Quote of the week

If we can get only one big win out of the post-COVID New Orleans political war, bringing the Convention Center heel would be pretty nice one to have. What's interesting about this board meeting is it sounds like there is caution (or at least embarrassment) over the fact that their big hotel project is still proceeding.  But one also gets the sense that nobody knows how to halt its momentum.

“My bigger point is, I want to make sure we’re thinking about this before we go put up $80 million, $90 million or whatever it is in site costs and other things,” Berni said. “The demand side is going to be different. It’s like post-9/11 or post-Katrina, we’re just living in a different world.”

But Convention Center President and General Manager Michael Sawaya told Berni and the rest of the board that the projects weren’t on pause, at least behind the scenes. Although the virus and related government restrictions have pushed back certain public-facing benchmarks and votes, negotiations with private developers have forged ahead.

In a meeting this week, Sawaya again reported that negotiations on the hotel deal, which were expected to be done in January, were ongoing and that the center’s attorneys were working on a counter-offer that they hoped to send to the developers this week.

At least they're sensitive to the public impression all of this makes.  The tide had been turning against the Convention Center in the months before the virus crisis. But now the emergency has caused longstanding questions about what it does with the hundreds of millions of dollars in public money it is sitting on to gain even more potency. 

And now look what's happening.  I don't think we'd have ever seen a statement like this from a sitting New Orleans City Councilmember before now.

“This whole thing reeks,” Councilwoman Kristin Palmer said in a Thursday phone interview.

“Why do we want to create something that’s going to take away from existing businesses? Because it very well could. I don’t understand what they’re trying to do. Are they trying to create this district that’s like Disney World with the Convention Center so people never have to leave?”

That, she said, would defeat the whole purpose of the Convention Center: to attract visitors (and their highly coveted out-of-town cash) and fill up existing hotels and businesses.

“These tourist leaders, these hospitality leaders are saying, ‘We need a whole other thing to attract people to this city,’ ” she said. “I call bull on that. We have so many things that we aren’t marketing that we already have. … We need to flip the script. We need to define tourism on our own level.”

I want to know more about what Kristin thinks we need to "market" differently.  It still sounds like she may think this is question of selling out smarter or something.  But we'll come back to that.  Leaving that aside, this is good to see.  It's about thirty years too late. But it's still good.