NO & Co. vs #CityOfYes and other potential 2019 political schisms

2019 is a statewide election year in Louisiana and candidates are starting to slot in to some of the legislative races. There's going to be a fair amount of shuffling about this year as the next wave of term limits claims its victims. In Orleans Parish both Walt Leger (House District 91) and Neil Abramson (House District 98)  are graduating and will have to replaced. Also the legislature we elect this year will be responsible for redrawing districts after the 2020 census so this is going to be particularly important. Let's try and not muck this up too badly. Not that there's a lot we can do with the choices allotted to us. Danae Columbus's latest gossip column about potential candidates does not offer much comfort, anyway.

In Leger's district, there is a guy whose actual name is Carling Dinkler IV. Dinkler is the scion of an old New Orleans family of hoteliers renowned for observing "accepted business practices" right up until the US Attorney General pressured them to stop that.

During a tumultuous era, in which racial segregation was the norm and the fight for civil rights would turn ugly, Dinkler Hotels became one of the first hospitality companies to integrate, but change came neither quickly nor easily. Referring to the unwavering attitudes of the day, Inman Allen, son of the late Atlanta mayor Ivan Allen Jr., acknowledges, "We were a segregated society in the 50s and up into the 60s." And, though the widespread violence observed in cities like Selma and Montgomery was kept at a minimum in Atlanta, many white business owners were very reluctant to accept and implement progressive reforms.

Despite a change in ownership, the Dinklers, under the auspices of a management contract, remained the primary policy makers for the hotels. While the Dinkler family was by no means a clan of bigots, their perspective on segregation was more reflective of the times and accepted business practices than personal convictions. The Dinklers ultimately yielded to the call for integration, but some prominent Atlantans like eventual Georgia governor Lester Maddox (who opted to close his Pickrick Cafeteria, an Atlanta institution, rather than serve black customers) stubbornly refused to relinquish their Jim Crow persuasions.

That said, between 1961 and 1964, the Dinkler Plaza Hotel was the focus of several protests and racial controversies, some of which made national headlines.

Here is a podcast I found wherein Carling Dinkler III tells us about the great favor done for New Orleans back when Moon Landrieu and Lester Kabacoff got together and invented tourism. Dinkler III was a founder of the New Orleans Convention and Visitors' Bureau, recently re-branded "New Orleans and Company."

New Orleans and Co. was in the news this week when it turned out its current director, Stephen Perry has some opinions on municipal budget priorities.  Specifically he believes funding the critical infrastructure that keeps amoebas out of the water you drink and, well, your city out of the water in the first place, is a "waste" compared to funding the tourism patronage machine from which he derives a half-million dollar salary.

Cantrell says the city needs the money to pay for what her administration estimates are tens of millions of dollars in infrastructure repairs. But Perry told The Lens that such a move would undercut the city’s economy, saying that new revenue would be wasted on what he characterized as an underperforming city government.

“In an unhinged interview with the Lens, J. Stephen Perry, who takes home over $430K per year to promote the City, spent most of his time tearing it down,” Action New Orleans wrote in a Tuesday morning press release. (A 2016 CVB tax filing — the most recent one available — shows that Perry’s compensation from the tourism group was closer to $460,000.)

Of course it isn't that much of a stretch for Perry, or anyone in his position to just assume that he's running the whole city anyway. Perry and the hoteliers have already hired their own police force (sort of) and contributed to the expanding French Quarter surveillance network.  In the opening gambit of its negotiations with Cantrell this year, NO and Co. proposed a hotel-specific sales tax scheme that would finance a one-time payment to the city dedicated to infrastructure. The mayor, quite rightly, rejected the offer as inadequate. But Perryet al were so impressed with themselves that they went ahead and drew up a spending plan for the money anyway as if they were purchasing actual governing authority.

