A canoe propped between two ladders.
Confetti and streamers knocking out power.
Horse fatalities.
These are some of the scenes of Carnivals Past New Orleans City Council members are trying to avoid repeats of at Mardi Gras 2025, or what some city officials are dubbing “Super Gras” as New Orleans is set to host the Super Bowl in the middle of Carnival season (They’ve also thrown around the inferior “Mardi Bowl”).
At the Carnival Legislative Advisory Committee meeting Wednesday, council members said they’re serious about cracking down on what they find to be the most egregious Carnival-time behaviors.
“The reality is Mardi Gras has to be accessible to everyone, and Mardi Gras needs to work for everyone, including the city, the krewes and the people that live in this area,” Council Vice President JP Morrell said.
Council members said they’re considering adding couches, platforms and scaffolding to the list of items banned along the parade route, as well as signs saying what’s prohibited.
As the committee discussed the trend of portable toilet tents along the routes, Morrell also suggested banning tents along the route outright, which he said have “spiraled out of control” in recent years.
“For years, it was kind of a minor, look-the-other-way problem. We’ll put up the no walls, little tents, so I can have a nice soft area for my family to rest between parades,” he said. “That has grown to the point where you have seen full-blown ‘Game of Thrones’ pavilions with couches and tables and restaurants inside of them.”
Morrell said having city officials determine which types of tents are allowed or not on a case-by-case basis is too difficult and that it would be easier to ban them altogether.
“You can't put an overwhelmed, overworked police officer in a position of arguing with a resident as to what type of tent they have,” he said. “Everyone’s going to argue, because everyone has watched ‘Judge Judy,’ that my tent’s not really a tent.”
At the same time, heads of city agencies said their teams are stretched thin during Carnival, which is an all-hands-on-deck situation for the city. Given the large crowds, they said, their enforcement capacities are limited.
For instance, Michael Karam, the city’s director of the Department of Parks and Parkways, said his agency trims more than 1,200 trees along the parade route starting in October and also monitors routes up until four hours before the parade, during which personal items like ladders, chairs and ice chests aren’t allowed in the public right of way. But Morrell noted Karam’s team can’t really access the Uptown route much during the weekend leading up to Mardi Gras Day, which is when they then start assisting the New Orleans Police Department.
Council members also called out people blocking streetcar tracks ahead of the parades, particularly college students Uptown camping out for spots. They said they wanted to work with Tulane and Loyola universities to get their police departments involved and even implement policies in their student handbooks against it.
“We know it happens every single year in this area that these frat boys really don’t give a damn about people who are shift workers trying to get out of the box in order to get to their jobs on a daily basis and rely upon public transportation to do so,” Council Member Lesli Harris said.
“I think we need to actually shame these students and have them understand that they are impacting people who, for the most part, are low-income, who are long-term residents of New Orleans, and that their conduct directly affects someone’s ability to make $15 an hour and feed their children,” she added.
Harris even went as far as to suggest a device for streetcars, like the "cowcatchers” on the front of a train to push cattle or any other obstacles off the tracks. A Chadcatcher, some might say.
“I said this jokingly to Michael Karam last year, but really, seriously a cowcatcher like they have on trains, literally just to move these kids out of the way, is something we should be considering,” Harris said.
Sen. Jimmy Harris, a New Orleans Democrat, has filed a bill at the state level to raise the fine for blocking a “highway of commerce” including streetcar tracks from $200 or less to $2,500.
A New Orleans streetcar heads up St. Charles Avenue through a canopy of trees covered in Mardi Gras beads and toilet paper.
Matt Torri, the city’s Department of Sanitation director, said hot coals from people cooking along the route are his department’s biggest problem. They can start a fire in the trash truck if they get caught in with the rest of the parade trash.
Morrell said though that is already illegal, the city needs to do a better job of enforcing it, even if it means working with contractors to get additional workers on the ground.
Torri also told the council members some of his department’s heavy equipment dates back to the ‘90s and requested the city invest in some new equipment.
Cannons with mylar confetti (the shiny material) are already prohibited, as one was responsible for knocking out a transformer during Carnival 2023. But the city will likely ban paper confetti and streamers too, as during the 2024 season wet paper streamers caused a fire along a power line.
They also want to ramp up enforcement and increase penalties for any krewe violating the ban, after they said they saw several instances of krewe members shooting mylar confetti cannons this past Carnival. He said krewes should kick members who break the rule out.
“It was so egregious during this Mardi Gras season that there were krewes shooting mylar cannons at City Hall to show that they didn’t give a crap,” Morrell said, adding that these incidents cost utility ratepayers money. “I’m so done that it might be next time the power goes out, the krewe’s responsible for it.”
Morrell also said he’d be asking the council to take away the Krewe of Nyx’s parading permit, given poor attendance and low membership in recent years after its founder made an #AllLivesMatter post on social media in 2020.
Morrell showed screenshots of the krewe trying to advertise membership on Facebook and said their throws also featured advertisements for membership, actions forbidden under rules against the commercialization of Carnival.
“If as a krewe you cannot maintain the membership necessary to parade during Mardi Gras, it is your job to give up the spot for someone who can,” he said, though he noted canceling Wednesday parades altogether could give city departments a breather.