LaToya Cantrell rips story about S&WB owed $134M: 'What do you want to do, screw the city?

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The New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board may be owed as much as $134 million in unpaid charges racked up by customers over the past three years, close to 20 percent of the total money billed by the water and sewer systems during that time, utility officials acknowledged under questioning by City Council members on Tuesday.

The news of the dramatic disparity between what the embattled utility has billed for water and sewer services since 2016 and the amount it has actually collected from customers comes as both the S&WB and Mayor LaToya Cantrell, who serves as the board's president, have been raising increasingly urgent concerns about its dwindling finances.

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To steady the ship, Cantrell has been trying to broker a deal in Baton Rouge that would see the utility — which has warned that its drainage system could be broke before the year is out — get both a one-time infusion of emergency cash and tens of millions of dollars more a year in tax money that would be redirected to it from hospitality and tourism agencies.

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Those fragile negotiations could be imperiled if state officials do not believe the S&WB is doing all that it can to properly manage its own finances. That concern was explicitly voiced by an angry Cantrell, who called The Advocate late Tuesday afternoon to complain that reporting on the figures “could kill the deal.”

“What do you want to do, screw the city?” Cantrell asked in a phone call hours after the newspaper posted an online story about the questions over unpaid bills. “Is that what you want?”

“Who’s doing the work trying to get the money we need? Me,” she said. “It’s for the city. And it’s just that serious. You can play games if you want, but this is not the one. It’s not it.”

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“The numbers that we learned today of $134 million possibly being owed to Sewerage & Water Board are eye-popping,” Giarrusso said after the meeting. “We want them to have the money they need to operate. But they’ve got to collect the money that’s owed to them.”

Cantrell did not dispute the numbers — in fact, she credited her administration with already being aware of them — but said reporting on the figures promoted a “false narrative” that the S&WB could do without money she says it needs for the city's very survival.

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“We know we’re owed money. I’ve been talking about that ad nauseam,” Cantrell said. “Even if we had the $140 million in hand, man, the problem is not solved. We’re talking drainage, man. We’re talking no reserves, man. We’re talking no cash flow, man.”

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