When you allow the tourism cabal to hoard as much public money for doling out to cronies and developers as it does, then you can expect they're going to assume more power than they are entitled to. But just to make sure nobody gets any ideas about reining them in, they also do a fair amount of propaganda. Here's what happens when somebody checks their work.

Amid new pressure from unions and an ongoing debate over whether the city’s hospitality and tourism industry is doing enough to support its mostly low-wage workers, a local nonprofit research group has released a report estimating that the industry’s economic footprint is significantly smaller than previous industry-led estimates.

While hospitality leaders have long touted the industry’s ranks as amounting to more than 80,000 jobs, the Data Center’s report Tuesday pegs the number of New Orleans residents who make their living from tourism at closer to 30,000.

Part of the issue with such projections, the Data Center notes, is that defining what qualifies within a set industry cluster is “a rather subjective activity, leaving definitions vulnerable to pressures to make industry clusters look as large and inclusive as possible.”

On the Lens podcast episode that features Perry's "unhinged" interview, Lens editor Charles Maldonado talks about the difficulty in trying to verify the tourism industry's assertions. Perry sources a dubious claim about what percentage of city revenue derives from tourism to an offhand comment in a phone conversation he once had with Andy Kopplin.  At one point it even sounds like NO & Co. has credited 100 percent of Orleans Parish sales tax revenue to the tourism industry.

There is additional comedy in the interview so, please, give it a listen.  Perry describes himself at the beginning as a "leftist" and then promptly launches into a rote recitation of every right wing economic talking point in the book. He complains that the city actually has "a spending problem, not a revenue problem" echoing a common Republican refrain from the past several legislative sessions.  He also bristles at the notion that we should want to fund city services by taxing a "high performing organically created private sector enterprise" which suggests he should probably go back and listen to Dinkler III's fond ruminations on our carefully planned and heavily subsidized tourism economy.

Eventually this dispute between Perry's NO & Co. and LaToya's #CityOfYes is going to have to be mediated in Baton Rouge. Which is where Dinkler IV is aiming to position himself.  According to his website Dinkler The Youngerest is "inspired by President Bill Clinton’s words, 'Opportunity for All."  Good luck figuring out what that is supposed to mean.  In any case it's hard to imagine he's likely to side against the family business in any meaningful way.

Also in Columbus's column we read the names Aylin Maklansky and Aimee Adotto Freeman as potential legislative candidates.  I'm assuming she means they're both going for Abramson's seat.  Freeman is a business consultant and, I guess, a dog person, who is associated with the usual circle of upper crust New Orleans charitable non-profits including the Arts Council and this police booster organization. She also has an association with the Tulane business school which happens to be named for an A.B. Freeman. At the moment I don't know if there is any relation there. Maklansky was a candidate for City Council in District A last year. Her father owns some sort of clinic that he also wanted to be an Airbnb or something like that.

You know at one point, I was near certain that renowned affordable housing activist Stacy Head would be interested in one of these seats.  I wonder why we haven't heard anything out of her yet.

Aylin Maklansky's father's Airbnb clinic

They're trying to sneak this in before Maklansky's boss, Nadine Ramsey, leaves the City Council in May.

Acikalin, who has contributed $5,810 to Ramsey's campaign since 2015, is currently operating one of the properties, at 920 Frenchmen St., as a short-term rental. He's barred from having guests there more than 90 days a year under its current residential zoning. He's told neighbors he wants to open a medical clinic once the site is rezoned.

But that's raised skepticism among neighbors such as Eugene Cizek, a longtime architecture professor at Tulane University who has been involved in City Planning issues in the Marigny neighborhood since the 1970s. Cizek said he's concerned that granting Acikalin's request would return the city to the "spot zoning" problem that proliferated before a citywide master plan was adopted in 2010.

Just for the sake of context, these spot upzone maneuvers have quickly become the mode of choice for property owners looking to back door their way in to the short term rental business. Typically the owner proposes some sort of commercial use for the property that just happens to also have space for STRs available. But the goal is a commercial short term rental license.

