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.