Zombie Zone

This should be interesting.  Word comes in at this late hour that the legislature might try to sneak in the original version of the HoZone bill minus Senator Peterson's amendments this afternoon.

Update: The bill did not come up today after all.

In today's papers, the mayor made some extraordinary comments that should be noted.  For instance, here he tells City Business that the amendments, which take into account the democratically expressed concerns of actual downtown residents, “don’t make any sense from a governing perspective.”  According to the mayor. "governing perspective" comes not from listening to the concerns of the constituency so much as being in the right meetings with the relevant lords.

But Landrieu insisted he was “counting votes” in the legislature and said that Peterson refused to accept a proposal that was workable.

“Had she been in all the meetings I had been in, or if she would have taken responsibility for creating this out of nothing, instead of coming in during the middle, she may have been more attuned to the political possibilities,” Landrieu said.

Near the end of this story in this morning's Times-Picayune Landrieu explains the bank shot trickle-down economics behind his rejection of Peterson's amendments.

Landrieu said the argument that more of the new tax revenue should go to infrastructure improvements than marketing is "penny-wise and pound-foolish ... because marketing is actually the thing that actually produces more tax revenue for infrastructure."

Rrriiight. Mitch is literally proposing that we market our way to better infrastructure. 

Let's back up a few steps here just to show how absurd all this is.  The original reason Mitch and friends told us we needed a HoZone tax was because the Convention Center had offered to spend its $30 million surplus on downtown street improvements but insisted that a continuing revenue source be created in order to maintain those improvements.  Of course there's no real need to tie this money which already exists to a new HoZone tax but Mitch and friends needed a bargaining chip and figured these infrastructure improvements would do. They even used the "ticking clock" of the countdown to next year's Superbowl as a kind of false crisis in order to force the issue.

So in order to resolve this crisis that Mitch and friends had intentionally invented, they demanded that the legislature create a special district governed by an unelected superboard of hospitality magnates.  The superboard would determine how revenues generated by taxes on things like hotel rooms and restaurant bills could be dispersed.

According to their plan some of that money would  indeed go toward maintaining the promised street improvements, but most of it would go to the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corp and the Convention and Vistitors Bureau where it would be used primarily to fund advertising campaigns.  Or at least that's what we were told. Since the CVB likes to consider itself a private club its leadership insists that it need not disclose exactly what it does with the public funds it receives.

Senator Peterson's amendments reversed all of this.  The amended bill struck the superboard entirely and re-directed the larger share of the revenue away from the hoteliers' clubs and back toward the street maintenance Mitch and friends began this process by telling us were the essential issue in the first place.  But because Peterson had not "been in all the meetings" Mitch immediately declared her revisions a "nonstarter."

And now he's telling us that the real way to spend money on infrastructure... you know... the way that makes sense from a "governing perspective" works like this.  First, give all the money to the private hoteliers' clubs.  Next, the clubs use that money to make commercials for their hotels (probably... but who can know?)  Then later, through some "pound-wise" process this all trickles back into money for street maintenance.  How exactly isn't important.  Nor is it clear how long this trickle-down effect takes which is weird given that the "clock is ticking" and all.

Anyway Mitch's vote counting must have gone well for him because apparently this evening Senator Murray has brought up the bill minus the amendments for a full vote of the state senate (Update: No this is not correct as it turns out) so stay tuned.  As we noted in an earlier post, arrogance is quite the thing these days.