A Letter to New Orleans
My fellow New Orleanians,
New Orleans is one of the places where Louisiana actually makes money.
Tourism brings in billions of dollars every year. The port moves global trade. The culture—music, food, festivals—creates an economy that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the state.
And yet here we are.
A city that produces this much value is struggling to make payroll.
The Sewerage and Water Board owes the city $87.5 million. It says it can pay about $20 million. The rest sit there while we cut workers and services.
Federal disaster money—money meant to rebuild this city—is delayed. Stuck in approvals. The funds are held up by federal control over spending, which is now indefinitely delayed due to our “sanctuary” city status by the Trump administration.
But the obligations kept piling up.
November 25, 2025: a $222 million budget deficit.
The response: a $125 million loan. High interest. Short term. Borrowed to make payroll. Approved by the state bond authority, a temporary solution.
Then $150 million in cuts.
700 workers furloughed. Services reduced. The systems that make this city function have been scaled back just to stay open.
And while all of that is happening—while we are borrowing to survive and cutting ourselves apart—the state is not stepping in to stabilize the city.
It is stepping in to exert control.
April 9, 2026: the Louisiana Senate votes to eliminate the office of Orleans Parish Clerk of Criminal Court.
Calvin Duncan won that election with 68% of the vote. He was supposed to take office on May 4.
The state eliminated the position before he could begin.
Same day: the Louisiana Voting Rights Act fails. 4–3 vote.
April 15: The Louisiana House passes HB 211.
Sleeping in public becomes a crime.
Up to $500 and six months in jail. A year for a second offense.
They call it “Streets to Success.”
At the same time, New Orleans has already been treated as a testing ground for increased state enforcement—programs like Operation Catahoula Crunch were proposed and pushed, and only failed because people here stood up and warned their neighbors.
So look at the pattern. The state is reducing services and dignity for many of its citizens.
The city is broke.
Money owed to it does not arrive.
We borrow at high interest to function.
We cut workers and services to survive.
And at the same time, the state is restructuring power.
Eliminating elected offices.
Blocking voting protections.
Expanding criminal penalties.
Increasing enforcement pressure.
None of that puts money back into the city.
None of that helps us make payroll.
None of that stabilizes the system.
It changes who controls it.
We are not an experiment.
We are not a city that exists to be pushed from one political outcome to another.
We are not a place where you turn poverty into a crime because you don’t want to solve it.
We do not want the homeless turned into criminals.
We want a government run by people who are actually trying to do the right thing—not people operating with a knife to their throat, making decisions under pressure from somewhere else.
And we want responsibility here too.
From our own leaders.
From our own institutions.
From ourselves.
We want to be part of fixing this—not just being told what’s going to happen to us.
If you want to understand that structure, look at Vichy France.
After France fell to the Nazis in 1940, the government still existed. It had officials, courts, and police. It governed daily life. But real power sat somewhere else. And it was allowed to operate as long as it stayed compliant—enforcing control locally while decisions were made elsewhere.
That’s what made it dangerous.
Not just that it was constrained, but that it governed within limits it did not set.
New Orleans is not Vichy France.
But the question is there.
Are we moving toward a system where this city is allowed to function only within constraints set somewhere else?
Will we become a city where resources are controlled externally, but responsibility remains local?
Where power flows upward, but the consequences land here?
Because that’s what this looks like.
The question is not whether this is happening.
The question is how much of it we are willing to accept.