New Orleans city leaders contracted with an outside firm to conduct a $250,000 audit of the number of houses that the city's two trash contractors service. But some City Council Members question whether the city should've paid for an audit at all.

WWL-TV

Last April, at a City Council Sanitation Committee Meeting, Council Members Stacy Head and Shelley Midura questioned Sanitation Director Veronica White about whether two trash contractors, Richard's Disposal and Metro Disposal, were providing an updated, monthly list of "serviced locations", as required by their contracts.

"I want to refer this to the audit," White told the council members at the April meeting, that once the audit is completed, if it shows that 60,000 homes haven’t been serviced, the city would be due retro pay from any number short of 60,000.

"I think what the issue there is the estimate of households versus the actual households … what we needed at that point, and what we need today, is an accurate baseline count," said New Orleans Deputy Chief Administrative Officer Cary Grant in an interview.

The Nagin Administration contracted with PFM, Inc., to count specifically how many houses each trash contractor services.

According to the city's contracts with both Richard's and Metro Disposal, the companies are supposed to invoice the city, and get paid, based on a count of "serviced locations."

Both contracts read: "The contractor will refer revised serviced locations lists for city consideration and approval at least once each month."

Questions about whether or not the city has been getting those serviced location lists and paying the contractors based on those lists, is what caused a blow up between the Sanitation Director Veronica White and City Council Member Stacy Head at a Council Budget Hearing last Tuesday, with an irritated Head saying she had asked for the list several times and White alleging they had never been requested.

City leaders said the count of serviced locations and the house count that the auditor is conducting are two different things, with the house count being a more comprehensive look at homes, with comparisons made to records from other utility providers.

"These contracts do not have in them that the contractors pay for an annual house count. What they have in them, is they have to provide, for their billings, monthly service locations, which is a count of the locations that they go to," said Grant.

"We shouldn't have had to pay for an audit. We should've gotten a monthly list. And we should have had someone in the sanitation department checking that list," Head said in an interview.

In April, White told the City Council Budget Committee that the audit would be completed in August.

But while grilling a representative from the auditor’s office at a recent budget hearing, Head was told that the results weren’t ready in August and that in fact the audit hadn’t even started until that month.

Grant said problems with bidding out the contract led to the delay in completion of the audit, but that the audit is now expected to be complete on December 12.