The sharing is always fairest for the tourism moguls

The Convention Center has got to love this plan for settling its dispute with RTA.  It's one of those "compromises" where they don't actually have to give anything up.

The single biggest funding source for the RTA, which provides public transportation in Orleans Parish, is a citywide one-cent sales tax that brought in $83 million in 2018, according to the agency’s most recent state audit. But the RTA only kept $7 million out of the roughly $14 million that the tax generated from hotel room sales.

A 20-year old legal settlement has forced the RTA to fork over roughly half of its hotel tax revenue to tourism industry entities — mainly the Convention Center and the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation, or NOTMC, a public body that markets New Orleans to out-of-town tourists.

The Convention Center’s deal would allow the RTA to keep roughly 75 percent of the annual funding instead of 50 percent. The Convention Center’s collections would stay roughly the same. The NOTMC, whose board recently voted to change its makeup and its mission, would stop receiving any of the money.

It’s unclear where Mayor LaToya Cantrell stands on the proposal. Her office did not respond to requests for comment.

Keep in mind this is a proposal created by the Convention Center (which the Lens apparently had to fight to get a copy of) so let's consider it a starting point for negotiation. But this thing where "fair share" actually means the tourism industry gets to keep doing whatever it wants while city agencies collect whatever scraps happen to be laying around (in this case, the carcass of a now defunct NOTMC) seems to be a pattern. So I'm not optimistic.

Pretty late in the game to be asking questions now

Did Kristin Palmer express support for Mayor Cantrell's Fair Sham bargain while the push was on to pass its enabling bills through the legislature? At the time it seemed like area politicos were presenting a united front. If an elected person had any questions at the time, I'd like to think I would have noticed.  I had plenty. But it sure felt like I was alone in that.

Anyway all that stuff passed months ago and now we have to deal with the consequences.  Which is why it's frustrating to see that now we're hearing complaints that should have been raised way back when.

The merger will transfer $8 million in annual funding and all but one or two of NOTMC’s employees to New Orleans & Company, NOTMC CEO Mark Romig told the New Orleans City Council at a Friday meeting. In Romig’s proposed 2020 budget, $1.8 million would remain with NOTMC for some lingering responsibilities, while $3.9 million would go to the city for infrastructure funding.

But some council members expressed concerns about accountability for the public dollars and other remaining uncertainties with the merger.

Councilwoman Kristin Palmer, who sits on the board of NOTMC along with council members Jay Banks, Helena Moreno, and Jason Williams, complained earlier in the week that she had yet to see a written plan for the merger.

“There are three other council members who sit on NOTMC and we have repeatedly requested information on any type of transition in writing, which we have yet to receive,” she said at a Monday meeting. “And meanwhile, [New Orleans and Company] is like absorbing and hiring all the NOTMC employees and we don’t know what’s going on.”

What's going on is what was always in the plan since the deal was first announced. The public money that used to go to NOTMC (a public board) will now go to NO and Co. (a private entity) where there will be far less public oversight. This is in no way surprising to anyone.

Of course city council wouldn't really have much reason to speak up until it came time to start hashing out the budgetary implications of all of this. Which is why we're seeing this discussion now. In the same article we see there are also concerns about NO and Co.'s share of the short term rental tax passed over the weekend. Interestingly, the city still has a bit of leverage to play.

In July, the council voted to put the tax on the November ballot. But before it did, council members raised similar concerns about accountability and public input.

“The accountability and transparency question, the mayor recognizes that’s a concern for the council,” Cantrell’s Chief of Staff John Porciau said at the July meeting. “It’s a concern for her.”

If the ballot measure is approved on Saturday, it wouldn’t institute the tax right away. It would simply give the council the ability to levy a 6.75 percent tax. The council would have to vote again to actually put it into effect. It would also have to approve a cooperative endeavor agreement that would funnel the 25 percent from the city to New Orleans & Company.

“That is where we have our say regarding the transparency piece,” said Councilwoman Helena Moreno. “It’s on the CEA for that 25 percent that we’re going to have some control in making sure those tax dollars are used properly.”

