New Orleans city leaders are taking a closer look at how trash service is tracked after discovering the numbers behind sanitation may not be adding up.
The review comes as the city considers raising the monthly sanitation fee residents pay for garbage and recycling pickup, a move now on hold until the data can be verified.
Right now, residents pay $24 a month for once-a-week trash service, a price that has not changed since 2011. The only change was after Hurricane Ida, residents lost trash pick-up twice a week.
But that fee covers only part of the cost.
City officials say sanitation services cost about $62 million a year, while the current fee brings in roughly $38 million annually. That leaves about a $24 million gap that has been covered by the city’s general fund, diverting money from other services like public safety, infrastructure and drainage.
That growing shortfall is one reason city leaders had been considering raising the sanitation fee.
However, before any increase moves forward, officials say they need to answer a more basic question: How many homes are actually receiving trash service, and how many people are paying for it?
Right now, those numbers do not match.
According to data from the Sewerage and Water Board, about 130,000 accounts are paying for trash service through their monthly bills.
But vendor records used by the city show the city is paying for roughly 164,000 homes that are receiving trash pickup.
That is a difference of about 30,000 service locations.
Louisiana Legislative Auditor Mike Waguespack said that gap is not just a data issue and could have a significant financial impact.
“If you do the math on $24, that is a big difference,” Waguespack said. “It’s about a $9 million difference on an annual basis. So we need to make sure we get the math right.”
The discrepancy has now triggered a deeper review at the state level.
Waguespack said his office is working through both datasets to determine where the differences are coming from and whether the city is paying for more service than it should be.
“So right now we’re kind of in the middle of this project,” Waguespack said. “We are cleaning up the data sets.”
He said one of the biggest concerns is that this type of comparison may not have been done before.
“And quite frankly, I don’t know that this has ever been done before, where someone actually went in and tried to match these numbers,” Waguespack said.
That means this review could be the first comprehensive attempt to reconcile how many households are billed for trash service versus how many are actually being serviced.
Part of the challenge lies in how different systems record addresses.
Even small variations, such as “Street” versus “Avenue” or missing suffixes, can cause the same property to appear as separate entries in different datasets.
“You may have a 111 Rosa Park Avenue or Rosa Park Street,” Waguespack said. “The other data set may just have 111 Rosa Park.”
Those inconsistencies can create duplicate entries or mismatches, and when multiplied across tens of thousands of records, they can significantly impact totals.
Over time, Waguespack said, those discrepancies may have contributed to the growing gap between what the city collects and what it pays.
“We just kind of took the revenue, we paid the bill,” Waguespack said. “And over time, the expenses have exceeded the revenue collection.”
Mayor Helena Moreno said the city supports the audit and agrees that verifying the number of households being serviced is necessary before moving forward with any fee changes.
“We must ensure that the cost for services is accurate as we work to reset the fee,” Moreno said. “Therefore, I agree with the auditor that an audit to verify the number of households being serviced is essential.”
Moreno added that the city will wait for the results of the audit before presenting any proposal to the City Council.
“We continue to welcome the partnership with the Legislative Auditor as he uses his resources and expertise to review and scrutinize all aspects of the City’s operations in order to get the best results for the people of New Orleans,” Moreno said.
Waguespack said his office was asked to help determine how the city reached its current financial position.
“I think it’s imperative that we get the household count right,” Waguespack said. “This is just another step in the process to make sure the general fund is no longer subsidizing a cost that should be borne by its residents.”
The audit will include reviewing billing data from the Sewerage and Water Board, along with city property and address records.
The review is expected to take several weeks. City officials say the results will guide future decisions on sanitation fees and how services are tracked moving forward.
READ MORE:New questions about New Orleans trash data as city pauses possible fee increase
