If you read The Hayride with any kind of regularity, you know that New Orleans under Mayor Mitch Landrieu is a very poorly run city. It is one of the reasons why Landrieu would rather talk about Confederate monuments than his actual accomplishments in the city. He has none.

A new report contains more information that Landrieu would like you not to pay attention to. If you spend any amount of time in New Orleans, you know the city is serious about parking and traffic offenses. Indeed it’s the only types of crime that appear to be enforced on a regular basis.

The city of New Orleans collects over $50 million a year from traffic cameras, parking fines, and other things like that. Guess how much of that is spent on street maintenance? None.

From WWL-TV:

According to a new report, the City of New Orleans is only spending $3.8 million on street maintenance and none of that is coming from traffic camera fines.

Ask any New Orleans driver, our city streets are in bad shape.

“People just don’t have no place to park because the potholes and the streets are so bad,” one man said.

“I’ve seen a lot of makeshift cones that really don’t do service to how dangerous those deep sinkholes, small sinkholes can be,” another man said.

[…]According a new BGR report entitled “Paying for Streets: Options for Funding Road Maintenance in New Orleans,” the city is only spending about $3.8 million a year on street maintenance.

Glovinsky says that’s a fraction of the $30-$35 million a year needed just to seal cracks and fix potholes.

“I think the current condition of the streets speak for themselves in terms of past practices,” Glovinsky said. “Preventive maintenance shouldn’t be delayed any longer.”

According to the report, traffic camera citations, parking tickets and other street-related revenue sources generate more that $50 million a year, but the city invests none of the money on street maintenance.

New Orleans under Mitch Landrieu is a very poorly run city. The city’s infrastructure, which was rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina at American taxpayer expense, continues to decay. Crime is out of control and the city cannot pay or keep first responders.

Instead of actually taking care of his city, Mitch Landrieu would rather distract us with talk of monuments. While he goes across the country on his self-congratulations tour, his city continues to fall apart. Landrieu cannot leave office soon enough.

As for not investing fines into street maintenance, that’s pure incompetence. Where is the money going? One of the jobs of local government is maintaining the roads. A city that cannot maintain its basic transportation infrastructure will become an unlivable city.

Perhaps when he’s on his self-congratulation tour, Landrieu will be asked about the nuts and bolts of governing.