Helena Moreno promising a spirit of collaboration in New Orleans

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.

We are taking a look at the race for Mayor of New Orleans, and Good Morning New Orleans anchor LBJ speaks with City Council Vice President Helena Moreno about her campaign.

LBJ: Your experience on a state level, the state representative, city council, as well as your career as a journalist pretty well documented. Beyond that, what are those skills that you bring to lead our city right now?

“Well, ultimately, I think what I bring is really a unifying perspective, bringing everybody together so that we can start really moving our city forward in a new direction. But ultimately, what I also bring is in my years of experience actually having a full understanding of the issues, being in the legislative branch, obviously, you know, we don’t run operations of the city, but we see what the issues are,” said Moreno,

LBJ: The $100 million that we’re hearing about deficit or the possible $100 million deficit, it’s a tough one. How do we handle that? How does your administration tackle that?

Moreno answered, “Well, as you probably reported many times, you know, there seems to be kind of this, this different take depending on who you talk to within the administration, whether it’s the CIO’s office or the CFO office. They seem to have a different take on where we are with this deficit for the current year. So, what I decided to do, along with the rest of the city council, is to bring in the state legislative auditor so that he can take a look as to like what is really going on with the budget and get a real understanding as to what the deficit is for this year and what we’re really looking at for the potential deficit, general fund deficit for next year.”

LBJ: And just about every poll we’ve seen that residents want the simple things. They want the streets to work, they want drainage, you know, the lights on I-10, whatever. How does your administration shift from what we are doing right now to what we need to do in the future?

“Yeah. Well, really, it starts with working with urgency, coordination and collaboration among all different, city departments and also with our outside stakeholders. Similarly to what we did during Super Bowl, we know that it can be done and all of that happened at the directive of the mayor. But what’s going to be different when I’m mayor is that that’s actually going to be the standard, not something that just happens when there’s a Super Bowl or when Taylor Swift is coming into town. But then the other piece, too, that’s so critically important, and we just talked about this with the DPW director during a council meeting we had a couple days ago, and that is that we are outsourcing so much to different contractors and consultants, which really raises the cost of a lot of services and services that we could be doing in-house,” stated Moreno.

Watch LBJ’s full interview with Moreno:

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