She also said that the council has the option to refuse to approve the agreement until they find it to be acceptable. Until then, she said, the money would go into an escrow account that’s out of reach of New Orleans & Company.

It's a bit of a cop-out, though, for City Council members to wait until there's nothing they can do about these issues until they have to deal with the fall-out. The "accountability and transparency question" isn't new.  It was well understood even at the time that the mayor was negotiating the deal. Council is dealing with it now because she conceded on points her predecessor would not.

A push to merge the two groups in 2010 floundered over many of the same issues. Then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu objected because he wanted the organization that resulted from the merger to be a public body, not a private one like New Orleans & Company, according to the Times-Picayune. The NOTMC board ultimately voted against the merger in 2010.

Having given up the fundamental issue of whether or not public money should fall under public governance, we've backed ourselves into a position where we're hoping to negotiate over a small portion of what we still sort of control.  Maybe someone could have asked about that sooner.

Fair Sham

During last week's CNN climate forum, Elizabeth Warren hit a home run. Warren was asked about the Trump administration's decision to reverse Obama era efficiency standards for light bulbs. Her answer brought out a point that Democrats, even the "good Democrats" often fail to make about where the true onus for effective climate action lies.

“Oh, come on, give me a break,” Warren, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, said during CNN’s Town Hall forum on climate change. “Look, there are a lot of ways that we try to change our energy consumption and our pollution, and God bless all of those ways. Some of it is with lightbulbs, some of it is on straws, some of it, dang, is on cheeseburgers.”

“That’s what they want us to talk about,” Warren said, before noting that, in her estimation, the fossil fuel industry wanted to cast the climate fight as “your problem.” She continued: “They want to be able to stir up a lot of controversy around your lightbulbs, around your straws and around your cheeseburgers, when 70% of the pollution, of the carbon that we’re throwing into the air, comes from three industries.”

The industries Warren mentioned are the oil industry, the electric power industry and the building industry, according to The New York Times.

In other words we aren't going to solve a problem caused by institutional corruption and  mismanagement by shaming the individual victims of that mismanagement into submission.  We're not going to reduce carbon emissions by drinking out of paper straws. Anyone who tells you differently is not really on your side. 

Similarly, in New Orleans, we aren't going to relieve decades worth of decay and negligence visited on our drainage system by shaming people into picking up their trash. But for some reason, LaToya Cantrell can't help but to do just that at every opportunity. Even, here, where the topic is really more about expanding the Department of Public Works, she can't help but get in a dig.

Officials outlined more on how they plan to spend money from the "fair share" deal. The money will help the Department of Public Works hire 42 extra employees and fund more tasks being brought in house. They'll bring in five more maintenance inspectors and 28 new pieces of equipment, including vac trucks, pothole patchers, dump trucks, excavators, pickup trucks and trailers.

"We are owning our responsibilities and seamlessly working together," Cantrell said. "It's a shared responsibility. We're not being reactive because we're doing the work every single day and have been doing it every single day since I've been in office."

Cantrell ask citizens to do their part by cleaning up the city and dumping trash appropriately. Someone recently dumped three boats on Martin Luther King Avenue.

"You can't make it up," Cantrell said. "It's present. It's there."

What does a boat left in the street have to do with causing people to need... boats in the street every time it rains?  I really have no idea.  But it's obviously evidence that we've done something wrong.

It's notable, also, that Cantrell's hostility toward the citizenry appears here in a story about her so-called "fair share" deal with the hospitality industry.  She's very proud of her grand bargain. She's so proud, in fact, that #FairShare has already transcended its original meaning to become a catch-all mantra applicable to whatever the mayor happens to be talking about at the time.  A new gambit at extracting patronage dollars out of the French Market is about “...getting our fair share, based on what’s coming back to the city, and these are assets we control.” A scheme to skim fees off of other governmental agencies for tax collection services is apparently about getting a "fair share."  The city raised the fees it charges to Bayou Boogaloo saying they also need to pay a "fair share."  LaToya's PAC is using it as the title of a fundraising campaign.  The city's and the mayor's official Twitter feeds frequently tag random messages about anything and nothing with #FairShare.  It's basically LaToya's #MAGA now.  More to the point, Cantrell's muddled, scattershot use of the phrase now indicates she never grasped its value in the first place.

