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.