. We are not a flophouse, we are a bridge to permanent housing, stability, and independence. Closing this shelter will not make homelessness disappear, but it can take away a critical resource from the young people that we already serve. I ask that you look beyond the building and look at the outcomes. In Hebrews 4.16, it's very simple. In this order, first comes mercy, then comes grace. Grace and mercy is not just for the elite, it's not for the middle class, it's for everybody. Thank you. Thank you for your work. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. Hey, Sarah. Hello. Hi, my name is Sarah Parks, and I'm a social worker and executive director of Grace of the Green Light. We serve individuals experiencing homeless 365 days of the year. According to national studies conducted by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the elderly are our fastest growing homeless population. 41% of the individuals that my organization serves are over the age of 60. Funding homelessness services is a matter of life and death. Recently, one of our elderly clients who was living with dementia died on the streets. He was found sitting in a chair on Poitras after being left there for two days. This loss is heartbreaking and a reminder of what's at stake. Adequate funding for outreach, shelters, housing, and supportive services can save lives. Our most vulnerable neighbors deserve the resources and the support they need to survive. Thank you. Renee, followed by Jennifer Hall, followed by Sister Mary Lou. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for all of this conversation. I'm really encouraged by what I'm hearing today and what I read yesterday, and I want to thank Dr. Avegno and this whole team here for all of the partnership that we've shared with them over the years, particularly in housing and in the crisis intervention team. If the low-barrier shelter closed, where would those 300 unhoused neighbors of ours go? Because I'm gonna tell you right now, we at Ozan Amen, I'm sorry, I'm Renee Blanche with Ozan Amen, sorry. We at Ozan Amen have seen more than a 30% increase just in the last eight to 10 months of people coming to us for shelter. We have 156 beds at Ozanam Inn, 97 on the men's floor and 59 on the women's floor. Every single solitary night, we set up an extra 20 cots on the men's floor because we don't want to turn those people away. We're still turning people away, but safety prohibits us doing more. On the women's floor, it's another six to ten cots that we set up almost every night too. So where are they going to go? We don't have any more capacity, neither do the other shelters in the city that are also non-profits raising our own money to run our own shelters. So where again are these folks going to go? And I know that I've spoken with Dr. Avegno and you, Council Member Harris, and to Council Member Morrell's point, we've had an increase of out-of-parish people. Of our Louisiana residents, 40 to 45 percent are from out of Orleans Parish. And that's an increase from about 25 percent about a year ago. So thank you for your time. Thank you. Jennifer Hall. Sister Mary Lou. Followed by Naomi Washington. Good afternoon, Sister Mary Lou, Hotel Hope, and President of Hope Family Housing, and also Social Justice Influencer. I just gave that name to myself today. But thank you so much, Dr.

Avegno and Council Members that are here present right now, because I know all of you will vote on that. I know it's been a long day, but thank you for taking this day. I think I just say, I hear the support that all of you are giving and I'm glad to do that. All my colleagues of non-profits who have worked tirelessly for years and years and years to make the line on the budget, on the revenue, match the expenses. That's what we do. That's what I do all the time. And so we have to be creative. We have to look and say there has to be some other sources. There have to be some other philanthropic corporate sponsors who want to help us. I was very disturbed by your first slide, Jen, of what does it mean if all of those budget cuts happen. Mental health is real. It's real. The people on our streets are real. And if we look at the consistent ethic of life, that is our moral obligation as human beings. If you have a religious affiliation, okay, you can take it one place further. But as a human being, we have to treat people with dignity and respect for life. So I'm begging you, council members who have that opportunity to make real important decisions to do so. Thank you, doctor, and your team. Thank you, Susan Ailey. Naomi Washington, followed by Anne Jays, followed by Charlene Ho. Hi, council members in attendance. Thank you. I'll pretty much be reiterating what has already been said. But good afternoon. As you all know, Night Out Against Crime was two days ago. Neighborhoods across the city celebrated with block parties and community gatherings as a part of what the New Orleans city government describes as an event that strengthens communities through meaningful connections between residents and local police. I'm also here to talk about, as with the rest of you, an entity that also strengthens communities and supports a reality in which all residents meaningfully engage with their physical environment and all the things embedded into community that makes a whole, the health department. The health department has played a crucial role in maintaining the public's well-being and quality of life and deserves to be recognized as a key driver in the historic decrease in crime we are experiencing today. The fact of the matter is that a healthy community is a safe community. Safety is a collective effort that takes meaningful investment in preventing crime before it happens and in healing from harm that has occurred. To feel comfortable in our own neighborhoods and to give our children a better future, we need to invest in people and in prevention. That's what supports healing and repair. Law incarceration and policing has not and will not break the cycles of violence in our city. These systems react after harm has already occurred. What does support for healing and repair look like in reality? To me, it looks like investing in systems that address violence as a public health concern. It means funding community violence interrupters, domestic violence intervention, restorative justice, court diversion, and trauma recovery, as well as the food security programs, home visits, and safety net programs for all youth. Thank you. Thank you. Ann Jase, Charlene Ho, and then LaDiana Williams. I hate to interrupt y'all. I'm a disabled veteran militarily. I can't do so much. Is there any way y'all can let me speak before y'all as an excuse? I'm going to be overwhelmed. Yeah, okay. Ma'am, if you could hold on for one second. Let's roll through some cards, and then we'll have someone talk with her. Ann Jase, followed by Charlene Ho. Hi. Ann Jase, Louisiana Public Health Institute. LPHI is very concerned about the cuts, and we're really grateful for all of the comments and support of the health department that we've heard. The health department is one of our biggest and strongest partners and do incredible work for the city, as we've already talked about today. Public health is inseparable from the conditions that people face every day. Housing, access to care, food security, economic stability, and support for mothers and families. New Orleanians have consistently identified these issues as urgent, most pressing needs, and the Department of Health addresses those directly. Programs such as Family Connects help families receive support earlier, like we already talked about, and reduce crises and improve health outcomes. Cutting public health funding does not eliminate the needs. It shifts preventable problems into more expensive emergency systems and makes it harder for New Orleans to build healthier, safer, more resilient communities. So we respectfully urge the council to protect the health department's funding and the 2027 budget. Preserving these investments will help the city respond to residents' priorities, prevent avoidable crises, and strengthen the systems families rely on every day. Thank you. LaDonna Williams, followed by Brittany Arsenault, followed by Jeremy Johnson. Hi, Charlene Ho, Health, and I oversee the Family Connects program at Ochsner Baptist. I'm here to respectfully ask the council to continue funding Family Connects New Orleans. Since July 2024, the Ochsner team has completed nearly 1,000 initial home visits. Ochsner remains committed to this program, and we want to see this program continue to serve our New Orleans families. Our registered nurses, they do go in the homes to assess the health and well-being of the infant and birthing parent. They answer questions, offer reassurance, identify concerns early, and connect families with health care and community resources. Respectfully, I ask the council to continue investing in Family Connects New Orleans at the strongest level possible so families can continue to receive the trusted support. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Michelle Boe, you have two minutes. Hi, my name is Michelle Christine Boe. I would like you to read the card, and I'll tell you what it's about if you have questions. So just read my card aloud.

Marie, I just have the one with your name on it. Michelle Christine Boe. Please read it. It just has your name on it, ma'am. Go ahead and read it. I will answer it. We need funding. It's the same thing. I'm a disabled veteran military. I asked for time off, sabbatical, for 25 years to get my life together when I became a disabled veteran. I want to be a PCA in the military, serve only military. That's the way I am. I find that people aren't in the military. You have non-military and military. I want my military ID. I want to be honored. I want to be a PCA part-time only 25 hours or less every month if I could do it or I have to go into retirement and sabbaticals and stuff like that. I really, really want the old VA at 1530 Infrared Street, New Orleans, Louisiana, 70112 NATO USA to be funded and support. We need more. We're there to save lives. I joined the military for that. I want to be in the health department. That's who I am. Please don't touch it. Come here. Let me have my own personal space. I don't want to be overwhelmed. I'm disabled. That's why I'm here. I want funding. I want it to stay. We need the funding. I heard about a new VA. We already had that other VA built, but we need to be supported more. We save lives. I save lives. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Bowe. LaDana Williams, followed by Brittany Arsenault. Good afternoon, and thank you so much for the opportunity to come here and speak to you today. My name is LaDana Williams, and I'm the Vice President of Community Engagement for University Medical Center. I'm speaking on behalf of the Seeds of NOLA Trauma Recovery Center and the UMC Hospital-Based Violence Intervention Program. The work we do in partnership with the city is vital to the city. We sustain investments for the Trauma Recovery Center as well as violence intervention, and it's essential to maintaining the progress that we've made and the progress that's made towards saving the city and the crime and the impact that has been made. The Department of Health and Human Services' Violence Intervention Plan, including the support for the hospital-based violence intervention, has contributed to declining violence rates in New Orleans, and continued funding will ensure that we're able to continue the progress that's already been made. Our program meets people in some of their most difficult moments, often immediately after violence has occurred in their life. We provide emotional support during crisis, safety planning, psychotherapy, case management and de-escalation to those at risk of retaliatory violence, support that helps individuals with setting goals, accessing resources, and building safer, more stable lives. While our program is small in budget, it's mighty in impact. Over the past 12 months, our team has engaged and supported with more than 300 individuals who sustained gunshot wounds. 139 new participants have been made and provided with case management as well as long-term services. Not every number is a person, a family, and an opportunity to interrupt another cycle of violence. This work is about more than just treating an injury. It's about helping people heal, stay safe, and having a chance to thrive. I want to thank the Department of Health and Hospitals, as well as our Seeds of NOLA Trauma Recovery Center for the continued... Thank you. Brittany, followed by Jeremy, followed by Meg D. Brittany? All right. Jeremy Johnson? Yes. All right. How are you guys doing today? My name is Jeremy Johnson. I'm a case manager at the Low Barrier Shelter, and today I wanted to read a letter from one of our guests, who wasn't able to be here, and it reads, my name is Antoinette Holmes. I'm a resident of the New Orleans Low Barrier Shelter. I first became homeless in January of 2026 after losing my job and my apartment. A friend of mine let me sleep in their car while I attempted to get back on my feet. After months of no luck, that same friend told me I should try to get into the Low Barrier Shelter and told me that they would help me get myself together. My friend told me that the shelter was the only shelter in the city that would give you a permanent bid, giving its residents a chance to find a job and to save money. When I first arrived at the shelter, I was welcomed in open arms. The staff treated me like family, and on my first day there, my health was declining after months of being off my diabetes medication. They helped me to see a provider the same day so that I could get all of my medication filled. In the following days, my case manager worked with me to search for jobs. After weeks of job searching, I can proudly say I'm employed again. Now we are working on the next step, which is budgeting so I can save towards housing myself. Closing this shelter would be a great disservice to the people of our city who struggle with homelessness. This shelter offers its residents the opportunity to be connected with providers for primary care and behavioral health services. They also provide assistance with finding employment so that people who struggle with homelessness can work towards ending their struggles, creating stability with housing. The help they provide is needed for our city. No other shelter offers the amenities for the less fortunate that are available at the Low Barrier Shelter. Other shelters only allow you to sleep for the night, and you have to take your belongings with you in the morning, making it practically impossible to hold employment. The Low Barrier Shelter is also the only shelter. Thank you. And thank you for writing that letter. Meg D. Meg D. followed by Maple Lewis. Meg D. All right, Maple Lewis. Linda Slade. And then after that is Angelica Dean. Good afternoon. My name is Linda Slade. I am a resident of Low Barrier. I have seen people come through the doors with nothing on but the clothes on their back. And Low Barrier has helped them and get them jobs and a place to go. This is the only shelter that will take animals, pets.

