Tulane public policy students went to New Orleans City Hall on Monday with a blunt message for the City Council’s Criminal Justice Committee: pay city workers more or risk making the city less safe. They urged council members to raise the minimum pay for municipal employees by roughly $3 an hour and add a housing allowance so staff can afford to live where they work, framing the proposal as part of a broader public safety strategy tied to population loss and rising living costs.
The team, made up of Lilian Loftin, William Kesterson, Avery Burks and Bellamy Parker, presented research they completed with Associate Professor Brian Brox and pressed the council to link wage hikes with targeted public safety investments. Their recommendations call for an across the board increase of nearly $3 to the city’s minimum wage and a new housing allowance for employees, according to Fox 8.
“Residents who work full time in New Orleans can’t afford to live here because their income doesn’t allow them to support a house and buy food and everything else you need,” Loftin told the committee. The students’ analysis flagged petty theft, burglary, robbery and carjacking as offenses that can be driven by financial hardship, and it examined pay and housing interventions in Providence, Washington, D.C., and Savannah. Their presentation concluded that neither policing nor pay by itself will fix crime in the long term, per Fox 8.
Council reaction and next steps
Council members welcomed the homegrown data and policy ideas, even as they pointed out that several major crime categories in New Orleans are currently at or near multi decade lows. They also reminded everyone that good intentions still have to fit into a tight city budget.
The Criminal Justice Committee heard the Tulane presentation at its July 27 meeting, listed on the City Council’s public calendar. The students’ work is now part of the committee’s official record for that agenda, as shown on the council’s online schedule via the City Council calendar.
How the research was produced
The recommendations grew out of Tulane’s Policy Making Research Shop, a hands on course that pairs students with city leaders to tackle real world problems and then present their findings directly to policymakers. Tulane’s School of Liberal Arts describes the class as one that produces professional briefs and concrete policy options for municipal decision makers, which is how this student report ended up before the Criminal Justice Committee, according to the Tulane School of Liberal Arts.
Budget and legal hurdles
Turning the pitch into paychecks is not simple. Any change to the city’s classified pay plan has to be recommended by the Civil Service Commission and then adopted by the council, a process that builds in extra steps and timelines before anyone sees a higher wage.
On top of that, the city is already in cost containment mode this year, with a hiring freeze and major overtime cuts that officials say make it difficult to absorb new recurring personnel costs, according to the Council’s Budget/Audit committee summary. For background on the formal process that governs those decisions, the city points to the City Code and the latest budget update provided via the Council’s Budget/Audit summary at the Budget/Audit committee.
For now, the committee has taken the brief under advisement. Any concrete changes to city pay scales would still need cost estimates from staff, a review and recommendation from the Civil Service Commission, and a final up or down vote by the full council. Until then, the Tulane proposal sits on the table as a fresh fiscal policy option in the ongoing debate over how to keep municipal workers in New Orleans while sustaining public safety.