The original context was the structural inequality of the tourism industry in New Orleans. An obscene portion of the wealth generated by tourism accrues to a cohort of owners and oligarchs while the majority of workers who make that wealth possible struggle for low wages, poor benefits and minimal job security. Moreover, the tax revenue collected off the backs of these workers feeds directly back into systems and institutions meant to further line the pockets of the very same oligarchs. A "fair share" of that revenue should be used to support the city's working class. It should build affordable housing. It should fund better schools, better transit, better city services. It should help the city build and maintain the basic infrastructure that makes life possible here without further burdening its poorest and most vulnerable people. 

So does Cantrell's "fair share" deal actually do any of that?  Not really. The city does receive the temporary windfall of a one-time payment plus a share of one or two new revenue streams (depending on future developments.) But the new money is grossly insufficient to the need.

Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s hard-fought “fair share” infrastructure deal could provide more than $20 million a year for the struggling Sewerage and Water Board over the next decade. But that doesn’t come close to meeting the $3 billion in funding required by the Sewerage and Water Board’s 10-Year Capital Improvement Plan.

That was revealed by Cantrell administration officials on Monday at the first meeting of the City Council’s Ad Valorem and Special Dedicated Revenue Committee. The committee aims to take a bird’s eye view of the city’s finances and release a public report in early 2020. 

“Oh wow, so every year, you’re hundreds of millions of dollars short leading up to 2028?” Councilwoman Helena Moreno asked at the meeting.

Sure, $3 billion over 10 years is a tall order. In a better world, every city in America would have ample support from a federally funded and guided Green New Deal initiative to repair crumbling infrastructure and stem the tide against the threat of climate change.  But until we get there we have to depend on our local leadership to do the best they can. The #FairShare isn't the best we can do in New Orleans.

In fact, it was never intended to be. The closest description of what it actually was intended to do came from Stephanie Grace all the way back in June. Her key observation at that time was that all of the recurring revenues generated by the deal do not come from the tourism industry giving up any of its accustomed share. Instead they come from new taxes on the "man behind the tree." 

The latest evidence that it always helps to have some metaphorical man behind some imagined tree is the deal to send more money to New Orleans to help rebuild its aging infrastructure, which has apparently cleared all remaining hurdles in the state Legislature. Despite a period of tense, on-again, off-again negotiations among New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, Gov. John Bel Edwards, legislative leaders and representatives of the tourism industry, all sides emerged with much of what they wanted.

"All sides" got what they wanted.  True! But that requires some explanation of which "sides" wanted what. Let's look at how the spoils are divided.

Number one on the list was the Convention Center wanted to build their publicly funded but privately profitable hotel. Check. Walt Leger got that for them.

House Bill 617, passed by the Senate on a 33-0 vote on Sunday, authorizes the Convention Center to build and own the $550 million, 1,200-room hotel proposed for the upriver end of the giant exhibition hall. The bill also clears the way for the Convention Center to develop other vacant land it owns next to the site.

Number two was the tourism cabal wanted less public scrutiny over the marketing and convention brokering agencies they control.  Check.  The technically public New Orleans Tourism Marking Corp will be folded into the technically private (but publicly funded) New Orleans and Company.  The city's "infrastructure fund" gets a cut NOTMC's corpse.  But the lion's #FairShare of that still goes to the NO and Co.

About $5.5 million of the Marketing Corp.’s budget, which comes from a nightly fee charged on hotel rooms, would be redirected to the city’s infrastructure fund as part of the overall deal. Other money the group receives, including $2 million a year from Harrah’s Casino and its hotel and $7.8 million from a self-assessment by hotels in the city, would go to New Orleans and Co.