No other shelter will do that. It has also been passed. It's a bad place. It is not. Take the challenge, spend one week there, and see if it's that bad. I have been there since January. I come from O'odham Inn because they do not take pets, as there are 10 other people there with pets. It is the only homeless shelter that will do that. And you want to put 300 people out on the street, and you're talking about people being treated as human beings? Stop and think what you are saying, because you're not being human. I have a dog. My dog goes where I go. I got out of O'odham to get into Low Barrier because of my dog that I have raised. So stop and think, and say in the state, we'll wait till next year. They don't need to wait till next year. They need it this year. Thank you, Ms. Slade. Angelica Dean, followed by Jamie Clark, and then Dr. Chad Lewis. Thank you, Council, for the opportunity to speak today. The Low Barrier Shelter has been essential to me as a homeless individual who relocated to New Orleans from Alabama 13 months ago. The shelter has afforded me the ability to regain my mental stability via counseling services, primary care, and case management support. I have been able to finally call New Orleans home through the assistance of Unity's Permanent Supporting Housing Program, which will put an end to my homelessness. Through the course of my journey, I don't believe I would have regained the insight to a better future if it wasn't for the shelter's 24-hour support. The shelter has given me a new outlook in the phases of my recovery. If the shelter shuts down, it will affect hundreds of individuals who depend on the expertise of the staff. Please continue to support Low Barrier Shelter so other individuals can experience the joy in finding a home without having to be on the streets. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Dean. Thank you, Ms. Dean. Jamie Clark, followed by Dr. Chad Lewis, and then after that is Reynard Oliver. Jamie Clark? Yes. Okay. Let's move on to Dr. Chad Lewis. Everybody say, love, forgiveness, and gratitude. Love, forgiveness, and gratitude. Thank you, Jesus. If you're out there with you, Unity, if you're Oslow, Ian, please stand up and give yourself a hand. Everybody out there with you, everybody who's with you, stand up and give yourself a hand. Green and white. My name is Dr. Chad Lewis, and I came here, my doctorate is in divinity. I came here because I came on vacation, and in the process, the city towed my car. By that measure, I don't have family to help me, and I wound up staying in a homeless shelter for the first time ever in my life. I am gainfully looking for employment with my doctorate in divinity, and with the people's counsel. Have you considered that no one should have to live in an Orleans Parish prison, like you plan on moving the people from low barrier? That will certainly cause post-traumatic stress and voluntarily induce mental health issues for us, understanding citizens who fought tooth and nail to stay out of jail. The Treaty of Peace and Friendship is acknowledged by Barack Obama, was signed in 1787, and bailed out a homeless George Washington, being that found the 10 square miles that we call Washington, D.C., which is the nation's capital. And this compassion of humanity of the Sultan of Morocco gave them these 10 square miles for a tribute tax that they were not able to continue to pay, which we still have today. Visitors of New Orleans in 2025, 19,000, I mean 19,460,000, if a peace and friendship hotel tax or other possible areas were imposed on visitors, tourists, in the amount of $10 who most likely would have gambled it away, that would yield $194,600,000. That's somewhere you could get that money from. Thank you, Doctor. Mr. Raynard Oliver, followed by Helen Tufts, and then after that is Melissa, I think it's Bear. Good evening. My name is Raynard Oliver, and I support not closing the Low Barrier Shelter or any other shelter for that reason. My main reason is because I have a friend that's right now, at this moment, as we speak, lives in his car with his three children, ages seven, four, and two. I mean, I don't know any ... That's enough said by itself, because I'm like shot when they're just saying that. The shelter did a lot for me as well. I was in the Low Barrier. I stayed five months. I went in with a job, managed to save $6,000, kept my job, moved out, and I'm still prospering. But maybe it wouldn't have been that way if it wasn't for the Low Barrier Shelter. Thank you. Thank you. Helen Tufts, followed by Melissa Bosch. Bear. Good evening. My name is Helen Tufts. Before I found the homeless shelter at Low Barrier, I come from Atlanta. I had a lot of disabilities with my health, and it made me feel like I had a family to come here to. You're able to shower, you're able to have somebody to talk to, and it's really the best shelter. I've never been homeless in my life, but this is like the first shelter I ever came across that really made me feel like that if I didn't have my immediate family, that I had a family within the shelter. They're very caring people, and I hope that you all can find the funds to keep the Low Barrier shelter. shelter open because it has really done a lot for me. I found a job. I'm back on trial. I got a car now. It's just everything has really been a blessing since I've been in a shelter. And please do your best to get the funds to help us out. Thank you. Thank you. Melissa Bear followed by Dolores Broussard. Melissa, you here? Dolores Broussard followed by Nellie Katzen followed by Kevin Kellogg. Dolores is in support of the Low Barrier Shelter. Nellie Katzen followed by Kevin. Then Emma Lotsfoot. Hey, everyone. Thank you, council members Harris and McCarron for staying in the room through testimony. There have been so many people here all day. And I'm really grateful that you two both decided to stay in the room with us. Thank you.

I won't belabor the point that so many with much more relevant experience have made about the Low Barrier Shelter. I know you both consider it a priority. I want to speak to the broader health department trend of a 60% cut in this year's general fund. Last year it was cut by 30%. But that's not all. It's actually been declining as long as CBNO has been tracking the budget since 2004. PreKatrina, the health department made up about 2.48% of the general fund. And it's been declining ever since with a slight increase over COVID. But it's pretty much been tanking. This year's budget has it at .6% of the general fund, less than a quarter of what it was in 2004. You get what you pay for. And what we do with our own money matters. I'm encouraging you to find the $7 million somewhere else. Thank you. Thank you. Kevin Kellert, followed by Emma Lotspich, followed by Joe Herron-Mueller. Good afternoon, councilmembers. Deputy Mayor Avegno, thank you so much for being here and everyone else that's here. My name is Kevin Kellert. I'm the program manager with the Committee for a Better New Orleans. We're also proud members of the Big Easy Budget Coalition. We're currently working on advancing an ordinance that focuses on realtime budget information, transparency input, and budget processes and community access to budget processes. We appreciate your continued and already ongoing collaboration in making sure that the budget dashboard is available and more information is still needed. This budget includes more than a 60% cut from the health department, general fund allocation, and we need more clarity on where the money is going and so that the experts and everyday people can be on the same page to see where these cuts can come from and find better solutions. Thank you. Thank you, Kevin. Emma from Solve Life, followed by Joe Herron-Mueller, followed by Anjanika Morris, and then Sarah Omoja. All right. Joe, you want to come on up? Good afternoon. I want to thank the city council for your attention and concern for the health and housing outcomes and needs of the residents of our city, and to the Department of Health and Human Services for the myriad ways that you work to address the needs of our community's most vulnerable residents. I'm very proud of the impact that the Unity Continuum has had working together with the city to address homelessness, to accelerate exits from shelter, and to address the complex cases among many other areas of coordination for which we meet regularly with the city leadership. I do want to correct the record that the signs that were referred to in Jefferson Parish that address pain handling are nothing that Unity has ever funded, paid for, or solicited funding on. And I'm very glad to know that the dignity and inclusion are very important priorities for addressing the long-term plans for the Low Barrier Shelter. Centering the experience of unhoused people is critical to putting legs to these commitments. I shared an email with members of the council yesterday addressing the funding considerations for the operating budget of the Low Barrier Shelter. In brief, this shelter is a critical node in the network of homeless response system in our city. And while the continuum of care funding is restricted from supporting shelter operations, we are grateful to pursue and support creative sources of funding that can ensure that the operations of this critical resource continue. The opportunity and necessity of the moment is for the city council and the administration to identify recurring city revenues and to responsibly reallocate existing resources and secure outside funding before the final budget for this coming year is adopted. Outside funding should supplement, not replace, a defined public commitment to these shelter operations. Thank you for all that you do. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you for what you do. Andronica, followed by Sarah, followed by Kim Mosby. Good afternoon, council members. Andronica Mars, president of the Greater New Orleans Housing Alliance. I'm here today to talk about not just the Low Barrier Shelter, but some of the disconnects that we talked about earlier when it comes to our housing system and how the very idea that this shelter was proposed for defunding in this process speaks to the larger problem. The fact of the matter is, is when the mayor presented her budget, housing was not included at all. And nowhere is there more apparent than the idea that this shelter would be defunded. We understand and appreciate that there's been efforts after the initial outrage to what truly is a catastrophically bad idea was proposed and that there are thoughts and prayers that the funding will be restored. But we need better than that. We need more than that. We need this city to stop failing its people when it comes to housing. The homeless shelter is the last resort. It is the safety net, the only safety net too many people have. And in this time and in this moment, what is happening in the state of Louisiana, where the legislature criminalized homelessness, the idea that the city of New Orleans would offer this and much less offer that the alternative to this shelter be a detention center is outrageous. It is absolutely outrageous. We need real leadership. We need to prioritize the needs of these people. And we need to make sure that we are understanding how the consequences of these decisions impact us. I mentioned this earlier. I'm going to mention it again particularly after the testimony we just heard of a gentleman with three children in his car. There are 2200 homeless children in this city. We are facing losing nine schools in the next three years. This is insanity. Pure and simple. Put the people of this city first. Sarah? Sarah, do you want to speak? Followed by Kim Mosby. Followed by Andreas Acuna. Hi. Sarah Mosla, director of Vera Louisiana and member of the Big Easy Budget Coalition.

