The New Orleans City Council convened on December 10, 2025, to review operational updates from Delta Utilities and Energy New Orleans (ENO), adopt resolutions regarding asset management and reliability improvements, and approve key utility regulatory contracts. The meeting highlighted progress following Delta Utilities' acquisition of Entergy's natural gas assets and detailed ENO's strategies to address persistent reliability issues and reduce outage frequency.
Ladies and gentlemen, we're gonna get started. Please take your seats. Please take your seats. Let me know when you're ready, Aaron. Ready when you are council member. All right, let's do roll call. Councilmember Thomas present. Councilmember Morel present. Councilmember Moreno present. Councilmember Harris present. We have a quorum. Thank you. First up, we have the approval of the minutes from September 9th joint committee meeting. I will move to adopt. Second by Chairman Moreno. All in favor say aye. Four years, no nays. It is adopted. Next we have a presentation by Delta Utilities. Thank you. Good morning. Good morning, Council members. Thank you for the opportunity to be here today and to provide an update on our progress transitioning from enter Gollowing Acquisition of the Natural Gas Assets here in New Orleans. So with respect to our service, we've had a seamless transition. We successfully transferred natural gas service from entergy beginning July 1 without any disruption to customers. And our goal internally was to ensure continuity and reliability during that critical transition period. And we believe we've been very successful. In only five months, with if we compare where we were on a customer interaction basis to the toe, we have registered 58% of our customers. We've achieved 100% retention of the skilled workforce that uh we inherited from InterG, uh preserving their institutional knowledge and operational technical expertise. We've created 125 additional jobs here in New Orleans to support our multi-state operations uh in the balance of Louisiana and Mississippi, uh contributing to local economic growth and employment. Um we've enhanced the customer access uh experience. So we've opened not one but two customer care locations, the first one being on 3400 Canal Street. Uh co-like co-located with Intergy, and the second one 3535 General DeGaulle on the West Bank at the Liberty Bank building. And we're improving access on the West Bank for our customers. We have about a hundred or so customers that visit us on average every day on the east bank and about uh 20 to 40 on the the west bank. And we've established a dedicated natural gas uh service team that's accessible. Uh 1833 Delta 99. We've instituted a lot of uh technology and customer experience improvements, uh the most important of which is probably track my technician technology, which allows customers to monitor their service appointments in real time, and more importantly, provide real-time feedback to us as to how we're doing. Um we've engaged with the community and partnering with them consistent with our mission. Um we've actively engaged with the community by attending over 25 neighborhood association meetings and community events. We've built strong partnerships throughout the community with existing civic groups and demonstrating our commitment to be responsive uh citizen uh utility provider within the city. From a customer operations perspective, we look at call center metrics to access to assess our health. With respect to that, customers reached out to us in the call center, and they're prompted to participate in a survey, and we've averaged 4.1 out of a five scale represents their satisfaction from a customer rating from July through November, and that has been trending upward. We make an additional effort to minimize the wait time that our call center callers have. Our service level in November has increased by over 25%. 20% rather since our launch two months ago. We answer 90% of our calls within 20 seconds and have abandoned rate abandonment rates of less than two to five percent. Our handle time on each of these calls continues to improve. To date, our team has handled over 128,000 across Baton Rouge and New Orleans calls and have improved our handle time by over 18% since we launched service. And more importantly, from a field operations perspective, we look at various metrics to assess our health and field operations.