(C) Verite News New Orleans
This story was originally published by Verite News New Orleans and is unaltered.
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2025 New Orleans Election Guide [1]
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Date: 2025-07-17 14:35:12-05:00
Verite News contacted each of the 60 New Orleanians running for office in the fall municipal election to ask how they plan to govern.
View our 2025 Election Guide for their in-depth answers and more.
Nearly eight years ago, New Orleans City Councilmember LaToya Cantrell was decisively elected mayor of New Orleans, becoming the city’s first female executive in its 300-year history.
Cantrell inherited a city that, more than ten years post-Hurricane Katrina, had seen its finances and its population begin to rebound. But it was still struggling with pre-Katrina problems like high crime rates, poverty and failing infrastructure. Even the seemingly good indicators had a flipside: Property values in the city skyrocketed in the 2010s, but Black working-class residents struggled to gain the same foothold in the city that they had before the storm.
Within months of taking office, Cantrell took aim at the city’s powerful tourism industry. Tax revenue on hotels in the city had traditionally been directed back to either tourism marketing, the convention center or sports, with the city receiving only a tiny slice. Cantrell hoped to better spread the wealth.
And in a little over a year, she scored a major political victory — the “Fair Share Deal.” The 2019 deal — which the mayor brokered with the tourism industry, the state legislature and then-Gov. John Bel Edwards — included a one-time infusion of nearly $60 million and new, recurring money from hotel taxes that now totals more than $20 million per year, dedicated to the city’s infrastructure needs.
Then things took a turn for the Cantrell administration.
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A series of crises
First, in October 2019, there was the Hard Rock Hotel collapse, which killed three people, damaged surrounding infrastructure and remained an eyesore and obstruction on North Rampart Street for well over a year.
The collapse was shortly followed by a cyberattack on the city’s computer systems that hobbled day-to-day functioning — with issues that, according to officials, continued to persist for years after the event.
Finally, in early 2020, came the Covid-19 pandemic, which posed a significant threat to both the lives and livelihoods of residents, and would come to define the remainder of Cantrell’s first term.
New Orleans was an early Covid hotspot, and Cantrell took a more cautious approach to the virus than local leaders in the rest of Louisiana. Throughout much of the worst of the pandemic, she was quicker to order business shutdowns and mask and vaccine requirements and slower to ease them than her peers in other parishes. The approach was credited with boosting the city’s vaccination rate and slowing infections and deaths in later virus surges, but it also made Cantrell a target for those opposed to Covid mitigation efforts who accused her of authoritarianism.
Still, Cantrell faced no considerable challengers when she ran for re-election in 2021. At that time, there was the promise that the city could bounce back from those disasters and make sizable investments into its future. New Orleans was promised one of the larger shares of American Rescue Plan Act dollars, providing a vital infusion of capital into the city budget. And with the Super Bowl on the horizon, there was reason to hope that the city’s tourism industry could be revitalized following the pandemic.
But her second term has been marked by controversy after controversy: from scrutiny over how much she traveled, to a well-funded recall effort, to her alleged romantic relationship with a member of her security detail, to her regular clashes with the City Council, to the very real possibility that she could be facing federal indictment.
Meanwhile, both the city and its residents have been struggling.
Ongoing drama over trash contracts has left some residents wondering whether their garbage will reliably be picked up. Federally funded “green” infrastructure projects have either been fumbled or failed to launch. In spite of billions in federal dollars secured for road repair in New Orleans, many city streets remain barely passable, and the city is still unable to keep up with basic drainage maintenance. And neighborhood power outages and boil-water advisories have become so commonplace, they barely rate a blurb in the local news.
In the midst of all that dysfunction, New Orleanians are also being squeezed by increasing rents, higher utility costs and untenably expensive insurance premiums.
And they are unsure whether they can have a future in the city, as it faces both economic decline and the impacts of climate change. People have begun voting with their feet — leaving the city. An estimated 28,000 people have left the city since 2020.
New Orleans heads to the polls
In the coming months, New Orleanians will go to the polls and decide who they want to take up the mantle of city leadership at this pivotal moment.
Voters will elect New Orleans’ first new mayor in eight years. They will also elect seven councilmembers, including at least three new councilmembers for seats where no incumbent is running. And they will decide whether to stick with a sheriff who came in on a wave of progressive support but, in recent months, has been besieged by the political fallout of a high-profile jailbreak – or whether to go in a new direction.
Only three seats – the clerk of Civil District Court, the coroner and the District B councilmember – are uncontested.
Verite News has contacted each of the 60 candidates running for office in 2025, including all 14 people running for mayor, and asked them to answer questions about themselves and their visions for New Orleans. Over the course of the next few weeks, we will be publishing all of their answers in full, so that you, the voters, can have that information on hand. (Some answers have been lightly edited for spelling or grammar.)
Not all candidates answered our questionnaire, but all have been given the opportunity via phone or email. We will update our guide if and when we receive candidates’ answers.
New Orleans is at a critical juncture in its history. Who voters elect to lead the city – from the mayor to the City Council to the sheriff and beyond – will decide the city’s future.
— Katie Jane Fernelius, New Orleans city government reporter
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https://veritenews.org/guides/2025-new-orleans-election-guide/
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