Quick thank you to Councilmember McCarran and Council President Morrell for coming to the Big Easy Budget Coalition town hall a couple of weeks ago and hearing people's concerns about the budget. Folks were asked a lot of questions about what surprised them about the budget and also what they wish was different. And people said time and time again, just like they said in our survey, that they really don't want youth programs, violence prevention programs and housing programs to be cut so severely. They were surprised by a 51% cut at the time to the health department and a 2% cut to the police department. A budget really is a series of choices. Right now the council is faced with those very hard choices that have cascading consequences. And really what is at stake is really safety in our communities and investment in our future. We're at a 50-year crime low in New Orleans and no one entity can take credit for that. But much of that effort comes from the coordination that comes with a public health approach and in the health department. You've heard all of the different programs that are important. I don't have time to name those with two minutes. But community safety is an ecosystem and that comprehensively approaches and addresses everything that happens before a shooting, before a crisis, before the criminal legal system comes into play. Choosing to defund NOHD means defunding our future. And make no mistake, 60% cut is defunding a safer New Orleans. And I'll give one quick example. I don't know. Oh, 15 seconds. The MCIU takes a lot of burden off of the police department. 36% burden reduction, in fact, just after they took 100 cases in 2023. And so your question will be where. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you. Kim Mosby, Andreas Acuna, and then Joseph Anthony Marshall. So I'm going to finish up for Sarah just real quick. So if you ask Sarah where this money should come from, she's going to say thank you for that question. Take the money from the single largest line item in the city's budget, NOPD. NOPD can sustain a $10 million cut. In fact, NOPD has reduced their overtime spend from $45 million last year to $10 million this year so far. So that's a $35 million reduction in one year. So let's say that NOPD is going to in one year. So let's take $10 million from the overtime budget and restore NOHHS, which reduces their burden. I ask that you don't defund our future and jeopardize our progress in community safety. All right. Let's see if I can do mine in a minute and 20 seconds. Everyone in New Orleans wants to live in a safe, thriving community with schools where children and their grandbabies have the opportunity to develop into successful future leaders. Unfortunately, many lives are cut short in New Orleans through community violence, drug addiction, and domestic violence. We sent you an email about the dashboard, so I'm not going to go into the firearms homicide dashboard and how it shows inequality is embedded in our neighborhoods. the access to resources that we get. I want to thank you for the commitment to continue funding for OVP and Ubuntu and their efforts to end gun violence. They've made significant strides since 2023 in reducing shootings across the city, but they don't do this work alone. UMC's hospital-based violence intervention team and their trauma recovery center are ecosystem partners that ensure residents that are hurt by gun violence can heal instead of continuing the cycle and becoming tomorrow's perpetrators. The Center for Restorative Approaches is a critical ecosystem partner that focuses on reducing violence in our schools so that our children can be safe. The ecosystem is more than just entities with violence prevention in their mission. Many of these programs make a difference by connecting their program participants to resources at other organizations. I call on this council to use our tax dollars to invest in programs and services that your constituents have consistently said over the last four years keep us safe. Thank you. Thank you. Andreas, followed by Jessica Anthony Marshall, followed by Michelle Seymour. Good afternoon, Madam Chair, members of the council. My name is Andres Acuna. I'm speaking on behalf of Operation Restoration today. First, I'd like to thank Dr. Avegno, Jeanne Taylor, and the health department team, Family Connects, all of Taylor's work is great and we really thank you for it. Our mission is to uplift women and girls that have been impacted by incarceration and the low barrier shelter, right to council, OHSS, survivors of domestic violence, and violence prevention programs all deserve full funding to ensure that the most vulnerable of us are protected. With Louisiana's recent criminalization of homelessness, those displaced by these proposed budget cuts or movement of the low barrier shelter may be arrested because of their living situation. These cuts may create problems like increasing the unhoused population, recidivism, and cost to taxpayers. These proposed cuts may allow for heavier enforcement of the encampment laws that may lead to more arrests and people being trapped in an incredibly expensive legal system with limited options for hope. Operation Restoration serves unhoused women and domestic violence survivors and strongly opposes any cuts that negatively impact those people that we serve and any future clients. Thank you. Thank you. Joseph Anthony Marshall. Joseph Anthony Marshall, Michelle Seymour, and Emma-Key Rial. And then after Amika is Catherine August Autry. All right. Good afternoon. I am Michelle Seymour and I am the director of the Re-Engagement Center at the New Orleans Youth Alliance. We are also a co-convening partner with the Children and Youth Planning Board. And I am here because the proposed health department cuts, including five million from the low barrier shelter, are also cuts to systems that keep our young people and our families safe and stable.

The young people and families that we serve are being so affected by this proposed 2027 budget that significantly reduces the health department's general fund budget by roughly 9.9 million with the potential loss of the low barrier shelter accounting for a significant portion of that reduction. At the Re-Engagement Center, we work with opportunity youth, young people ages 16 to 24 who are disconnected from school and work. And we continue to see housing not as a separate issue, but as a barrier that, excuse me, as a barrier that shapes whether a young person can remain connected to school, employment, health care, and community. That is why the Re-Engagement Center has elevated housing as an opportunity youth resource need. And we have partnered with Housing Louisiana in the Big Easy Budget Coalition. And this need is growing. Regional homelessness has increased again since 2025. Our covenant House New Orleans that houses unhoused young people has reported a number of young people in this care that has grown from 45 to over 170 young people each night. The You Master Plan already tells us what our response should be. It calls for safe housing, culturally appropriate prevention, and strong youth-serving social infrastructure. We cannot commit to these solutions while we're moving $5 million from one of our most accessible points of entry into shelter, services, and permanent housing. So I'm asking the council to keep this funding to protect our health department and understand that housing policy is youth policy. Thank you. Amika, followed by Catherine August Autry. Amika? Okay, Catherine, come on up. And then Titiana Saunders and Jordan Alexis Lindsay. Good afternoon. My name is Catherine August Autry. I am the clinical manager for the Family Connects program at Turo. Everybody kind of stole my talking points, but you all have heard how wonderful Family Connects is. So I am just going to, like I always do, just talk from the heart. We as nurses, we enter the homes, we enter those front doors, and we see firsthand what's going on. We know that nursing is one of the most trusted professions every year except the year of 9-11. The first responders beat us deservingly. But they trust us, and they let us know what's truly going on. And like we said earlier, everyone, we are safety nets. We connect them with resources. We screen them for mental health issues, depression, anxiety. We screen them for intimate partner violence, drug and substance use. So we are there finding out what's going on, and we're able to sit there, talk to them, and get them connected to all of these needed services. Housing is our worst service to get our moms connected to. We have a mom now who is homeless as of two days ago. She's on Unity's waiting list. But I'm just saying this to say that the Family Connects program plays such a vital role in these parents who are at their most vulnerable state, some of them. And it is the most vulnerable. You're bringing home a new baby, and your hormones are everywhere. It is a very vulnerable state. And navigating the systems is very hard. So someone there during that vulnerable state is much needed, and that's what we're there for. So please, whatever you all can do, keep our funding, because as they said, the state is trying to mimic this, and it is embarrassing if we have to cut it. Thank you. Thank you. Titiana Saunders, then Jordan Alexis-Lindsey, then Milo Malone. Good afternoon, Councilmembers. And for the record, my name is Titiana Saunders, and I am a Youth Advisory Board member with the New Orleans Children and Youth Planning Board, or CYPB. CYPB helped create the Youth Master Plan, shaped by hundreds of young people and community members. I am here because I'm concerned about this budget and the continued cuts to youth services, along with others across the city. I've experienced this firsthand, and how these programs make a difference. I was a RIDE ambassador for a long time, and I'm also a long-time user of the Opportunity Pass, a free transit that helped me get to my workforce training at Cafe Reconcile, and access to other opportunities across the city. But when we look at the city budget, and what we, you know, these investments that supposedly supposed to be doing what they're supposed to, and for the record, I would like to name a few. The health budget, $428,000 in proposed cuts to Family Connects, and for safety is $42,000 in proposed cuts to Louisiana Center for Children's Rights, and our Juvenile Public Defender. And for the shelters, $5 million in proposed cuts to the Low Barrier Shelter. These are not just numbers, they are affected by young and older people. Thank you. Thank you. Jordan, followed by Myla Malone. And then Samantha Plerner, and Jan Tarantino. Hi, well, my name's London, not Jordan. Hi, my name is London Lindsey. I'm a sophomore at Eleanor McMahon, and I'm very concerned about this year's city budget. I want to remind you the resolution the city council signed in 2021 supporting the Youth Master Plan. The Youth Master Plan is a 10-year roadmap to improve outcomes for the youth across New Orleans. We need a safe space, transportation, education, job opportunities, and support throughout the year. When fundraising for the youth, when fundraising for youth services is cut, those opportunities become harder to access. So I have to ask, why are we asking the people who have the least to do the most? So that's when the budget reflects when young people and the services depend on what we ask. We're asked to absorb more cuts when we physically cannot, and I'm asking you to look at the budget and the Youth Master Plan in mind to protect the services and investments that help young people succeed. You made a commitment to young people when you supported the Youth Master Plan. Please make sure this budget reflects that and the commitment. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, London. Milo Malone, then Samantha, then Jan Tarantino.