The key difference, though, is that these operations will be more fully privatized under the new regime.  The city had a direct oversight role with NOTMC.  The new entity says it will "invite" them to sit in on the back bench at some of their meetings.

Oversight of the combined organizations is another detail being worked out. In an internal company email sent Wednesday and shared with NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune, Perry said New Orleans and Co. intends to invite the two City Council district members and a rotating at-large member to serve on an “ex-office” basis with New Orleans & Co. Perry later clarified that his group is still working out the details for a formal City Council presence on the board, but his plan is to invite council members to serve on a leisure marketing committee run by Romig.

Number three was the city wanted to pull in more recurring revenue from local hotel/motel taxes. This, more than anything, was the core of the "fair share" argument. And they did sort of get what they wanted.  But the trick is in how they got it. What the city is getting is a completely new tax based on a revival of a so-called "lost penny" that hadn't been collected since 1966.  In other words, the tourism agencies aren't "sharing" their previous take at all.  The "man behind the tree" is.

Number four was various parties for various reasons wanted a new tax on Short Term Rentals.  The hotel industry wanted it in order to equalize the tax paid on STRs with that applied to hotel rooms.  The STR industry, while not happy about being taxed, is happier on balance with becoming a critical revenue generating industry the city will be reluctant to crack down on in the future. The city, again, just wants to get paid.  And they will. Maybe. The new tax still has to be approved by voters on the November ballot this year.  Also the city is having difficulty projecting just how much revenue it's going to actually see from it.  One thing we do know is whatever amount the tax does eventually produce, we still have to "fair share" 25 percent of it back to NO and Co. So, congratulations on that as well. 

Number five on the wish list was the Convention Center wanted to ret-con its legally questionable collection of a tax originally intended to pay for its Phase IV construction. Over the years, that money has become a kind of slush fund the city's elite have used to pass money around among themselves for their own pet projects and those of their cronies.  So, yeah, in exchange for a paltry $50 million one time payment, they get to keep doing that now.   Already, they've got big plans. 

New Orleans tourism officials' plans for a massive entertainment district on empty land upriver from the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center are back on the table.

The Convention Center's board, which finally won approval in June to build a 1,200-room hotel on part of the land after lengthy political wrangling, has asked interested firms to submit ideas by Oct. 4 for how to develop the 20 acres adjacent to the hotel site.

In its request for new master plan proposals, the Convention Center said it "expects the development to be reflective of the unique culture and history of New Orleans and include elements not commonly found in other parts of the nation."

They're putting out for bids on a shiny new entertainment district to go with their hotel. It will be built on some of the highest ground in the city convenient to downtown. Ideal for building affordable housing, maybe.  But that would only happen if the city were serious about giving its workers a "fair share" of the benefit their labor actually produces. LaToya Cantrell's fair sham deal was never really supposed to do that.


The mayor herself even admitted the fair sham isn't going to be enough last week when city officials laid out their plans for some of the money they know they will have on hand.  The deal left far too much money and power in the hands of the tourism cabal. So, naturally, she is asking you to make up the difference.

But she said it will take far more than the "fair share" deal’s millions to fix all the roads, canals and pipes that have crumbled during years of deferred maintenance and that are being further battered by the effects of climate change. She said that’s precisely why voters should pull the lever for a trio of infrastructure funding initiatives on Nov. 16. 

Part of what voters will consider is tied in with the fair share deal: a tax on short-term rentals whose proceeds will help to fund city infrastructure.  The other initiatives include a 3-mill tax to pay for repairs and maintenance of infrastructure, a $500 million package of infrastructure bonds and another $10 million in bonds for maintenance work.

When they do get down to fixing the canals and pipes, however they pay for it, let's hope they get it right this time.  The last big drainage project only just recently wrapped up. And already people are raising questions about that one.

The SELA improvements all stem from widespread flooding on May 8, 1995. The resulting $3.1 billion in insurance claims set a record at the time for an unnamed storm event, and the federal flood insurance program had to foot the bill for repairs.