Increasingly, homes near tourist areas are being bought specifically for the purpose of converting them to AirBnBs, and a single person might masquerade as the “occupant” of numerous homes that are rented out all the time – and some companies even hire local people to play that role, Dedecker said. Property owners are also increasingly asking for spot zoning changes on homes from residential to business zoning to fit into the third category of short-term rentals, commercial, which allows more tenants and can be rented year-round.

There are a lot of these in various stages of discussion right now.

Here's one at the former Zara's Supermarket on Prytania Street.

This one, which appears to be a no-go at this point, would have been, ostensibly, an ice cream shop.

Here is a property owned by Pat Swilling.  He asked for a commercial spot-zone without even specifying what sort of business he might like to pretend to want to open there.

Councilwoman Stacy Head asked for clarification.

“I can’t tell you I’m not going to, but I’m going to do something else as well, like a mixed use,” Swilling said.

Head pressed him further.

“So you’re going to do short-term rentals. Just tell us the truth here,” Head said. “What do you want to do? That’s the question here. You said a coffee shop. I’ve got a whole list of things that have been promised to the Council that have never come true. … I’m so tired of being lied to by developers not giving us what they promised to give us.”

Head turned her question to Cantrell, asking whether it would be a coffee shop or not. The zoning requested would allow for that, Cantrell said. Swilling added that coffee shop, ice cream shop and others were all under consideration.

“Now it’s not a coffee shop,” Head retorted, saying that Swilling had failed to give the Council his vision for the property.

“That’s very disrespectful,” Cantrell said quietly as Head concluded her questioning.

Note that in all three of the above cases, LaToya Cantrell intervenes on behalf of the would-be Airbnb owner one way or another.  Here is one LaToya supports even without a bogus front business scheme. It's just a developer who wants to do STR condos.  It does help to have councilmembers on your side.  Here is a property on Bienville Street the council voted to upzone despite the Planning Commission's denial.  There's a list of CPC denials that could still be overridden depending on the Council's disposition.

And that's the real trick with regard to Maklansky's dad's "clinic."  The plan in that case was to jam the thing through before Ramsey and the rest of the Winter Council* leave office.  The attention has probably spoiled that.  The real fun begins in May when we learn, to everyone's shock, no doubt, just how pro-Airbnb the new Council and, of course, Mayor Cantrell end up being anyway. But we've still got a few months to pretend otherwise.

*I've been calling the lame ducks the "Winter Council" but the weather hasn't cooperated much with that term for almost a month now.  They're gonna be around for a while, still. Maybe we need a new thing.

The Winter Council

The lame duck City Council is decamping to a broom closet in an abandoned bunker somewhere across the river for a few months.  This will not be a vacation. As it turns out there are still a few items on certain outgoing councilmembers' "bucket lists" that will still need attending to.  If you are a member of the public interested in providing your input on any of these items, getting yourself over  to the hidey hole where your representatives are conducting their ostensibly public proceedings is only your first obstacle.  Five of the seven councilpersons are leaving office in May so, even if you can get your pleadings through to them, it's doubtful they're going to pay much attention. So good luck.

Here are a few items that might make their way onto the agenda. The first of these probably will have to wait until after the turnover... but, also, it might not.

• A consultant recently completed a survey of city employee wages and benefits. Their recommendations are intended to look encouraging at first glance. See, they want to give everybody a raise.
  

  New Orleans city government should raise its employees' pay by 10 percent, provide for annual merit raises and allow new hires to be offered more than the minimum salary for their positions, according to a report by a consulting firm hired by the city.
  
  The report, completed last month, argues that increases in the cost of living in New Orleans and the availability of higher wages in the private sector have made city jobs less appealing and harder to fill.
  
  The last widespread boosts in salaries for city employees came in 2008, meaning most have seen at best minor raises over the past decade, according to the report.