Good afternoon, council members. My name is Milo Malone. I work in the public health sphere, but I am here today as an advocate and citizen and representing myself. I originally was going to speak on behalf of the Family Connects program and ask the council to continue its funding. I'm very encouraged to hear that that is going to be a priority for you all. Obviously, the low barrier shelter is also in my top priorities for this upcoming budget. However, I would like to draw attention to the fact that all of these programs we're discussing, all of these public health programs, these safety net programs, they are the most important part of the city. government supporting its citizens. We heard a lot of testimony earlier and speaking about economy, nighttime economy, locals going to restaurants, all of this. Locals can't go to restaurants if they are sick, if they don't have transportation, if there is violence in their city, if they are unable to access services. Public health, it really is everything, and we heard that the health department has been facing cuts since 2004. There needs to be a stopping point. They do the most with the least. We saw how they're using so much grant, restricted grant funding for everything, and they are stretching every single dollar that they have. We need to try to support the health department as much as possible, and I think that it is imperative that the council continues to prioritize the health and safety of the citizens of New Orleans because this city will not exist without healthy and safe citizens. Thank you. Thank you, Milo. Samantha? Jan Tarantino after Samantha, then Eileen Lespar. Lespania, sorry. All right. First thank you to Dr. Evagno, and to Jeanne, and to NOHS staff for their work, dedication, and honestly, they represent a gold standard of city leadership. I really appreciate all the work that you guys do. So yes, my name is Samantha Florinor, and I am the regional director of the New Orleans Food Policy Council, and a deep partner of the city on matters of food and ag. I'm here to ask that the city council please invest in our public health department and maintain their budget. At 1.5% of the general budget, the New Orleans Health Department is operating at an investment well below not only the national average, but also our neighboring parishes, and we cannot afford to cut it by the proposed 61%. The budget crisis demands that we prioritize what to invest in. Please invest in the people of New Orleans by investing in our public health, including the low barrier shelter, the personnel, and Family Connects, among other programs. The health department has a high rate of return on investment in terms of our health, well-being, and safety. Furthermore, food policy lives in the health department. They help residents navigate federal nutrition programs, including SNAP, and identify resources. Thankfully, these services are grant funded, but any strain on their resources is also a strain on their ability to meet these needs, and it's only going to get worse with the federal cuts happening to SNAP. Their success at acquiring grants should not be a punishment, but rather a promise that they know how to stretch and leverage a dollar. Furthermore, with fewer federal and state dollars available to us, local investment is essential to our community survival and eventual prosperity. Thank you. Thank you. Dan Tarantino. Dan Tarantino. Eileen, come on up, followed by Mary Claire Landry, followed by Ciara Gaines, and then Shori Bechet. Hello. Eileen Laespina with Bike Easy. I know the word transportation has been dropped a lot, so this is how transportation relates to our work with the health department, and kudos to Dr. Avecno and her whole team for how great they are as partners to us. I'm here today to talk about our partnership with the New Orleans Health Department and really how much our work together has grown over the past few years. One of the things I appreciate most along working with the health department is that they understand something that is fundamental to Bike Easy's work. Transportation is a public health issue. We've been fortunate to work alongside the health department through the Safe Streets for All safety action plan, and in many of the conversations around transportation safety, vulnerable road users, and how we make our streets safer for people walking, biking, rolling, taking transit, and driving. That work has reinforced for us that improving street safety isn't just about what happens after a crash. It's about designing systems and policies that help prevent those crashes in the first place. The city's own Safe Streets for All analysis found that people walking and bicycling make up a disproportionately large share of fatal and serious injury crashes in New Orleans. More recently, our partnership has grown around e-bikes, and I'm particularly excited about that work. Bike Easy has been working with the health department on e-bike policy recommendations and most importantly, education, as e-bikes become a bigger part of how people get around New Orleans. And now with the launch of the city's e-bike route program, we're helping support the education component of that program. At the end of the day, I've said this so many times, we all need to learn to share the road. It's not the responsibility of just one user, and the health department has been such a key in helping us get that message across. And thank you. Thank you. Mary Claire Landry, then Ciara Gaines, then Troy Boucher, then Lou Anne White. Good afternoon. Thank you for allowing me to be here. My name is Mary Claire Landry. I'm the CEO of the New Orleans Family Justice Center and the Hope Community Center. I'm here to really support all of the work of the health department.

I've been in this work for over four decades, and the work that the health department has done in the last several years has been phenomenal and just has had the best outcomes that I have seen in this city for many, many years. We are one little piece of the health department's budget. We have the domestic violence AIR program. And I wanted to come here because it is October, Domestic Violence Awareness Month. And so I did all these statistics for the last nine months that we have been operating. The AIR department is responsible for responding to 9,000 incidents, 911 calls. And we were able to engage 3,043 of those victims that filtered into the Family Justice Center that we have been able to help access over $3 million of direct assistance, rental assistance, transportation, medical services. We provided 1,382 clients with rental assistance and housing, totaling 114,000 safe nights for victims of domestic violence. And all of that is fed through the AIR program that we are able to do that early intervention and give them the access to all of those resources. This is just the top of the bucket in terms of the needs. But the most important outcome is that we've only had three domestic violence homicides in 2026. And only one was connected to the Family Justice Center. So that's one victim out of 2,884 victims that we serve. That's less than zero point. Thank you. Ciara? Ciara? All right. Troy Bechet. Luann White. And then Manuel Lawrence. Good afternoon. I am Troy Bechet. I'm representing the Center for Restorative Approaches. We are a proud member of the Big Easy Budget Coalition. I want to thank you, councilpersons, for staying, hanging in here with us, and to the Health Department for providing programs that not only help our residents to survive but to thrive. Over the past few years, New Orleans has made some of the highest investments in violence prevention in the country. And as was noted by Councilperson Morrell and others here today, we are reaping the benefits of that with historically low crime rates. The Center for Restorative Approaches violence prevention program is a part of that shift that we've seen. Any public school, fifth through twelfth grade students experiencing escalating violence can be referred for a circle. We facilitated 223 restorative conflict resolution circles, touching 1,000 lives with a 94% rate of peaceful resolution. It cost us about $300,000 to do that. We received a $150,000 grant, this award, from the city this year. With staffing cuts and our own investment, we were still able to ensure that our children receive the help that they needed this year, but we can't do that next year. Without city funding, the program will cease to exist. So in a world where aggression has become normalized as a way to solve problems and command respect, we normalize peace. Not only that, we see children who come to us skeptical about this circle stuff, and they leave us not only as believers, but as advocates for their peers. We've heard, let's do this circle with this kid because they're going to get themselves killed. So imagine the pride we feel. We are helping to make that shift, the shift from retaliation to advocating for peace and caring for our neighbors. Thank you, Troy. Luann? Luann? Followed by Manuel Lawrence, followed by Terry Madison. I'm Luann, wanted to appreciate y'all's long day. So I'm co-founder and executive director of LUVA Services. We are a permanent supportive housing developer. We create rental housing for folks who are homeless or who have experienced homelessness. I'm here today to ask you, like everyone else, to protect funding for homeless services, including the Low Barrier Shelter. I'm increasingly concerned about the direction we're taking in response to homelessness. We're seeing more emphasis on law enforcement, criminalization at the very time when we should be investing in housing, shelter, outreach, mental health services, treatment facilities, and supportive services. Recently a woman called LUVA Services looking for housing. She was working and living in a hotel. She had wages, but her wages had gotten cut, so she was running out of funds, and she was looking for a place to stay. One of the things that she told me was that she was afraid she would be arrested if she became homeless. Now, how is that a thing? How is that a thing? So think about that. She's working, doing everything that she can do to keep housing, but nobody should be concerned about getting arrested because they don't have a place to go. For years, I've heard the same myths. People want to be homeless. They don't want housing. If they would make different choices, they wouldn't be homeless. Our experience at LUVA Services is that is not the reality at all. The Low Barrier Shelter is an important part of our response to homelessness. It provides people with a safe place to go when they have nowhere else. We should not be reducing the capacity at a time when people experiencing homelessness face increasing criminalization, but we also have to remember that shelter is not the destination. It should be, as some people have said, a bridge to housing. We need the entire continuum, and we're asking for you to stand up for supporting all of that, all of that. Thank you, Luann, and thank you for your work. Anyway, Lawrence, and then Terry Madison, and Charles, I can't read your last name, but you're on Washington Avenue. Good evening, how you doing? My name is Manuel Lawrence. I'm a guest at the Little Barrier Shelter. I've been there a year and a couple months. For the most part, I can say that all of the guests and staff, they're great people and they do care and they do take their time to show us the things and give us the tools needed to go about daily life to survive and they make sure that we do try to get jobs and everything. It's not really them, it's us not being as serious. So I would never take away the shelter because it means a lot to me. It helped save me.

