Something something Ponzi something

This is a touchy conversation to have in New Orleans. It comes too close to threatening a perpetual scam run by some Very Important people.

“Audubon Institute is not a park; it’s a large organization that runs a park,” said Mike Moffitt, a former commissioner of City Park. “It seems to me very confusing to have funding so broadly distributed, because it doesn’t get any focus. If the city needs to fund insectariums and aquariums and other projects, then they should fund them, but they shouldn’t fund them thinking they’re funding a park.”

The need for funding drives initiatives for park leaders to create “amusements” that charge admission, the panelists said, but every new amusement takes away from land that was previously open to the public, a concept described as “We pave our parks in order to save them.” Debra Howell of Save Audubon Park said that these projects often end up losing money anyway, and become part of the larger system that needs financial support, rather than contributing to it.

“Every new facility loses money rather than raises money, and the next thing you hear is yet another plan for a new facility,” Howell said. “At some point when does it become obvious that none of these new facilities are going to raise money?”

The "next facility" is the fundraising pitch that keeps everything going. When your non-profit launches a new campaign to the donor base, it's helpful to say you're raising the money for a shiny new thing. That works better than just begging for money to stay afloat.   It's sort of like the way firms like Uber leverage piles of venture capital to hide their massively unprofitable business models. Which is why Ron Forman can pull down a six figure salary running a public-private "non profit."

Of course, a park is not a start-up. It is a public resource. It isn't supposed to turn a profit. But because we like to pretend that everything is better if it is run like a business through "public-private-partnerships" we create all sorts of byzantine opportunities for socialites and oligarchs to pass public money around to each other.

Justin Kray of “City Park for Everyone” noted that City Park is also likely to begin looking for tax support from voters, and that he too thinks a single citywide system would be a better approach. He noted that while individual parks such as Audubon and City Park have conducted surveys of their users, he’s not aware of any survey of recreation of the entire city.

“We’re continuing to perpetuate bad solutions to a problem that’s structural about how parks are funded,” Kray said. “I’d like to contemplate a future where we have a unified parks governance and operational strategy citywide. All these things are related, and the health of the city is in large part related to the health of the parks system.”

Ideally, all of this would fall under one unified NORD/Parks and Parkways department with its own dedicated funding and a mandate to provide free open and equal access to facilities in each and every neighborhood.  But that would be horning in on too many rackets.