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Moving at a speed not seen since the City Council approved pay raises that doubled their salaries, New Orleans announced today it has installed hundreds of new parking meters with cameras in an underground Mid-City canal where multiple cars were found loitering and promptly ticketed them.

An underwater camera employed by one worker and sixteen supervisors of the Sewerage & Water Board revealed dozens of cars, clearly parked without having paid the city anything, in a covered drainage culvert that runs under N. Jefferson Davis Parkway and Lafitte Avenue near the Lafitte Greenway.

According to a statement by Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s office, the meter cameras were immediately put online in the underground Mid-City canal and have already written over 76,000 tickets and counting.

“The real-time monitoring analytics is quite impressive because this technology automatically generates a ticket when a violation is noted and obviously there are ongoing violations,” said Arnie Fleece, spokesperson for the mayor, who noted the system has created greater efficiency for the city.

“We used to only get cha-chings, but now we get cha-ching cha-ching cha-chings. This allows us to utilize our resources better in other parts of the city that we normally are not monitoring and also lets us attend to other pressing needs.”

The cars, which the city says are clogging up one of the key pipelines used by the pump station that drains parts of Mid-City, have also been booted due to the thousands of repeatedly ignored violations since this morning.

“We can’t be having people park wherever they want, freely, without consequences. The verbiage in our contract with Guardian Parking Meters, LLC clearly states we take the rule of law seriously in New Orleans, and parking enforcement is no exception up to what is stated in our agreement.”