I had many days I wanted to go sleeping on the corner. I had days I was high out there. I've been to rehab. They put me in the River Oaks and they gave me all my medicine. It has me well. I feel human. I feel loved. I feel wanted, you know, but I don't get that from my family. I get that from them. They give me hope to try. Most days, I don't. If I don't have my dog, I don't have nothing and this is all I have, right here, and they're all I have at the end of the day. I please ask y'all don't take none of that from them, please. I swear like they're great people. You just take the time to see them. Y'all love all of them. I swear because I love them. I ain't gonna never turn. I swear. I thank y'all. Thank you. Thank you. Terry Madison, followed by Charles, who lives on Washington Avenue, whose last name I cannot read. How y'all doing? My name's Terry Madison. I came to the LeBaron shelter after being released from jail, and I thank Miss T for allowing me to come in there. When I came to the shelter, I had nothing. I had just been released from jail, and I was a victim of identity fraud. They stole my money while I was in jail, so I had nowhere to go, but the shelter, it accepted me, and I mean, it's just hard for me to say, you know what I'm saying? I've been fighting to get my money back and find me a place to stay. I needed that. It's a great place, you know. Miss T got a lovely staff, you know, and this guy here, Jeremy, my boss, my social worker, case worker, I drives him, you know, but it's a great place. It help you get back on your feet without going back to the streets, you see what I'm saying? They gave me everything I needed to start over without going backwards, you understand? The LeBaron shelter pushed me forward, you know, and I'm still going forward. I'm going to get my place to stay as soon as I get my record expunged, you know, and I know they're the ones that helped me do this, so I appreciate this shelter. I hope it keep going. Thank y'all. Thank you, Mr. Madison. Charles, followed by Earl, Haggery, Charles. Okay, Charles, you here? Okay, did you fill out a card? Earl, yeah. Yeah, come on up. Earl Higgins. Earl Higgins, how y'all doing? Let me be real quick. I canvass the community a lot, right, and one day, and this is many of a bunch of stories I have, young guys standing on a block, so we decided to go engage. Turns out these guys had guns, and I'm sharing this story because of the importance of violence interrupters. They get paid to do this. These guys had big guns, and when we noticed they had big guns, we didn't stop talking to them because they had big guns, but what happened was these guys, these young guys decided to stay there and talk with us. Not only that, they decided to go and put the guns up and talk to us about voting. It's an amazing experience for me because most of the time, people don't want to hear nothing about voting, and I'm sharing that only because the importance of violence interrupters, that's only one of many stories I have. I would like to think that day that we intervened with something very, very terrible happening, so just imagine on a larger scale when they have guys that go out in the community and do that on a daily basis. Was it dangerous? Maybe, but it would have been more dangerous if I hadn't taken the time. We had to take the time and say, hey, listen, because when we found out after many of those encounters, that's the lack in the community, listening to what these young people have and say and what they want to do. The importance of it is this. The city agreed to second chances wholeheartedly, and we want to make sure that that continues, that guys like me, formerly incarcerated people, come home and have an opportunity to disrupt violence in the community. Thank you for letting me share. Thank you so much. Why Frank Southall? Mr. Southall, are you still here? All right, Melanie Richardson, followed by Chelsea Morgan. And then after that, Bob Danton, Sarah Jane Guidry, and then Barksdare Hortonshire. Are you Melanie? Chelsea, come on up. Good afternoon, council members. My name is Chelsea Morgan, the Community Impact Vice President for the American Heart Association here in Louisiana. We recognize the city's budget challenges requires very hard choices, and we appreciate the work that you are doing. As a longtime collaborator with the New Orleans Department of Health and Human Services, we ask that preserving the department's capacity to remain a priority is a core part of the city's infrastructure and a key connector between community needs and effective policy. Together, we have advanced smoke-free protections, improved nutrition standards, expanded CPR and AED access, and supported maternal and infant health initiatives. None of that is possible without NOHHS. They are helping to ensure the needs and voices of New Orleans residents are heard and reflected in public health policies and priorities. We know this is a hard budget year, and we ask when additional funds become available, restoration of NOHHS funding be a priority. Thank you for your time, for allowing us to be heard, and for your continued support of public health in New Orleans. Thank you. Bob Danton, then Sarah Jane, then Barksdale. Good afternoon. Thank you all again for remaining here with us. My name is Bob Danton, and I'm here today both in my role as Policy Manager for Ride New Orleans as well as as a citizen of New Orleans. Over the past year and some, I've had the distinct honor of working closely with the everyday heroes who make up the New Orleans Health Department and the Injury Prevention and Transportation Safety Team in particular. They work tirelessly to keep each and every one of us safe in our city and to make New Orleans a better place to live.

During the restructuring of city offices that followed the mayoral transition this year, the Health Department absorbed numerous critical roles previously held by other offices which were dismantled or downsized, shouldering additional workloads in youth and family programming, safe transportation, and other critical areas without complaint. They also work tirelessly to secure grant funding to sustain many of these critical programs within a department whose budget is already far below what it ought to be to maintain critical operations that meaningfully improve the lives of each and every resident of our city. Every day they are tasked with doing more with less. I understand the position that our city's finances are in today. I've looked at the numbers and I'm here to tell you that the proposed cut to the Health Department's general fund budget of over 10 million dollars, over 60 percent of their 2026 general fund allocation, is nothing short of unconscionable. In the midst of a budget deficit, the mayor's proposed budget nevertheless manages to find millions of dollars to increase the general fund allocation for the Police Department in the name of keeping us safe. The Health Department keeps us safe. If we want a safe city, we need to invest in one where youth have opportunities, where families have support, and where citizens are not left to die on our streets. If we want our city to be safe, we need at the very least to maintain the already minimal investment we make in our Health Department and to the critical human services they provide. We simply cannot afford not to. Thank you. Thank you. Y. Frank Southall, Sarah Jane Guidry, then Barksdale is going to close us out. Hey, good afternoon everyone. My name is Yossi Frank Southall. I'm the organizing communication manager at Jane Police and we're a proud member of the Big Easy Budget Coalition. Thank you to everyone in the Department of Health. Thank you to city council members for still being here. I know it's a long day. My brain is fried, so thank you. I also want to say I serve on the board of Santosha Mobile Mutual Aid Project for Unhoused Folks. I've worked with various other non-staff mutual aid solidarity projects in our city. Thank you for funding these public health interventions in the past and continue to prioritize them. At Jane Police, we understand the need to examine intersectional needs to address the housing crisis. It's not enough to simply house folks. We must address the complex social, emotional, mental health needs of our residents. Crime isn't merely an issue of people desiring to cause havoc and harm. Rather, it's about the lack of resources and lack of addressing real health needs in our society. Jane Police is a full supporter of Ubuntu, the Center for Restorative Approaches, which has done legendary work, like on the global scale. People are coming to our city to learn from Troy Bichet and folks at CRA, as well as Ubuntu in our city. Furthermore, we are full supporters of preserving low barriers, shelter, and any intervention that keeps people off the streets in a holistic way. But we need to ensure that unhoused and formerly unhoused folks are front and center in any planning and execution of a new center. Not just folks chosen by one provider, but all the providers. Unity, the Harry Thompson Center, folks from People's Council, mutual aid groups such as No Harm. By bringing everyone together in non-profit and volunteer mutual aid and solidarity, we can arrive at comprehensive solutions. Let's also form a task force to get the state legislature to fund this work. We are the economic center of the city. a fist more to fight back. This is our money. We need it. So let's come together as a city to get this money. It's our tax dollars. So thank you. Thank you. Sarah Jane. Good afternoon, council members. My name is Sarah Jane Guidry. I'm the Director of Policy and Advocacy at Crescent Care. We're a federally qualified health center based here in New Orleans serving over 14,000 patients annually. And I'm here in support of the New Orleans Health and Human Services and the critical public health infrastructure that they provide. We recognize the city's financial challenges and understand the difficult situation that we are all in as a city. We've already seen Health and Human Services proactively make difficult decisions year after year with more impacts to come. But with HR1 bringing significant changes to Medicaid and SNAP eligibility, threatening food security and health care coverage for thousands of Louisiana residents, our local public health infrastructure will become even more essential. At Crescent Care, we know the importance of services like the mobile crisis intervention unit, maternal health initiatives, and community-based prevention. These programs help keep people healthy and connected to care. We need to be healthy to go to work, to go to school, to go to festivals, and to go to our city council meetings. Public health is public safety. And as we navigate these difficult budget decisions, we must recognize that cuts and preventative services today will create greater costs and consequences tomorrow. Thank you. Thank you. Are you Melanie? I can't hear you. What's your name? Jennifer, come on up. Thank you. My name is Jenny Hall. I'm the Policy Director at Women with a Vision and a Big Easy Budget Coalition member. I really appreciate Dr. Abigno outlining all that they're doing to keep making progress toward their goals, despite having to do so much more with less. They should not have to do that. But if budgets are a reflection of our values, looking at the proposed 2027 budget, I would think that this administration does not value the health of its residents. Many of the programs that have already been talked about, we've talked about the dire consequences of cutting them. They're also programs that are most valued by community members.

