Mayor LaToya Cantrell said the city is now facing a $150 million deficit due to the coronavirus and warned that the Sewerage & Water Board could be unable to pay its bills as her administration prepped new, temporary morgues to handle New Orleans' rising death toll.

In a wide-ranging press conference Thursday afternoon, Cantrell decried the federal stimulus bill as leaving out New Orleans, one of the cities hardest hit by the virus in the U.S. She said the S&WB could "potentially" be facing bankruptcy and warned about the massive projected loss in sales tax revenue as a result of rules shutting down bars and restaurants and orders for residents to stay at home.

The CARES Act, the $2 trillion federal rescue package intended to provide assistance to individuals and relief to communities amid the economic calamity caused by COVID-19, falls far short of what New Orleans will need to recover from the crisis, Cantrell said.

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The law allows cities with more than 500,000 residents to apply for direct federal relief from the impact of the coronavirus. New Orleans falls a little more than 100,000 short of the population needed to qualify. As such, New Orleans will only be able to apply for aid to cover the money it spends directly on battling the virus, and not the broader economic impact of lost conventions, shuttered shops and closed bars and restaurants.

For those costs, it will need to share in the allocation given to the state.

“That doesn’t make me feel like we’re cared about if that’s all that’s going to come down from the federal government to the city of New Orleans,” Cantrell said.

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“Local governments need to provide essential services and need direct federal support,” Cantrell said. “We’re going to be relentless to make sure that the city of New Orleans gets her fair share based on this city being ground zero for this virus.”

The possibility of a bankruptcy for the S&WB was first broached in a meeting Thursday afternoon by Executive Director Ghassan Korban, after being asked about how the public utility’s rocky finances were faring. The agency, which was close to running out of money in 2018, had stabilized its finances in part with money from an infrastructure deal Cantrell struck with the city's hospitality industry.

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In an emailed statement, Korban stopped short of saying that the agency will be unable to pay its bills, but said he expects many customers will struggle to keep up. He said that while the S&WB anticipates a significant drop in revenue, “I do not anticipate (bankruptcy) in the near future.”

“We are seeking funding relief from several sources and will continue to do so in order to minimize the revenue loss we expect in the coming months,” Koban said.

New Orleans has been among the hardest-hit cities in the country from the effects of the coronavirus, ranking among the top cities per capita for infections and deaths. There are more than 5,240 people who tested positive for coronavirus in the city and 224 have died. About 30% of both the cases and fatalities in Louisiana are within Orleans Parish.

Cantrell said the city had requested 20 refrigerated units to store bodies of those who had died of the coronavirus and currently had 10 supplied by the state set up. The city is also establishing a temporary morgue on the property next to the Coroners' Office and working on securing additional sites to handle the expected toll of the virus.

As of Thursday, there were more than 18,280 Louisiana residents who had tested positive for the virus and 702 fatalities statewide.

City officials also announced that Friday would be the last day of operations for the drive-thru test site at the University of New Orleans’ Lakefront Arena. That site had been one of the first set up under a federal pilot program.

That program was always scheduled to end on April 10 and has seen a slow-down in use as time has gone on, Cantrell said. The city now intends to replace it with a mobile testing program that can target neighborhoods where many residents have not been tested, possibly because of transportation or other issues, said Dr. Jennifer Avegno, director of the city’s Department of Health.

The Alario Center in Westwego will remain a drive-thru test site and the closure of the UNO facility will allow the shift to resources to other areas of the state where they are needed, Avegno said.

The reductions come as both city and state officials have said there are encouraging signs that the virus is no longer spreading dramatically due to the restrictions put in place last month. But those positive signs only indicate that the pace of new cases is slowing, not that the crisis is nearly over.

“We are nowhere near the end of this crisis but we are seeing signs that the stay at home order is working,” Avegno said. “However, hospitalizations and deaths are still rising.”

To that effect, both Avegno and Cantrell warned that residents should avoid their usual Easter celebrations and religious services this holiday weekend and said residents should continue to follow the stay-at-home mandate, even in cases where drive-thru church services are offered.

“We understand the sacrifice, the Lord understands as well,” Cantrell said. “We have to do the right thing and stay the course.”