Duplessis pledges to work with City Council to solve problems in mayoral campaign

NEW ORLEANS (WGNO) — WGNO is your local election headquarters and we are talking to the candidates in the major races in the Oct. 11 election.

This week we are taking a look at the race for Mayor of New Orleans and on Wednesday, Sept. 24 and Good Morning New Orleans anchor LBJ speaks with Senator Royce Duplessis about his campaign.

LBJ: Based on your experience as both state representative and senator, you work as an attorney as well outside of that, what do you feel qualifies you as the best candidate to lead the city?

“I’m gonna start with the fact that I’m a true son of New Orleans, and that’s all that matters. It just really makes a difference understanding who the people of New Orleans are, understanding the the thoughts, the feelings, the emotions, the perspectives of New Orleanians from all across the city,” said Duplessis.

LBJ: We’re facing this deficit that has been in the news the last couple of weeks. We’ve certainly reported on it upwards of $100 million. How do you tackle that as the lead of the city, as the mayor of the city of New Orleans?

“I hate that I have to be so honest, but the truth of the matter is that the city council is responsible for the budget. The city council, under the leadership of Council Member Helena Moreno and others have abdicated and stepped aside their responsibility. Now, what I plan to do is, to be honest, we don’t run from responsibility. We’re going to be transparent and we’re going to be accountable. We’re going to do an audit within the first 60 days to figure out where we have been misspending. As the mayor, I’m going to work in collaboration with the city council,” said Duplessis.

Watch LBJ’s full interview with Duplessis

LBJ: The desire for residents is to be in a city that works. That’s the infrastructure. it’s their streets, that the city drains after a heavy rain, or we don’t flood when it does heavy rain. How will your administration handle this differently than what’s currently happening right now?

“One of the things that I believe is lacking right now is that we don’t have true benchmarks that are in place. What I mean by that is, if you go to the 311 website, you report an outage or a pothole or street repair. It’ll get logged, but it’ll just get logged as pending with every other reported problem. But what citizens deserve is an expected date of completion,” said Duplessis.

LBJ: Final question of course we’re past Labor Day, the gloves come off in this race and things begin to get ugly from time to time. Is there anything in your campaign that you feel is being either misrepresented by you or by your campaign, that you’d like to address?

“Nothing being misrepresented about my campaign. Well, what I will say is that, unfortunately politics can be a tough sport. When you have to distinguish yourself and show why you’re different from your opponents, that’s really that you have to do that in order to properly inform the voters of really what’s going on.

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