We've pulled them year after year with the Big Easy Budget Coalition. One thing that hasn't been mentioned as well is the domestic abuse fatality review. It was kind of skipped over on the slides, but I know that one of the things that they'll be tasked with is picking up the slack for the state DAFER, which was defunded. Again, asking a small group to do more with less. A lot of the programs that are being cut are the exact recommendations that come out of the DAFER every time we meet. I review those cases. This is not abstract. These are real people's lives that are lost and that are impacted by violence. This work is essential, but we really need funding behind the recommendations that we make, not more on our plate to cover other cuts that the state is making once again. I also have to say that in a state with the second highest maternal mortality, losing any dollar that goes to maternal child health feels unconscionable, especially since that ranking, we have restricted essential medications that are used in the management of pregnancy and miscarriage and hemorrhage, which will result in more deaths and injury. Please continue funding the health department. They need all they can get. Thank you. Mark Stahel. Good afternoon, council members, Dr. Vagno. My name is Mark Stahel Hortenstein. I'm the director of the Mental Health Unit at the Public Defender's Office. My work centers at the intersection of mental health and criminal legal systems. As such, a pleasure of mine has been to be a partner of the health department and to work with other stakeholders to try to address some of the challenges that happen for people who are incarcerated. I wanted to address the council today to help you understand that connection. Now, I believe a budget is a moral document, but it is also a financial balancing. When you cut money from the health department, you increase expenditures at the jail, and you increase system involvement. A simple example of this is the program, INSTEAD, that helps to facilitate our mental health diversion system, which is a program that the public defender and the district attorney worked on jointly, and INSTEAD operates in community to assist clients to divert them from incarceration. INSTEAD connects our clients to services in the community, turns on their phones and secures social security payments. It assists with medication and treatment. This is funding from the health department, and this is keeping people from occupying jail beds where they sit and become worse and cost more money at the same time. The jail is far more expensive, and rather than improving lives, it leads to further destabilization. It increases costs, both financial and human. Everything is tied together. The loss of housing contributes to incarceration. We need support and stabilization like the low barrier shelter, the health department, and the crisis hotline, not less, more. We need to invest in these success stories. Whether a budget is a moral document or a financial balancing test, the answer is to increase the funding of alternatives to incarceration and increasing the opportunity for stabilization. Please fund the health department and accomplish those multiple goals. Thank you. Look, I want to thank everybody who came here at 9 o'clock this morning, who's been sitting here since 9.30 this morning. I want to thank every provider who's been here, every person in our health department, Dr. Vagno, your team, Taylor, all the good work that you do. But most of all, I want to thank the residents of the low barrier shelter who came here today to express their support of our low barrier shelter and how it helps them get on their feet. We heard from people who found job opportunities at the low barrier shelter, who got addiction treatment at the low barrier shelter, a person who doesn't want to leave their pets behind and they're at the low barrier shelter. It is a necessity that we keep these 300 beds in the city of New Orleans. And this, especially at a time when the state of Louisiana is criminalizing street sleeping. So I want to thank my colleagues in advance and the administration for their support of the low barrier shelter, because I know that we will get that support. But again, just thank you to everybody who turned out today to show your support of the community. We need you more than ever. Thank you. I know sometimes I just kind of quietly press the button, but I just wanted to also thank the residents of and the staff of the low barrier shelter, especially, and also the office of homeless services and strategies with whom I work directly. We've made tremendous progress and we don't want to stop that progress from going on. When I became a council member four years ago, unfortunately, there were on the streets of New Orleans over 500 people who died of drug overdoses and the like. And working with those who are unhoused, working with those who have drug addiction issues, we've been able to cut into that tremendously. So I think that we all on the council recognize the role that the health department has played, even including in traffic safety and reducing fatalities from traffic accidents. So I want you all to know that we certainly share with everyone here your commitment to wanting to help keep our residents safer. Now, we're going to need your help too, because you've heard the word mentioned very often here today, the state, the state. Even the lieutenant governor admits that the state of Louisiana generates billions of dollars in economic impact based on the activity that takes place here in the city of New Orleans. We're going to need help with letters. We're going to need help with communications at committee meetings because there are a lot of resources that should be made available to the city of New Orleans that aren't.

But I don't want to go into the negative because the only way to get something done is through communications and we're going to enhance our communications with the state. But I do want to thank everyone here and have you to continue to recognize that the city of New Orleans is under challenges, but there are opportunities I think that exist on a state and federal level to curtail some of those challenges that and the experiences that is resulting right now in New Orleans. So thank you again for being here and especially to the courage of those within the low barrier shelter for being here today. This entire council stands wanting to make sure that the low barrier shelter continues to operate and provide services. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Vagner. Thank you. And Dr. Vagner, if you can believe it, we have EMS and mosquito control. Do you want to move that to another day? It's up to them. They have separate presentations. EMS mosquito. Come on up. All right. We'll see. All right, chief. You rolling? You rolling? All right. And Claudia, I know you're going to be quick and just hand us some bugs. This is 17th. We had to change it. Can you throw some upstairs for me? It's the revised day. Yeah. Chief, if you want to get started, you can rock and roll. Okay. All right. Well, good afternoon, everyone. It's been a long day. So right through our presentation, Bill Salmon. I'm chief of New Orleans. Before I start our presentation, I did want to start off by commending the New Orleans Health Department for the work in providing the world-class public health and safety net programs to the people of our city. Even though we are a public safety agency, many do not know that we've been actually a division of the New Orleans Health Department for 41 years and are very proud to be part of the NOHG team. We do ask the city preserve funding to maintain the many NOHG programs that save lives, cuts to NOHG safety net programs will put more strain on other agencies like ours and other service providers that already struggle to meet current demand. My second thank you goes out to our amazing staff. Our team does an amazing job serving the people and visitors of New Orleans as they call us during sometimes their darkest hour. So I'm very proud of our team. They are amazing and I will get started here. So just a little bit about our department, just to remind you of who we are and what we do. We do about 72,000 calls for service a year, that's every seven minutes. We work about 300 special events that includes the convention center paid details and unpaid upstaffed details for larger events. We have a 30% response time compliance measured against the 90% standard. That obviously is something that we've been working on for the past several years and so as staffing improves that number will also improve. And then we have a 60% unit utilization hour which is against the 40% standard. That means that 60% of the time our units are tied up on calls and so that is a high number and we certainly need to get that down. That will also improve with our staffing. We are still utilizing the Acadian surge contract to meet our daily 911 coverage and so they provide anywhere from four to six units a day within the 911 system. Our workforce, we currently have 119 FTEs which equals 129 individuals. We have 38 vacancies and our force target is to get to our pre-COVID number of the 157 FTEs which equals about 167 staff. We do have full-time as well as part-time staff and PRN staff that work in our department. Our workforce is our most important asset and so we need to do everything that we can do to preserve that and bring more folks on to our team. This is our org chart. I circled the area on our org chart where all of our vacancies are located. We have an admin vacancy but that's not going to be filled until we completely fill our field operations staff and so that's what's circled in red. All of our field operations team is our frontline staff that provides that 911 service. Our revenue, we do an annual, we on average bill out about $53 million. We have a net return of about $20 million. That includes current patient billing as well as aged collections that we work to try to recoup that billing. And then we get about $900,000 net in detail fees as we work special events or whatever that might be. So that means we bring in around $21-$22 million a year. This is our adopted 27 budget. Our 26 budget and personnel was $14.9, 27 is going to be $12.3, that is a 2.5 variance and so that is as they reconcile unstaffed and unfilled positions that number decreased. Our other operating in 2026 we were at 3.78 and then we're going to 3.73 which has only a $50,000 variant and so we are pretty much staying even to where we are this year in other operating for a grand total from 18.7 this year to 16.1 in 2027. And most of that is in the personnel saving side from those unfilled positions that we're able to, as we recruit positions, we're able to go to the administration and get them filled and so we've always done that with them with the real-time budgeting and we have no concerns about that moving forward. Okay, did you have anything on that? You're good? Okay. Key components to the 27 budget on the personnel side, we did have the uniform pay increases. Thank you to Civil Service Commission for that as well as the council and so thank you very much. That did take effect last pay period and so we certainly hope that we're going to be able to better retain staff and then recruit more staff with those pay adjustments. As far as other operating, as I said before, we are maintaining our current funding level to support our operations. In our non-general fund side, we only have two programs for the non-general fund and so this year was a 2.5 and 2027 will be a 94,000 and those two programs, we're currently in the last year of our DOJ opioid grant with Odyssey House. That was originally awarded 1.3 million in September of 2023.

