NEW ORLEANS (WGNO)— In recent years, residents living in New Orleans have had to put up with several issues getting worse like potholes, trash piling up, and thousands of street lights being out.
City Council members say they are working hard to try and alleviate some of these quality of life issues.
“It is really needed in the area here because it is really dark right here. We really need that light,” Barbara Butler said.
For three months now this streetlight on Exposition Boulevard—Uptown has been leaving the neighborhood in the dark.
“It is really dark around here and it is right by Audubon Park, anybody can come over and run from the park and harass someone trying to get in their driveway at night,” Butler said.
This is just one streetlight outage, out of more than 4,000 across the city. Some lights have been out for more than 400 days.
“I think just part of a good functioning city is making sure you have good functioning street lights and that’s all people are asking for,” District A Councilmember Joe Giarusso said.
He went on to say, “When the streetlights have been out for 400 days, let’s start knocking away at the 400 ones, then go to 300, then 200.”
In addition to the lights, neighbors continue to be frustrated with all the potholes and their trash not being picked up on-time, all affecting the quality of life.
“When you have 5,6,7 things in the state of flux, when one of them is not working it sort of aggravates all the other things,” he said.
A spokesman, John Lawson with the City of New Orleans said in a statement:
“Currently the City of New Orleans Department of Public Works estimates that out of 55,000 streetlights that exist citywide, there are approximately 4,200 outages making the City’s entire streetlight system over 92 operational. DPW is in the process of reviewing the list of streetlight outages reported to 311 and verifying whether each case needs to be closed out or is in still need of repair.”
“Let’s get those results and let’s start showing people we are going to fix this. Things are going to get better,” Giarusso said.