The New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board is poised to issue $114 million in bonds for sewer and drainage repairs.
That work, however, represents only a drop in the bucket compared with the cost of long-delayed maintenance needed by some parts of the board's systems.
The S&WB gave unanimous preliminary approval to the bond issue on Wednesday, the first step in issuing $27 million in drainage bonds and $86.7 million in sewer bonds later this year.
The drainage bonds will pay for all or part of 36 projects, including pump repairs and generators and improvements to the pump stations themselves. There also are smaller projects including the purchase of new emergency radio equipment, installation of fire alarms and purchase of new vehicles.
About $2.25 million will be set aside for covering damage caused by work on the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Program. An ongoing lawsuit claims the massive project has damaged homes near construction sites throughout the city.
The money for the sewer system will largely be dedicated to a variety of repairs and upgrades to lines.
Ron Spooner, the S&WB's chief of engineering, said the projects had been chosen to fit the amount of money the bonds would bring in.
They represent only a small portion of the hundreds of millions of dollars in work needed to make up for decades of deferred maintenance, Mayor Mitch Landrieu said.
Several steps are still needed before the bonds can be issued, including approvals by the City Council and the State Bond Commission. That process is expected to take until early July.
Meanwhile, the S&WB continues working to repair drainage pumps in the wake of last summer's floods.
At present, 111 of the 120 drainage pumps in the system are up and running, said Bob Turner, the director of engineering and operations at the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East, who has been assisting the S&WB with engineering issues.
Most of the pumps that aren't working are small ones, putting the drainage system at about 98 percent of capacity.
At the time of the Aug. 5 flood, 16 pumps were out of service.
Of the pumps now being repaired, four were taken out of service recently for minor repairs.
The only large pump currently being worked on is in Pump Station 7, which serves Mid-City. That pump had been fixed during the summer by a contractor but failed again months later, Turner said. S&WB crews are now repairing the pump.
Landrieu said the S&WB's position is that the repairs were still under warranty and the new work should be covered by the contractor.
All the current emergency repairs are expected to be completed by June 1, the start of the 2018 hurricane season, Turner said.
The cost of the emergency work done since the Aug. 5 flood now stands at $79.3 million. Of that amount, $53.5 million has gone toward repairing turbines, acquiring generators and other work related to the S&WB's power system.
Another $10.5 million went to manpower, including both temporary staff brought in by S&WB contractors and the various interim managers who have run the agency over the past six months.
Roughly $6.8 million went to drainage pump repairs and about $286,000 to water pumps.