The end of that program is coming in September of 2027 so that's currently sun setting and then we also utilized Health Department's Simon Sickles Legacy Fund to fund our pre-hospital blood program and so we are currently using that funding to help support that program as we don't bill patients for blood. Highlights for this year, we did reach our 400th patient this year in our nationally recognized pre-hospital blood program. We are one of only two programs in the state and we have certainly been busy with that program and we have been saving lives and so we're very proud of that program. That will continue. We have expanded our advanced practice paramedicine program to deliver higher acuity care in the field and so we have paramedics that are trained at higher procedures and can provide those procedures. We have a uniform compensation increase this year which was greatly appreciated. We protected our core 911 services despite significant fiscal and staffing pressures and then we did implement spending controls while still maintaining excellent patient care. Our budget efficiencies this year, we prioritized resourcing for our essential core services and we implemented enhanced spending control measures such as suspending non-essential purchases and equipment updates and we limited overtime spending. Our goals for 2027, obviously to protect our 911 response capacity, we need to make sure we maintain sufficient staffing and resources to do that. Also stabilizing our workforce, we're focusing on lateral hire recruitment for advanced providers such as advanced EMTs and paramedics. We're also doing now in-house training for advanced EMTs and paramedics to provide promotional opportunities to our current staff and then we're going to do another EMT recruit academy next year to bring in people from the community and train them as EMTs through our system. Another goal is to improve our response time, that will improve as we increase staffing and unit deployment. We're going to protect our revenue, mainly with this is we need to reduce our surge unit utilization and recapture a greater percentage of our billable call volume. We are currently losing about $9 million a year to the Acadian contract and so we need to increase our staffing. As that staffing increases, we're going to be able to put our own units on the street and recoup those billable calls. So we're hoping that that will gradually happen in 2027 as we're able to bring on more staff. And then as we're doing this year, we're just going to maintain our fiscal discipline with aggressive management of overtime, purchasing and non-essential spending. In closing, I want to thank the council for your support for our amazing team. The council and the administration has been great partners in making sure that our resources are there and our staffing is taken care of. And so we really thank you for your support and I'll entertain any questions. Thank you. I just want to say, you know, appreciate you and your team also for staying here all day and being with us. As much as you can, you know, increasing that in-house workforce, you know, this council is here to support you in that. And so we look forward to continuing to work on that with you. Did any other members have, Council Member Greene? Yes, thank you. I appreciate the work that you do and it's always good to be at the ceremonies where you're welcoming new members of your staff. Somebody's going to ask me about this, so I want you to explain the difference or why there is a difference between the gross billing and the net returns. I mean, it's significant, but it's important for people to understand that we can't just go out and say, hey, there's $30 million, let's go and get it. Can you explain that a little bit? So, for example, if we bill out, if we bill a patient $1,500 for their ambulance ride, they have, let's say, Medicare, right? Medicare is only going to pay us a few hundred bucks off that bill. So that means we're writing off a majority of that bill. Now we do bill the patient. We don't have aggressive collections, and so we don't go after people. We don't send them to credit bureaus, things like that. We do have very passive collections. And so we do end up writing off a significant amount of our bills for stuff that's uncollectible. Plus we have unknown patients. We have other things that we can't bill for. That's just the world of medical bill. I wish I could bill everything at 100%, but we have to go according to what the plans are. And so the plans may pay you only up to a certain, while I might bill out $1,500, I may only get back $500 or $600 from that claim, and we may or may not get the balance paid off from the patient. Because also remember, 30% of our patient volume is Medicaid patients, and so we legally can't bill a Medicaid patient for the balance bill, right? And so we ought to, now we're losing 30% of our volume just right there. Right. I know that you provide services for some people who are from other places, out of town. Yes, yes. It's not going to be able to collect from them even if you felt that there was a need to collect. Could you talk about that? Because I don't know that people pay attention to the fact that EMS provides services to a number of people who come from out of town. Yes. So if you call 911 and we provide you a service, you get a bill for it. And it just depends on who your provider are. We do our best to get as much information as possible as far as what your insurance is. Our billing company is great when it comes to reaching into the insurance marketplace systems to find what insurance that you may have. And so while we might not get the information at the beginning, we'll find your insurance plan as it's put through the system, and then we're able to bill that. But as I said before, Medicare and Medicaid are 30% of each of our volume.

Those with private insurance represents about 20% of our call volume, and then self-pay, which some people who have no insurance at all, represents about another 20% of our volume. So, you know, we only have, you know, we're only able to bill for, you know, what's paid, right? And so the rest of it, we do keep it, and our eight, so there's a, we have a contract biller that does our normal, our normal billing, and then we have a secondary contract that does age billing that does continue to work those accounts until we're able to get them paid. Sometimes people get, like if it's a car accident, they may get a settlement, or, you know, they may, we may be able to work with somebody to pay 50 bucks a month until you pay your bill off. And so it does take a while to get up to, you know, getting 100% paid, but medical billing is never 100%, so we're definitely getting what we can back, so, yeah. Thank you. Can you talk about our relationship with the state of Louisiana, some of the positives, if you will, and some of the challenges? Well, we work very closely with the state on several projects, as far as, you know, with like EMS for children, we definitely work with them. That's a state program. We also work with our state and also our other EMS partners with making sure that we have the same systems and programs in place that we're interoperable and we can work together. We also work with the state Medicaid program, or LDH, when it comes to our IGT, our intergovernmental transfer. And so we pay into the LDH Medicaid fund, just like all the other services do. And so, for example, this year we paid in 1.5 million, but then we were able to make, we were able to have 7.9 million back in billing, right? And so all the services participate in that fund. We're one of the major providers in that fund, and so that's just one of the things that we work with that we're able to pay into that fund to get those increased, enhanced payments for Medicaid, and that's done through LDH. Yes. I want to thank you and your staff. I've chosen to, over the past four years, go to the scene of accidents often and the scenes of crimes, and it is such a relief to family members to not have to wait for a half hour for somebody from EMS to show up. I've been to scenes where I've even witnessed them, accidents involving motorcycles, accidents involving bicycles, unfortunately shootings. But it's important for the public to know that when we fund EMS, we're not funding it with the expectation that we're getting back money. We're funding it because it's what people need, and it makes a tremendous difference and it helps save lives. There are a number of reasons that our murder rate is down. One of those reasons is because you're able to respond sometimes. It's something that we don't talk about, and I look at you and tell you, we don't want to talk about it. But one of the reasons that we have fewer homicides is because we have EMS responding in a timely manner to scenes that I think in the past, we can all say, wouldn't have been responded to in as timely a manner, and also with technology. It's important to keep you in the financing loop whenever the technology is necessary because it saves lives. Maybe you could talk for a second about technology so people feel and understand why we provide the funding to EMS that is necessary and is so important. How is technology saving lives in terms of what EMS does? Well, technology is really important. So we, well, let me go back to the murder rate you commented about. So since our pre-hospital blood program started, we have done studies that have shown a significant increase in survival rates for patients who we've given blood to. Majority of those patients are those with penetrating trauma, gunshots, stabbings. So in a sense, we are moving people who have had fatal shootings or fatal stabbings to non-fatal shootings and stabbings, and they're able to survive with the blood that we've given. So we do like to think that we have contributed to the decrease in the murder rate in the city for sure. However, we do, you know, definitely don't want to take away from the work of the police department and criminal justice system for doing that and the community partners. Technology-wise, you know, we, you know, we're paperless, right? Medical billing is all paperless now, so we have to have the technology in place to do that. And so, you know, everything is computers and connecting with 911 dispatch and the trucks. We also have a significant amount of technology as far as, you know, we have a Lucas device in every truck, which is a mechanical CPR device. There's not many services in the country that have that, not only on every ambulance but also every fire truck, every frontline vehicle. We have state-of-the-art cardiac monitors treating people who have cardiac issues. We have a significant amount of equipment out there. And so we certainly do invest in innovative technology and procedures. Thank you for pursuing the technology because it makes a difference. And again. Thank you for allowing us to. Yes, thank you. All right. Appreciate your work. And it's important to recognize that when we were talking about murders, it's not pitting us against anyone. I mean, the New Orleans Police Department, homicide investigations, response times is so important. But it is important to recognize that if you've saved a few lives, it makes a difference in the family's lives. That's what I want to emphasize more than anything else. Because when I emphasize murder reduction, it's about reducing the number of victims of crime, reducing the number of families that are suffering. And some of that reduction is because we're able to provide them with emergency services in a very timely manner. So thank you, EMS, for the work that you do. I would have had more of my team here, but I fell off. It's been an eight-hour day. We understand. Yes, thank you.

In fact, if they had been here all day, then I'd be saying, how are you all here all day? I know. All right. Thank you. Any other questions? No. Thank you for being here and staying with us. I appreciate it. Well, thank you for your time and your long day as well. Thank you. That's awesome. Thank you. Finally, we have the mosquito, termite, and rodent control board. Claudia, you know, just roll through it. All right. Thank you so much. Speaking of blood. We appreciate allowing us to present our budget. My name is Claudia Regal. I'm director of the City of New Orleans Mosquito, Termite, and Rodent Control Board. And this is Dr. Carrie Catone. She's our assistant director. All right. So looking at, we're going to start, so just for everyone to know, we provide the mosquito and pest control for the City of New Orleans, including city buildings. Our organization was founded back in 1964. So we've been around for quite a long time. When you look at our org chart, we are general fund and grant funded. We have a total of 44 employees. The general fund has 34 FTEs with 3.75 vacancies in it. Our grant projects right now have 5.25. And we have about three FTEs of interns. So that can be anywhere from 10 to 12 people. So anyone listening, if you have high school kids or college kids in the area, please contact us by January. All right. It's pretty important. So we'll talk about the grants. In some of ours, the openings have come from retirements or people moving out of state, things like that. Our proposed budget for this year, there's actually an addition in personnel. I believe that is the money putting back from furloughs. Other operating stays the same. Whoops. There we go. Stays the same. So there was a variance of just shy of $300,000. The key components of our proposed budget from the general fund, it helps pay for the personnel that conduct mosquito abatement, rodent abatement, termite and pest management. And we have a couple of people in there that are administrative. But I will remind you that everyone in our agency is cross-trained. So for other operating, the budget really just covers that sort of day-to-day, the trash, the things that we just absolutely need to have to be operational. But it doesn't cover the bulk of the insecticides. So, you know, we do what we can do to purchase those and manage our stock. But it does pay for the surveillance of in-house testing, some of our source reduction that we do do, like permits and with DEQ, things like that. It does pay for some of the adulticides, not quite a full city treatment, but that's what that is. And then also some of our safety equipment that we need to keep the equipment running up to specs. Our rodent treatment, we've been doing a lot of work. We're using carbon dioxide. You have to be a pesticide applicator to do it. But it's made significant progress and improvements downtown. And then also we have mosquito fish for biological control. So that's a great thing for everyone. What we're doing now, so for us, we just really have to manage our stock of products that we have, right? So when we have funds, we're able to buy them. Here it is. The last couple of years, 2025, was one of the most active West Nile seasons that we've had since the introduction of West Nile back in the early 2000s. So, unfortunately, we've had to use much of that stock. We had three human cases last year, which is great. I mean, I'm sorry for everyone who got sick. But as far as if you compare our numbers to 2012 where we had 19, we've been able to improve some of the technology and methodology to get those counts down. So that is the big concern here with inventory. For the 2027 non-general fund, so you can see there's a lot of changes that happened there. And one, because that money is very variable. So we find money every which way you can imagine. Through federal grants, we actually are one of the seven CDC-funded centers in the United States. That's a large project. It covers everything from Texas to Florida. We have a lot of collaborators there, which is a great thing. So that helps support people in a lot of things. And then also, we're pretty proud of the efforts that we take to find money. So that can be everything from product testing for fee-for-service. We take donations. We sell things. Any which way we can find money, we go do it, all right? Patents, like everything. So that's pretty important. But those funds are often pretty specific. As Dr. Vegna had stated, you know, they're intended for those uses. Yes, of course, we do help lean on the general fund. Everyone is cross-trained. So when we need to move people, we do that. But it does help pay for, you know, again, stuff and supplies and things like that. All right. I think we did this one. But for the non-general fund components, so these are all the grants, it is really programmatic support. Our general fund cannot afford having interns. And those are seasonal workers that are absolutely essential in workforce development. But it also allows for us to deal with the surge, right, of pests. Part-time employees are also there. We like part-time employees because you don't need to pay the insurance overhead. And they do a great job, right? So sometimes somebody is just looking for a part-time person. And, in fact, we are now. So if there happens to be somebody there that's retired or is interested in running traps, for example, a week, please contact us. And then, of course, all the details of the Gulf South Vector. I would absolutely encourage everyone to go to VectorOutreach.org. We just got funded for year four, and this is a difficult federal situation with grants, but we've been able to survive. And I wanted to make a note for everybody that the Kay Hagan Tick Act was approved and funded. So this is wonderful for enhanced laboratory capacity and vector control. That all goes to the folks, CDC and Fort Collins.

