Since New Orleans is built below sea level, the city’s streets are built over wetlands, which causes the concrete streets to sink. This sinking creates potholes, sinkholes, dips, and cracks all throughout the city of New Orleans. This becomes a problem because many times, people’s cars will bottom out, and their vehicles will become damaged. This damage costs thousands of dollars to repair, which leads to unhappy, angry citizens. Additionally, when the streets crack and dip, they are also breaking the sewage pipes found underneath. These broken sewage pipes cause sewage expenses to rise drastically, which can sometimes raise taxes. This also leads to unhappy, angry citizens. In fact, citizens have already shown their disappointment with the current street conditions in New Orleans through an organization called Fix My Streets Nola. Fix My Streets Nola is an organization whose goal is to make sure that the city no longer delays the process of fixing the streets and pushes this fixing to be the city’s top priority. This organization goes to show that I am not the only one noticing this situation, but it has also become a common problem affecting many New Orleans citizens. These badly cracked streets cause enough problems, and it is time to finally address and prevent these problems from ever happening again.

The obvious and simple solution is to fix the streets of New Orleans. The city council needs to prioritize this problem and allocate the tax money into fixing the streets. First, I would need to get a petition with the citizens of New Orleans saying that they want and need the streets to be fixed. This should be an easy step since many citizens would agree that fixing the streets is a project that has been delayed. Second, I would approach the city council and propose a couple of easy solutions. Because the people fixing the street are paid by the hour, they often work very slowly and get nothing done. The alternative is to pay the employees by the job rather than by the hour. They could even get paid more if the job is done in a shorter amount of time. The change in salary would fix and improve the streets of New Orleans, which would solve and prevent the many problems dealing with the poorly paved streets.

The horrible streets of New Orleans cause a variety of problems, and my proposed solution solves these problems in a multitude of ways. By creating a better payment method, the streets would be finished and repaired more quickly and efficiently. It will also save the people and the city significant amounts of money because the city would not be paying the workers by the hour, but by the job. This extra money can be used to fund more projects to fix other cracked and broken streets in the city. This will also lessen tax deduction which will lead to happy, pleased citizens. The citizens will also be excited and happy to finally drive on streets without potholes, sinkholes, dips, or cracks to damage their vehicles; these new, nice paved roads will save the citizens even more money because there will be no more car damage to pay for. Additionally, these fixed and paved streets will not break or disrupt the sewage system. This untouched sewage system will, once again, save the city even more money because there will be no need for fixing it. New Orleans has become a cracked city because of the horrible, poorly paved streets, but by simply changing a payment method, this city can become complete and restored to its intended beauty.