So, Congress responded by authorizing $1.5 billion in drainage improvements over the next 20 years, with the idea that improving the infrastructure would prevent rising flood-repair costs in the future. The Uptown culverts were among the last pieces of that puzzle.

But after this summer’s floods, there are questions about whether those improvements have had unintended consequences for New Orleans’ antiquated drainage system.

When the Corps completed the SELA culverts, they were turned over to the Sewerage & Water Board. The board’s executive director, Ghassan Korban, doesn’t believe the increased capacity in the SELA culverts would have any negative impact on surrounding drainage, but he said he’s hired an outside engineering firm to analyze the flow and determine if it’s causing any bottlenecks.

A couple of independent engineers quoted in that story think maybe the SELA work is making the flooding worse. Sewerage and Water Board is skeptical but they say they'll check it out.  Last year we read in The Lens that the new culverts are "large enough to accommodate three city buses side-by-side."At the time that seemed like a colorful description but, really, who knows what might be down there. 

Whatever they find, though, it's important to understand, the mayor is not going to ask the city's ruling classes to pay to dig it out.  According to her version of events, they are paying their fair share.  So, obviously, we must be the problem now.

Joey Wagner, the Corps’ senior project manager for the SELA projects, bristled when WWL-TV asked what he would tell Bossier and others who think the construction has contributed to recent flooding.

“Like the mayor says, move your cars to the neutral ground," he said. "We all know there are certain areas of the city that are going to flood. And it’s going to continue to flood until the system is totally overhauled.”

And Mayor LaToya Cantrell backed up Wagner at a news conference last week: “Until the city, until we start dealing with our local issues relative to infrastructure, then we will not see the system working as intended.”

She focused her ire on the large amounts of debris New Orleanians regularly dump into the drainage system, and then blamed the intensifying rainfall.

To quote Senator Warren again, come on, give me a break.

LaToya Levels at peak

This is really more in the category of what happens when you ask a stupid question than anything else.  In this interview, Essence Magazine asked the mayor about the recently finalized infrastructure "deal" with the tourism cabal. As we know, this refers to a series of bills passed out of the legislature this year which does the following.

1) Allows the the Convention Center to build a publicly subsidized hotel.

2) Legitimizes the Convention Center's previously legally questionable and still morally indefensible publicly subsidized slush fund.

3) Creates a new tax on hotel rooms based on the formerly "lost penny" which the city only gets three fourths of in order to pay for Sewerage and Water Board improvements. This is supposed to be the "fair share" tax despite the fact that the tourism cabal still gets an unearned piece of it AND gets to keep all of its prior revenue streams.

4) Creates a new tax on Short Term Rentals which the city can dedicate its portion of toward infrastructure... although, yes, we still have to "fair share" part of that with the cabal too for some reason. Also, apparently we are married to the proliferation of STRs now.

5) Folds the technically public New Orleans Tourism Marketing Company into the less public New Orleans and Company in such a way that shields their meetings from public records even though both entities continue to receive public funds.

Anyway the deal sucks. But Essence Magazine could have asked  the mayor about any of the above problems. Instead they asked her, "In what ways do you feel the deal will aid in further diversifying the corporate and entrepreneurial workforce in New Orleans to increase the presence of women of color in leadership roles?" Which.. what?

A diverse workforce with plenty of opportunities for women of color sounds like a terrific goal. But how or why would this infrastructure deal have anything to do with that? I can't answer that. And neither can LaToya but boy does she give it a try.

“Fair Share” ensures that improvements to our infrastructure affects everyone in this city – for everyone who is trying to make their way up and forward, and that includes a corporate and entrepreneurial workforce that looks more like this city. “Fair Share” doesn’t single out any particular entity or industry. None of our many thriving industries would be successful if not for the hard-working men and women of this city. In that vein, “Fair Share” ensures inclusivity and intentionality for everyone who puts skin in the game. It’s about meeting people where they are and giving them a real way to level up and that’s what’s been missing in our city.