For other operating, of course, we have to meet those objectives of those projects, but it also helps, you know, buy the things that we need to support the department. For the Gulf South Vector, we have trained over 70,000 people. So I'm going to kick it over to Carrie here, and she'll talk about the efficiencies. Sure. Great. Thank you so much. Yeah. So we do cross-train our employees. So it doesn't matter who you are in our organization, you know how to do multiple things. So not only does this help us better prioritize, even from the day-to-day, but it certainly does increase our overall departmental efficiency. We invest in mosquito surveillance to make our data-driven decisions for mosquito abatement. So all of our abatement spray mission decisions are done using scientific data. This increases not only the effectiveness, but it allows us to really have targeted treatments. And this is really best practices for any mosquito abatement district. So we conduct a lot of pest control and termite control at city buildings. So this actually saves probably hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damage from pests, especially termites, and it also prevents those costs associated with having to contract services for every city department or every city facility. So some of our 2027 goals, certainly we absolutely prioritize the protection of our citizens from medically important mosquitoes. We have maintained low levels of rodents in commercial areas. This is something that is ongoing, and it's done by collaborating with other city agencies and private industry as well. In 2027, we also want to initiate, as part of a cooperative endeavor with Soja Water Board, we want to start implementing integrated aquatic weed management for long-term sustainability. We have a very tremendous staff, very high-level performers, and we are able to meet our project deliverables in order to maintain and find new revenue sources. When Claudia says that we look for every which way to find another dollar, we do. We even have nationally recognized subject matter experts on staff. We're very, very proud of that. As part of the Arts Council grant, we are having a yellow fever mosquito statue put on our front lawn. That is actually very exciting. Not only is it going to be educational, but it's also going to highlight the historic importance of mosquito control for the city of New Orleans. Ongoing goals every year, we educate the public, businesses, and government about best practices and mitigating conducive conditions to prevent pest infestation. Sanitation is a big part of saving money overall. Anytime you get a microphone in front of us, normally at some point we are going to be talking about either dumpsters or sanitation or standing water, things like that. The more aware people are, the more those pest issues can be mitigated, which saves us money. The one thing I just wanted to state, also on the 2027 goals, nuisance mosquitoes are a problem. We have them on most of our calls, usually in the springtime and in the fall, but honestly with the inventory that we have, we will have to prioritize the mosquitoes of medical importance. That may be a problem, likely, when people are outside and it's getting at dusk and these mosquitoes are coming out. Just today, we had five more locations throughout the city of New Orleans on the East Bank and the West Bank that had mosquitoes that tested for West Nile. We are still very much in the season. We've had two human cases. Last year, we had three in totality. It's very important that people wear their repellent, of course, turn over their containers and do all of that. The issue with the floodwater mosquitoes is they come from the marsh. That often requires aerial abatement to be effective. I just wanted to mention just a couple more things and we'll wrap it up. Tomorrow, which is Thursday, so Saturday was going to be NOLA Bug Fest. We are going to have to move it to the 17th. We had to make a decision earlier in the week. This is a 100% outside money funded event. It's a community event. We really talk about education for mosquito and vector control. We've done, it's a STEM event. This year's theme is Habitat and Nature, Exploring the Vibrant World of Insects and Rodents. We had over 1,500 people last year. We have over, I think, close to 40 exhibits. You can see us on the website. We have multiple universities. Again, if you've got students that are thinking about college, many of the local universities are there and also from the Southeast. It's a great opportunity. With that, if you have any questions, we're happy to answer them. Council Member Green. Yes. Thank you for sharing your facilities and your information with folks. For those who don't know, at the corner of Leon, C. Simon and Allegiant Fields is a great resource to find out about your building, to find out about what we can do to kind of make it more comfortable for people to live in our city while respecting nature. So I do appreciate that. I also want to invite everyone to come out for the Bug Fest. I've been to the Bug Fest. It's not just a festival. It's an information-gathering opportunity, too. So I want everybody to know that you'll have a good time, but it's great to see the young people there who are enjoying themselves. And now you're right across the street from LSU, New Orleans, and so they're going to be- Very excited about that. Right. They're going to be walking there. Talk to me about one other thing, because also in your name but in the work that you do is termites. Just today on St. Rock, down the street from us, Mr. Willard, a tree fell, a palm tree fell. I thought it was riddled with termites, but it fell, and now you can see the middle of it. What can we do? What should we as citizens know, especially on public property, but on private property, what we can do to kind of mitigate the effects that termites have in our city? Okay. So mitigating the effects of termites.

So this was a commercial property? No. It's a neutral ground. Okay. Right on Gilmore. So on things like neutral ground properties, we would love to hear from folks that think that there might be a tree infested somewhere. Right now, I mean, as much as we would love to canvas the area and check every single tree for termites and treat every single tree for termites, it's actually like my background, what I went to school for. We simply cannot do it with the staff that we have, and this is another one of those projects that is funded through extramural means. Okay, so it's not general fund, but we do have ways of treating trees that are at risk. Sometimes with some of this revenue generating projects that we have, we actually do a lot of product testing, and sometimes we need infested trees to include it on these projects. So it's no cost to the city, right, and it's revenue generating. So a lot of times it's a 3-1-1 ticket that people can call 3-1-1 and let us know about a questionable tree with termites on city property, and ... And we'll take a look at it. You know, one of the things that's really important for every homeowner to deal with, to have a termite treatment, and so it's not a matter of if here in this town, it's a matter of when. So if they do have a tree that's in the sidewalk, and let's say they have a baiting system, have the pest management company drop a couple of bait stations, you know, around there. It'll help. So look, we also have online at our YouTube channel, we've got a four-part series all about termites and termite treatments and termite biology. So to me, that's sort of step number one. Many years ago, like when I first came to Louisiana in 20 ... like almost 25 years ago, the Louisiana Department of Ag and Forestry actually had a project where they were able to procure funding through federal government, USDA, ARS, to treat trees. But that funding has gone away because it was an earmark, and so remember when the earmarks were all getting stopped. So I think, look, I mean, New Orleans is the belt buckle of the termite belt, of the termite belt. So everyone should be thinking about termites, but as Carrie, you know, said, is that the step number one, if you're not sure, or if you see mud tubes or something, we do have abilities to go and at least and check. Right. But it's important to recognize that, you know, termites are going to be around, but they have an impact. A big branch just fell in commission, in Council Member McCarran's district. It was in City Park. Absolutely. I don't know if you saw it. Right, you saw it. So I mean, it's because of termites. So we have the one that fell today. So I wanted you to say what you said, that if you see something on public property, remember there are maybe 90,000 trees somewhere or the other on public property here between the parks and between the neutral grounds, but you can file a 311 request because we don't see it all the time. Exactly. So many trees. But it can be treated, though. Yeah. It can be treated. I mean, you have to figure it out, but yes, oftentimes it can. But I do want to let people know that many of the named trees in, well, up in City Park actually City Park pays us to treat those trees, and many of those trees have been treated for over 30 years. And so those named trees are protected. We're actually talking to Downtown Development District right now about Canal Street trees. Any city property trees, those are all included. All right. And once again, I'll close with thank you for your hospitality and for hosting meetings. Our meeting last Saturday had over 200 people, and they got a lot of information from it. So thank you for hosting neighborhood engagement, and just thank you also for your enthusiasm. Your presentations during those events really makes people motivated to know that government is doing certain things that they may not know about, but they find out through those meetings. So thank you. Thank you. All right. Bug Fest 2027. Here we come. Yes. Please come. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much. And thank you to my colleagues, but most importantly, Brandi, Council staff for sticking it out. This has been a long day. Looking forward at the schedule, we might have a couple long days ahead of us, but hopefully not this long. So thank you. With that, I move to adjourn. Seconded by Council Member Karen.