Over the next six weeks, New Orleans voters will elect a new City Council. The council, which will be seated in January, will help steward an annual budget of more than $1.5 billion, regulate the city’s utility providers, Entergy New Orleans and Delta Utilities, and help oversee the hundreds of land use and zoning questions that the council faces each year.
And a crop of challengers for council seats hopes to ensure that the new council is made up of mostly new faces.
District B councilmember Lesli Harris faces no challengers for her seat, which means that there are six contested council seats: two at-large and four district seats. Three of those elections – one at-large, District A and District E – are wide-open races without any incumbents running. The candidates for those seats are not all council newcomers. In District E, former councilmember Cyndi Nguyen, who lost her 2021 reelection bid to Oliver Thomas, is now running to reclaim the seat…