City Council member Helena Moreno attends the annual wreath-laying ceremony commemorating the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina on August 29 at the Katrina Memorial in the Charity Hospital Cemetery in New Orleans. Peter Forest/Sipa New Orleans —

This city’s new mayor-elect prays many times a day, for big things and small ones and often, she says, to a holy guardian known for helping defy lost causes.

“My favorite patron saint is St. Jude,” Helena Moreno explains. “I don’t know what that says about me.”

More than 40 days before she is due to take her oath, Moreno faces a double-barrel of city crises that indeed may seem impossible.

The first is crushing and categorically local: a projected $222 million city budget deficit left by a term-limited mayor largely absent from p

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