Mayor-elect Helena Moreno is set to inherit a city government still struggling to get its financial house in order. One issue at hand is the massive budget gap of the NOPD being hotly contested in city council meetings with fingers being pointed in every direction. There’s been a huge spike on approved overtime pay and that has the NOPD’s budget deep in the red. Former NOPD Police Chief Ronal Serpas discussed his experience working with city government and how the process of budgeting is supposed to work when all departments are in proper communication. “If we’re talking about public safety and talking about the police department’s proper staffing, there’s a nearly $100 million hole in the 2025 budget. Those things are not going to line up if people don’t know what’s in the budget from day one until the end of the year,” Serpas emphasized.
“It’s the same thing in Nashville, Washington State, and New Orleans,” the former NOPD Police Chief notes. “The mayor or governor creates the budget, they go to the city council or legislature, and they pass it. The mayor and the department are then responsible for staying within that budget.The council authorizes how much money each department gets. So, they have a necessary legal responsibility to oversee that budget,” Serpas went on to explain. “All the years I was Chief of Police and most of the years I was Deputy Chief, we had to report to the budget committee of the council every month on where we were in terms of expenditures, revenues, and where we were going to be in terms of the budget at the end of the year. This is nothing new,” he adds.
Serpas explained that when he was Chief of the NOPD, he had to approach the City Council giving a picture of the department’s budget either monthly or quarterly. As budgeting got tighter, he would speak to the council monthly to keep them abreast of what the financial situation was. “Our budget staff, the Chief Administrative Officer of the budget staff, and the council’s budget staff were in regular communication daily about how much communication we allocated to the city and how much the city spent,” Serpas explained…