  And there's plenty of justification for doing just that. The report cites the rising costs of housing in New Orleans as well as a 500 percent increase in health care costs for city workers over the past decade.  Of course, that's a strange thing for the consultants to bring up. A ten percent raise doesn't begin to address that problem. And they aren't arguing for more generous health benefits. In fact, they're recommending sick leave be slashed.
  

  That policy gives workers 13 days of sick leave a year during their first five years and provides those with more than six years of service 15 days of sick leave annually and those with 16 or more years of service 20 days of sick leave each year. The report recommends all those figures be capped at 12 days of sick leave per year, to meet the regional average.

  This sort of bait-and-switch strategy is used against low wage workers all the time. Offer something small but attractive up front, take something important away on the back end.  It's the same logic behind the recently passed Republican tax cut plan which all but guarantees devastating cuts to Medicaid and Social Security. We've also seen it here.
  
  
  
  
  
  In this case, what City Council is most likely to use the report for is as an argument for cutting retirement benefits.  That's what it says way down at the bottom of that Advocate article.
  

  The report also recommends changes that would make city workers' retirement system less generous, noting that other governments in the area require workers to contribute more to their own pensions. The changes recommended are similar to those the city put in place for new hires starting next year.

  Slashing pensions has been Stacy Head's highest priority in her final year on the council.  Her false claim that the retirement system is in fiscal peril echo decades-long Republican lies in agitation against Social Security. Last spring she even attempted to jump the gun on the wage survey and pass the cuts before even seeing its recommendation. Last month they finally passed a scaled back version of the cuts that only affect more recent hires.  But this is still a swipe at the retirement security of a slightly younger cohort of workers.  Head hopes "the next council" will take it further. But there's no guarantee she won't try sooner given that it's harder for people go yell at her now.
  
  
  
  
• Nadine Ramsey is trying to do a favor for a former staff member's father. 



Metairie gastroenterologist Tamer Acikalin wants a zoning change for a Frenchmen Street residential property he owns that he says could one day become an urgent care clinic. The pillared apartment house with a second-floor front porch is two blocks from Washington Square in the Marigny and just down the street from some of the city's best-known live music venues.

Under the proposed zoning change, a medical clinic is just one of 21 commercial uses that would be expanded from its current zoning designation, which only allows day care facilities and small, owner-occupied bed and breakfasts as a commercial use. One of the possible new uses is likely to rile neighbors: Short-term rentals would be allowed year-round, not subject to the 90-day cap that the New Orleans City Council adopted when new regulations took effect April 1, 2017.

We're actually seeing a rash of these "spot-zoning" requests aimed at proliferating short term rentals, lately. One thing they all have in common is a vague plan for some sort of small business on a property that is clearly meant to be used as an Airbnb hotel. Many of them have specific instances of political favoritism in common too. This is one of many but it is in the news because of how obvious it is.


Acikalin is father of Aylin Acikalin Maklansky, Councilwoman Ramsey's legislative director who recently returned to her job after an unsuccessful run for the council seat Guidry is leaving. Acikalin said his daughter has no financial interest in the property. Campaign finance records show Tamer Acikalin contributed $5,810 to Ramsey's election efforts between 2015 and 2017.

Recall that, during the campaign, both Ramsey and Maklansky were beneficiaries of pro-Airbnb lobbying groups so this is a pretty easy gotcha story.  Expect more of them to come, though.



• Most urgent on the Winter Council agenda is the surveillance ordinance. 



The plan, proposed in January as part of Mayor Mitch Landrieu's $40 million public safety initiative, includes the adoption of a city ordinance that would require bars and restaurants across the city to install cameras on the outside of their buildings pointing into public areas. The ordinance, if approved by the New Orleans City Council, would also require those establishments to store the surveillance footage on a cloud-based government server to which law enforcement would have access.

