NEW ORLEANS — New Orleanians don’t need an explanation of the city’s massive street-repair effort to know what it feels like. They live with it daily — the mud, the detours, the sudden water shutoffs.

But few residents realize the program digging up their blocks this summer also blew a cavernous hole in the city budget.

“I mean, it’s taken a toll,” said Gentilly resident Leah Namer, whose neighborhood has been torn up for years. “It’s cost me money for wear and tear on my vehicles. They’ll just randomly turn off the water all day long. And there’s no reason that the money for this work shouldn’t go where it’s supposed to go.”

That money — $1.7 billion in FEMA funding to fix 10,000 blocks of streets and the pipes beneath them — is the backbone of the Joint Infrastructure Recovery Request

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