Mayor Helena Moreno is putting New Orleans’ potholes on notice, elevating basic street repairs to a top City Hall priority as part of a broader push to speed up street and sidewalk maintenance. City officials are pitching the plan as a coordinated, in-house effort meant to attack long-delayed fixes across roughly 1,500 miles of city streets.
As reported by FOX 8, Moreno said Department of Public Works Director Steve Nelson expects city crews to fill about 1,500 potholes a week, with staffing changes inside DPW making that ramp-up possible. According to the station, the department is also set to repair sidewalks, repave streets and fix more than 1,800 streetlights under the same initiative.
City Funding and the Smooth Streets Push
The new focus follows recent City Council moves that freed up unspent bond dollars for street maintenance, along with a formal Smooth Streets program aimed at accelerating repairs across New Orleans. New Orleans CityBusiness reported that Smooth Streets was expected to tackle between 500 and 1,500 potholes weekly and to coordinate resurfacing work across the city’s 1,500 miles of roads.
New In-House Crews and Equipment
Earlier this winter, the administration committed about $6.25 million to build out a 50-person Street Maintenance Unit that will handle some paving and repair work directly instead of relying only on outside contractors. WDSU reported the new unit was originally expected to manage roughly 50–100 repairs a week, a starting point that city officials say they plan to multiply as DPW reorganizes and shifts staff to expand capacity.
Backlog and the Scale of the Problem
The push for speedier fixes is driven by years of slow responses. An inspection of NOLA-311 pothole service data by the Office of Inspector General found the city averaged about 204 days to resolve pothole requests, a number that highlights just how deep the backlog runs. Local watchdog reporting and city studies have also found that resurfacing New Orleans’ entire road network is a multibillion-dollar, multiyear project, meaning the new weekly targets will only stick if funding and coordination hold up over time.
For now, city officials are urging residents to keep reporting potholes and streetlight outages through the city’s NOLA-311 service portal so problems can be logged and prioritized. The portal allows residents to submit and track service requests, and DPW says it will publish progress updates as new crews and equipment come online. Officials have not given a firm timeline for when the full pace of 1,500 pothole repairs per week will actually be reached.