"This ordinance would put the city's surveillance apparatus on steroids, subjecting New Orleanians to near-constant monitoring of their daily lives and stifling our vibrant public space - without meaningfully reducing crime," ACLU Louisiana interim executive director Jane Johnson said.

In addition to ACLU, the camera scheme has been criticized by the Orleans Independent Police Monitor citing “potential for mismanagement, poor information security, public record law compliance challenges and user abuse,”  and by the Music and Culture Coalition of New Orleans who released a review this week. MaCCNO's report concludes that the ordinance would constitute an unprecedented expansion of government surveillance powers that exists in no other U.S. city. The proposal has not been criticized by Councilmember (and incoming mayor) Cantrell, however. Her stated position is that the cameras are "a step in the right direction at the right time."

There is a vote scheduled for the coming Thursday over in the bunker.  If you have a hard time getting there, though, there is also a committee hearing set for this Wednesday at the very convenient for everyone time, I am sure, of 2 PM. They'll be on the 21st floor of an office tower at 1340 Poydras St.  Good luck figuring out how to get in there.  Maybe someone will think to install some cameras.

The problematic sandwich shop

Y'all have probably eaten at Melba's at least once by now. It's very good. They do po-boys and plates and stuff. The gumbo is really good. The ordering system is a bit of an adventure but once you figure it out it's fine. There should probably be more places like it. But there's a lot that goes into getting even something seemingly so modest off the ground quickly.  Melba's has been open for only a couple of years but has gotten a lot of attention. This can only happen for a family business if it starts with a fair amount of financial and political capital already in the bank which these guys certainly had in spades as this 2015 profile explains.

Melba’s is the latest venture for Scott Wolfe Sr., the grocer who made Wagner’s Meat into a household name in New Orleans, even for those who never shopped at his stores, thanks to its potentially blush-inducing slogan: “You Can’t Beat Wagner’s Meat.”

Wolfe and his family also created the Chicken Box (slogans: “Tastes Like Mama’s” or, at some locations, “Tastes Like Ya Mama’s”), a related chain of takeout joints that had a short but colorful run in the years before Hurricane Katrina. This was the company that once offered to put on weddings for couples who bought its 1,000-piece chicken package to cater their receptions.

After shifting to real estate development in the years after the storm, Wolfe quietly returned to the retail game in 2012. That’s when he first opened Melba’s, turning a vacant drycleaners on Elysian Fields Avenue into a 24-hour combination po-boy shop, daiquiri shop and washateria.

More recently, the menu has expanded with a steam table selection of New Orleans comfort food, boiled seafood and, as he’s resurrected the Chicken Box brand, fried chicken (the 1,000-piece package is available, though the wedding offer is not). More is on the way, including urban gardens Wolfe plans to develop on adjacent lots, an outdoor event venue and some 500 birdhouses he wants to distribute around the city bearing a Melba’s sales pitch.

The high profile cuts both ways, though.  The Wolfes found this out after a TV crew showed up at Melba's to get some man-on-the-street takes from customers about the Great NFL Kneeling Controversy of 2017.

What brought the crisis to Melba’s, however, was a comment from the manager on duty at the time. Mike Wolfe told WWL-TV that he didn’t want to show the Saints game if players protested in that way.

The restaurant’s Facebook page lit up with angry comments, accusations of hypocrisy from a white-owned business based in a largely black neighborhood and calls to boycott Melba’s.

But Scott Wolfe, the owner of Melba’s, said his brother's comments amount to an employee of the company expressing a view that doesn't represent the business and is at odds with its character.

“What he said was not the opinion of Melba’s, it wasn’t my opinion, and it’s not how we operate here," said Wolfe. "I know it's confused a lot of people, but the people who know us know that's not what we're about."

"It wasn't my opinion." Okay sure, we'll just have to take his word for that.  Still, as long as the business isn't deliberately involving itself in the stupid boycott movement, they at least deserve credit for that.   It's pretty nice for them that they have the kind of pull that gets the Advocate to help them with their PR response, though.

