Hotel Inertia

We know the Convention Center board has its back to the ropes right now in the public relations arena.  I mean if there was ever a time to win an argument over what should be done with their $200 million + slush fund, this is it. Today the Advocate reminds us that even the BGR Good-Government-For-Some Brahmins are on the right side of this one.

The Bureau of Governmental Research, a public policy watchdog, has called on the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center leadership to re-think plans for a $557 million hotel, saying it is an especially bad use of taxpayers' money at a time when the coronavirus pandemic is expected to blow a large hole in the city's finances

Nobody from the Convention Center has a good answer to that in this article.  Walt Leger basically says he'll get back to them.  And you can see why they might want to take a little time to get their story straight. It wasn't too long ago they were telling us that the tourism and convention business was BOOMING in New Orleans so they needed this hotel to create more capacity.  Today we learned hotel occupancy is down to about 4% in the city so that argument isn't going anywhere.  However, at the same time that they were telling us about all the big business they were doing, they were also saying the convention business is tight and competition is "cutthroat" which also meant they needed to build their own hotel.

So they'll have it either way. The hotel project has its own inertia now and even a global pandemic is making it difficult to stop.  By the time this is over, we'll start hearing it needs to be built because it's an "economic recovery" project.