Citizens Angry as New Orleans City Hall Closes

City Hall shut down Friday as thousands of municipal workers began the first of their enforced three-day weekends to trim a $10-million deficit.

The main doors of City Hall were locked, and people who had not heard the news expressed anger and shock when they could not get in Friday.

“You know I’m mad,” said Melba Williams, who rattled the locked doors when she could not get in to pay her water bill. “It’s upsetting because I know they’re spending the money.”

Betty Boissalier, 22, said she drove in from suburban Metairie on an errand for her 1-year-old daughter, Inez. “I am upset,” she said. “How am I supposed to get a birth certificate for my daughter?”

At the request of Mayor Sidney Barthelemy, the City Council last week ordered about 5,800 workers to temporarily work four days a week at a 20% reduction in wages.

Emergency services continue round-the-clock, but the bulk of non-emergency city services are shut down on Fridays from now until the first week of December.

Calls to City Hall departments went unanswered Friday, and a switchboard recording advised that offices would reopen Monday.

Barthelemy and some other top city officials went to work in an otherwise empty building.

“I think it will give me an opportunity to get to some things I just don’t get to during the week,” said Barthelemy, whose $75,000 salary also has been cut 20%, as have the $42,500 salaries of City Council members.

On the eve of the shutdown, the mayor made the first live television address of his six months in office and urged residents to pull together through the city’s fiscal quagmire.

“Help me. Join with me and put our love of New Orleans above everything else,” he said.

Recession in the Louisiana oil business and dwindling state and federal revenues spurred the crisis that led to layoffs of 1,200 city workers this year. The city’s jobless rate, at last count, was 10.5%.