I had to go to the other news"paper" to find this story.

The owner of 821 Gov. Nicholls St. is now challenging the city's enforcement of a ban on short-term rentals in the French Quarter in a lawsuit on the argument that what's being purchased is catering services -- not a short-term rental -- because the free night's stay is merely an optional bonus.

Despite the lawsuit, a city administrative hearing officer Wednesday (July 12) fined property owner 821 Gov Nicholls LLC $3,000 for six violations of the city's short-term rental ordinance. Officials showed a VRBO.com listing for "Melba's Mansion" during the hearing.

Scott Wolfe owns Melba's Po-Boys on Elysian Fields Avenue through the company K-Ville Market LLC. Wolfe said the Governor Nicholls property is owned by his family through 821 Gov Nicholls LLC.

The "Po-Boy party" farce isn't just some uh.. lone.. Wolfe.. action.  It's actually the beginning of a larger, concerted effort by the Short Term Rental lobby to further confound efforts to regulate their activities. 

Eric Bay, the director of the pro-short-term rentals group the Alliance for Neighborhood Prosperity, appeared in an adjudication hearing with attorney Eric Torres to answer an enforcement action against a French Quarter short-term rental. Short-term rentals are illegal in most of the French Quarter under an ordinance that the City Council that took effect on April 1.

Bay does not own the short-term rental that was cited for operating illegally, and he insisted he does not represent the owner. But his appearance before the city's adjudication panel over a clearly illegal short-term rental raises fresh questions about how committed the organization is to complying with the city's short-term rental law.

Bay and his group practically wrote the ordinance.  It was their side who showed up in force at City Council to lobby for its passage.  But now they sense a political opportunity to press even further in the direction of full legalization. In order to do this they're pouring money into the municipal elections.  Gambit reported last month on some of the campaigns who have received money from Bay's group, Alliance for Neighborhood Prosperity. ANP emails to members explicitly state that candidates, "have pledged to work with us" presumably in their efforts to expand STRs during the next term.

The council candidates named in that article have had to publicly backtrack and even return donations in order to keep up appearances. Gambit doesn't say anything about the mayoral candidates [THIS IS INCORRECT SEE * BELOW]

Cantrell also got $1,100 from the Alliance for Neighborhood Prosperity, a local group of short-term rental property owners, and $2,500 from the Committee to Expand the Middle Class, Airbnb’s political action committee. Shachat said Cantrell has not given any assurances on what her policy on short-term rentals would be if she’s elected, other than to say that it would be “open, fair and transparent.”

As we've noted previously, Cantrell has demonstrated through her words and actions that she doesn't believe Airbnb is really all that much of a problem.  Wonder how she came to that conclusion. In any case, despite their reporting on the council races,  Gambit must not think STRs are all that much of a problem either. They've endorsed Cantrell for mayor, after all. Maybe they thought she was just talking about po-boys or something. Either way it's good to have friends in the media, whatever it is you might be trying to sell.


* This blog is a piece of trash sometimes.  Here is what Gambit actually wrote in that article.

ANP’s other campaign donations include:

- $1,000 to Ramsey on May 11 and $250 in June 2016.

- $100 to District B councilmember and mayoral candidate LaToya Cantrell on Feb. 2 and $1,000 on May 24.

- $500 to At-Large Councilmember Jason Williams in June 2016 and $250 in November 2016.

Bay also made donations to Cantrell ($250 on Feb. 2) and District A candidate Joe Giarrusso ($250 on Sept. 2). Giarrusso contacted Gambit after this story initially ran to point out he returned Bay's contribution the same day it was made

Here's a little behind the scenes look at how this crap blog gets made sometimes. I read that Gambit article weeks ago and bookmarked it in here.  Later, I noticed Melba's was in the news vis a vis the Trump bullshit, remembered Wolfe and them were running the po-boy airbnbs, and thought I could put all of that together.