Whether they're moving forward or making their way up, we're gonna meet them where they are and level up their skin in the game. We will do this intentionally.   Got it?  Okay.

Who is getting lifted up?

These are some of the comments tweeted out of yesterday's City Council budget hearings by NOLA.com reporter Greg LaRose. They are from Mark Romig's presentation concerning the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corp.'s budget and goals. None of this showed up in either paper's account of the hearing each of which focused on the "spirited seniors" in the audience there to comment on the Council on Aging portion of the meeting.  If you want, you can always go watch the whole six hour meeting for yourself but it's nicer when the reporters report for you.

Anyway here's what you would have learned had you happened to be following along on Twitter.  The city's Tricentennial is coming. To help you celebrate, plans are already underway to launch the next marketing slogan and hashtag everyone is sure to love.

Romig previews “Tricentennial Toast” which will use social media starting New Year’s Eve 2017.

— Greg LaRose (@GregLaRose) November 4, 2016

Get ready to be toast, everybody.  In the meantime, try not to get too over-fested.

Romig: Fried Chicken Festival was the 136th permitted event of its type in New Orleans this year.

— Greg LaRose (@GregLaRose) November 4, 2016

The plague of festivals and mini-festivals arises from the unrelenting pressure to grow the number of annual visitors regardless of the costs. Other "destination cities" are beginning to grow wary of this practice.

But can tourism be too much of a good thing? When all the undoubted benefits are outweighed by the sheer aggravation, when numbers and money, the measurable things, are eclipsed by less quantifiable downsides, such as congestion, jobs that remain low-paid and insecure, and a deterioration in life quality for permanent residents?

One European city thinks so, and is daring to challenge the conventional wisdom that tourism is the bright white hope of a modern economy. The new Mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, was elected with a mandate to clip the mighty tourist industry’s wings. The last straw for residents, it seems, was the large number of young visitors fuelling a night-time economy deemed ever more antisocial. That, and the magnet that favourite areas of the city offered to petty criminals who saw tourists as easy prey.

The mayor has now declared a moratorium on new hotel licences and moved to clamp down on unregistered and illegal apartment-lets. The night-time economy will be subject to tougher policing. Business is already blaming her for killing the goose that laid the golden egg. But is she? Or is it rather a matter of the residents’ reclaiming the city as their own?

Unfortunately none of the decision-makers among our city's leadership is asking these sorts of questions. Instead we press on with schemes to jam as many visitors in as we possibly can going so far, even, as to open up the process by which our very neighborhoods are converted to de-facto hotels.  Nevermind the burdens this places on neighbors or on housing costs. We need to grow this tourism biz even more.

2017 goals of #NOLA tourism: 3% visitor growth, $7.5B in visitor spending, 75% hotel occupancy

— Greg LaRose (@GregLaRose) November 4, 2016

We keep doing this because we continue to labor under the notion that somehow we're going to figure a way everyone can "reap the benefits."

LaToya Cantrell and Nadine Ramsey have discussed wage disparities in the tourism sector. Cantrell: Let’s lift our people with tourism

— Greg LaRose (@GregLaRose) November 4, 2016

Cantrell: Locals who are culture bearers "should reap the benefit” of the increase in visitor numbers.

— Greg LaRose (@GregLaRose) November 4, 2016

But that's not going to happen anytime soon.  Not without major reforms.  The following is from a NOLA.com article about tourism and its impact published back in August. It's a helpful reference when we're talking about the return on our "investment" in the industry.

The web of local subsidies has grown so complex that few know the full extent to which tourism in New Orleans benefits from tax support. 

Hotel stays, the single largest source of the subsidies, are subject to a dozen taxes, each established under a different state statute or city ordinance to benefit one of eight different entities. Some of the taxes are further broken down and redistributed among the recipients, obfuscating the true scale of the dedications and who benefits from them.

The BGR study estimated that the hotel taxes generated $165.9 million in 2015. After accounting for all the pass-throughs and levels of distributions, the watchdog group estimated that about $126.8 million -- 76 percent -- went to tourism-related entities. The remaining 24 percent went to public services such as city government, transportation and education.

