(The Center Square) — New Orleans has been paying private contractors using a service list that includes thousands of addresses that may be vacant, duplicated, nonexistent or otherwise ineligible for taxpayer-funded trash collection.
A Louisiana Legislative Auditor review released Wednesday found 12,915 of the city’s 164,625 approved sanitation locations — nearly 8% — were potentially improperly included on the list used to pay contractors. The city had no formal process for routinely cleaning up the database.
That included 4,900 addresses the city itself had already classified as retired, meaning they were no longer valid addresses. The city told auditors it had not analyzed its sanitation list to remove retired addresses since the current contracts began in 2022…