So I put all the bookmarks in a post and saved it for a while. Over the following days and weeks I came back here and wrote a few lines at a time about what I thought I remembered this  post was supposed to be about.  Usually I write while two or more people are talking to me and/or the TV is on. I'm actually typing this correction right now while listening to a mayoral debate.  I have severe Trump brain. It's a wonder any of these sentences ever come to a complete.......

Anyway, by the time I "finished" this post I had forgotten enough of the Gambit story that I ended up misrepresenting it (and snarkily so, even.)  Sorry about that.  I still think they shouldn't have endorsed a candidate in this terrible race, although that is a separate matter from what they published in the Airbnb story.

None of the jokes are landing

This was supposed to be a very important municipal election.  It was supposed to be an opportunity for organized push back against the obscene acceleration of hyper-capitalism and exploding inequality and have been grinding New Orleanians into the dirt in the post-Katrina years. Instead it has been the most insidery business-as-usual snooze fest imaginable. Somehow even the entertainment division of the mayor's race feels like an exercise in going through the motions.

How did this happen? Where did the joy go? There should at least be some joy.  Look at all these oddball candidates.  There's a grifter in a top hat who literally wants to build monorails. There is a guy who is running pretty much because he read one pop management theory book.  There is a lady who wears sparkly boas and talks about gladiators and space aliens and the like. There's a guy who is intentionally running as a joke candidate for the fourth time and he's actually kind of the sane one. This should be, at least in some way, entertaining. It isn't, though. It's flat and tired.

If we're going enjoy the comic relief part of the program, we first have to feel invested enough in the main even that we need to be relieved.  But, for the most part, we're not invested. The election is happening in near perfect isolation from the voters who would seek to engage with it. The principal candidates are focused on the donor circuit and their own inside baseball. Their policy positions are hollow iterations of cynical condescension.  When there's no hope that any outcome in an election can benefit anyone but wealthiest elites, there's no drama that needs to be cut with comedy.   One could argue there is a Dadaist statement to be made here but so what. Absurdism is a great lens for politics but it only has value if one can imagine a rational counterpoint worth aspiring to. The joke candidates this year, then, aren't really jokes. They are insults.

The situation is so bad that our clarion call for reengagement comes to us this week via Clancy DuBos, is inspired by something Newell Normand said, and praises the work of two upper class business community organizations. There's just no hope, is there?  Certainly not if this is any indication. 

Less than six months into implementation of the city’s short-term rental (STR) ordinance, the leading local proponent of expanded STRs is raising money for some City Council candidates “who have pledged to work with us,” according to an email sent by the pro-STR Alliance for Neighborhood Prosperity (ANP). In the email, ANP makes clear that the organization seeks to expand the “footprint of inclusion” for STRs and increase “both day count and occupancy permitted” in the city’s STR ordinance.

An ANP email sent last month titled "Call to Arms and Action-All Members City Wide" asked the group’s members and supporters to help raise campaign money by attending fundraisers for two council candidates in particular — District C incumbent Nadine Ramsey and District A hopeful Aylin Acikalin Maklansky, who until recently served as Ramsey’s legislative director. In addition to hosting fundraisers for Ramsey and Maklansky, ANP and its president have contributed to several other council candidates directly.

"Both are Equally important to our futures," the email said, "as their contending opposing candidates have announced anti-STR sentiment and prioritized restrictions going forward if elected. Please make every effort to contribute online and if unable to attend. Support your future by supporting those who have pledged to work with us."

There's definite political engagement happening here. It's just all on the wrong side, unfortunately. The pro-Airbnb team is pushing to expand short term rentals in New Orleans as soon as this December. With a show of strength in the fall election they should be able to get whatever they want passed. We've previously noted the odds-on favorite in the mayor's race is more or less on board with them.  I wish I had a joke to end on here but, well, it's not funny anymore.