No other major American destination city devotes a smaller share of its hotel taxes to local government than New Orleans, according to a recent study by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. On average, the 17 cities in the study dedicated 65 percent of hotel taxes to basic services. New York dedicates 100 percent to its city government.

In addition to the hotel taxes, there are other special taxes and local sales tax exemptions that benefit tourism that were not included in BGR's examination. When they are included, the total dollar value of tourism subsidies was an estimated $154 million in 2015.

At present there is no plan to disentangle this web of revenue streams in a way that will allow us to "lift our people with tourism," according to LaToya's invocation.  But we're going to keep on growing the business in the meantime.  Because reasons.

So who is getting lifted up?  It sure isn't municipal government. As all those angry seniors can attest, the mayor's budget has cut most agencies receiving general fund dollars by five percent in order to shift more money to so called "public safety" priorities such as hiring another 400 police officers.  In addition the mayor is seeking to raise money directly off the backs of residents through a regressive tax on alcohol and an even more controversial proposal to double the number of traffic cameras in town.  The mayor says the budget this year is "balanced on a knife's edge."  And wherever we look, we find the poorest and most vulnerable among us are stuck with the pointiest ends of that knife.

Meanwhile, the Convention Center has all sorts of money it can't figure out how to spend.

While business has remained flat, the taxes received by the convention center have steadily risen. A decade ago, it collected $25 million annually. It's now up to $59 million, mostly from dedicated hotel/motel taxes.

Records show the center has amassed a reserve of $222 million. The reserve accumulation comes from an annual budget surplus, $25 million in 2015 - the Morial Convention Center doesn't spend all the money it takes in, even as the city itself pinches pennies to pave streets and pay police.

So while we're shaking down motorists and asking seniors to sacrifice, all of this public money under the Convention Center's purview is going where?  Right back into the tourism industry, of course. Which is to say it's going into the hands of the city's wealthiest oligarchs.  

Now the Convention Center wants to grow again. It plans to spend $175 million on a new project that includes creating a headquarters hotel.

“There will be entertainment, housing - we want the people who work there to live nearby - restaurants, attractions that are uniquely New Orleans-kind of attractions,” Johnson says. He envisions "a real 'Mardi Gras World' that the guy from Peoria that's down here in July, he can really experience Mardi Gras in a real, professionally done, multimedia interactive experience.”

Nevermind that "Mardi Gras in July" monstrosity for a sec.  Here's what the hotel project is all about. 

Things seemed to be falling into place when the Convention Center's board in early 2015 began negotiating with a group led by the Dallas-based Howard Hughes Corp. and local developers Joe Jaeger and Darryl Berger.

Hughes is an experienced national retail developer and owns the nearby Outlet Collection at the Riverwalk. Jaeger and Berger are both successful local hotel developers.

Johnson anticipated that the negotiators would reach an accord last summer and the Convention Center board would vote on whether to award the development team exclusive leasing rights, perhaps by the end of last year.

That still hasn't happened. "We're still slogging through it," Johnson said last week. "As you can imagine, it's very complicated."

It's unclear precisely what's holding things up.

One stumbling block, Johnson said, is that both sides are trying to get comfortable with the massive level of public and private investment contemplated. Although a deal has not been finalized, the board's vision for what should happen on the tract "is still intact," he said.

Johnson added that the discussions are complex and weighed down by a myriad of factors, including ironing out traffic plans and zoning changes. "We keep attending to those in hopes that we can eventually find a way to be able to accommodate everybody's concerns," he said.

Berger had a similar take, saying the deal has a lot of moving parts. "In a nutshell, it is complicated, to say the least," he said.

But he added that he expects an agreement by the end of the year, with plans being drawn up in 2017 and construction of a hotel beginning the year after that. Berger acknowledged some parties to the discussion are feeling "a bit of frustration" but said he personally is not. 

