Contractors blame 'toxic' relationship with City Hall for New Orleans road work delays

Least surprising news ever.

This isn’t an issue anywhere else in the State. I believe the contractors 100%

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Contractors should find a way to relay the message to local taxpayers.

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I'm amazed that any journalist would write an article that doesn't shower dysfunctional progressive bureaucrats with praise and admiration. It's so rare to see a newspaper article that tries to get to the bottom of a story rather than just spreading their bullshite agenda.

Maybe there is some hope for that industry.....

What a cringy video/gif.

This shite is out of control.
The Walmsley corridor is a disaster.
Near Audobon Park, near Riverbend, Gentilly, Lakeview by Gen Diaz. So many areas they just ripped up blocks and let it sit.
I've never seen anything like it.

Uptown is by far the worst though. Yes they needed streets fixed but you have to have a plan to install new streets after you tear the old ones out.
Some areas it has been months with no work done.
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New Orleans is governed like Luanda, Angola. Change my mind.

This explains a lot actually.

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Reminds me of my time living in Memphis. Only worse.

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I despise the monopoly that is MLGW more than anyone; that being said I’ll give their road crews credit where it’s due, they’ve seriously surprised me in the past few years. They tore up Cooper from Central to Poplar about 18 months ago and I swear they had it repaved and finished in less than 10 days. Having watched HWY 42 sit torn up by my parents in Prairieville for years and years, it blew my mind how quick they finished.

The way they handled the recent ice storm outages dropped them right back down to bottom of the barrel for me though.

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I think the bigger mistake the city has made has been starting all of these at the same time. Not many places are at a completed stage, but we have all these projects that are like 10% done. Not to mention places that have the road work completed then the S&WB come and tear the new road up to work their part. It seems the issues, including this apparent lack of communication, all stem from trying to do everything at once instead of progressively working through the city.

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I can tell you that I am directly involved in this work. What you are saying is poo poo. Example:
-met with the owner of one of these contractors yesterday adn the city owes him over $4M. Dating back 18 months. he has signed and approved by the city and the consulting eng. yet he cannot get paid.

starting too many jobs is not the issue. the problem no one wants to talk about is that the city has had this money for YEARS. the politicians have not figured a way to steal too much of it, and with a deadline, they need to use the money before they lose it. If congress goes back to the republicans, and there is another natural disaster anywhere in the country, i can see this money being put to work somewhere else.

soem jobs are patchwork projects, some are complete rebuilds...meaning drain, sewer, water, pavement. the only thing that the city has done correctly is that they NOW minimize situations that new construction is torn up.

in defense of the city, consulting engineers are lazy. add that to the city employees that are largely incapable of making decisions equals these insane delays that you see now.

at this point, there is +/-$1.2B yet to be spent. there are more than enough local contractors to bond this work. the bottleneck will be when/if this work is released, there are not even close enough DBE contractors to handle 37% of this $1.2B...and when they do not get paid for 4 months...they do not want to do this work.

As I type, the City of New Orleans is actively recruiting large contractors from other areas of the country to come bid this work. This information needs to be reported. This is just wrong.

All of this on top of vehicle and job trailer vandalism, and murders ON JOB SITES are never addressed by the city. Never.

anything else you want to know??