It's stalled a bit for the time being but Berger doesn't sound too discouraged. The "moving parts" referred to there involve a coordination of complicated zoning changes  and traffic planning in the works to create something the poo-bahs are calling the Trade District. Long time followers of your humble Yellow Blog may recognize this portion of our Noligarchs Map as "Jaegertown."



To this end, the Convention Center has been granted even more power to siphon off public money.

The Louisiana House unanimously approved legislation Tuesday (April 26) granting the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center new taxing authority to expand upriver with a 1,200-room hotel and entertainment district.

The bill state Rep. Walt Leger sponsored would open the way for the Convention Center to use tax increment financing, typically with a special sales tax that pays for infrastructure for a new commercial development.

Berger and Jaeger may be feeling "a bit of frustration" with the pace of things but it looks like their money is on the way. If you're a real estate developer, it certainly helps to have friends in high places willing to bend the rules in order to "incentivize" your business.  Donald Trump knows this. And look how well he's done.   But among those of us worrying whether we're about to be evicted by Airbnb or fined by an unaccountable traffic robot, it's difficult to gin up much sympathy.

Meanwhile, the Convention Center's bounty is being put to use to "lift up" some of the city's "culture bearers" after all. I'm pretty sure Ti Martin considers herself a culture bearer, anyway.

The former Louisiana ArtWorks building at Howard Avenue and Carondelet Street may soon change hands again for the second time in two years.

The likely buyer: the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, whose governing board voted Wednesday to move ahead with plans to purchase the nearly 94,000-square-foot building a block from Lee Circle for $8 million.

The likely tenant: the New Orleans Culinary and Hospitality Institute, which bought the building in 2014 but has faced numerous delays in getting its planned project off the ground.

The institute is backed by a group of culinary and hospitality industry leaders, including restaurateur Ti Martin of Commander's Palace and chef John Besh.

It paid $6.2 million for the five-story building with the idea of opening a world-class culinary teaching facility in it, but the onetime furniture store remains vacant.

So this "Institute" of restaurant barons bought a building for $6.2  million which they are about to sell for $8 million in public funds. They propose to parlay that into a public-private "workforce development" scheme to churn out more minimum wage workers to supply their businesses.  That way they'll turn an even more  efficient profit as even more tourist dollars are extruded through the machine during the Tricentennial Toast and beyond.

Meanwhile the bulk of the city's bills will be collected from residents through the most brutally regressive of means until many of us can't afford to actually live here anymore. No problem for the NOligarchs, of course. That just means more room to grow that tourism business that keeps lifting them higher and higher. This is why they have to build their "Mardi Gras In July" thing.  Hope everybody enjoys that.

"Urban Myth"

New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corp president Mark Romig presents an interesting word choice here.

Romig sought to clear up notions that tourism officials are actively trying to bring more college kids, armed with hand-grenades, into the city.

“There’s been an urban myth that a large portion of our marketing message is geared towards this girls and boys gone wild type of audience,” Romig said. “Less than 10 percent of our media mix, Buzzfeed, Flavor Pill, hits an age group of 18-24 years,” Romig explained.

In fact, the “sweet spot” for tourism is 35-65, Romig said. Mature visitors generally have more money and more “discretionary time.”  

I'm not sure the age demos you are targeting via your "media mix" necessarily says anything at all as to the content of the message you're sending.  Seems to me the "sweet spot" is grabbing visitors who have the "discretionary time" and money you're looking for but who also respond to the branding you've chosen to emphasize.  For example, it is possible to market a "girls and boys gone wild" atmosphere to dirty old men with money.

More importantly, the notion that our tourism mullahs are pursuing this angle is in no way an "urban myth."  It is the recommendation of a consultant's report the New Orleans Conventions and Visitors Bureau commissioned and then tried to keep out of the public record.  So Romig is not only being disingenuous about the overall marketing strategy, he's also insinuating that its critics are conspiracy nuts of some sort.  

This kind of snide dismissal is becoming more common among the wealth in this city and its defenders in the media, by the way.  Expect more "conspiracy theories" to proliferate in 2014.