You won't believe who is trying to defund the police now

Amazingly, it is New Orleans and Co. 

Facing a collapsed tourism industry due to the coronavirus pandemic, two publicly-funded tourism agencies in New Orleans have cut funding for supplemental security and infrastructure improvements in the French Quarter. And one of them is trying to take back millions of unspent funds it’s contributed in years past.

The agencies in question are the Ernest N. Morial New Orleans Convention Center — a public body — and New Orleans and Company, a private nonprofit group that serves as the marketing agency for the city’s tourism industry. Both organizations had signed agreements with the city that will expire in a few months.

New Orleans and Company, however, has already cancelled one of its contracts with the city. 

With the end of the agreements, the city stands to lose roughly $5.7 million that it had in 2019 for French Quarter security and improvements. The biggest chunk of that money, $2.5 million per year, has gone to pay for Louisiana State Police patrols in the French Quarter. Another $1.2 million per year went to the French Quarter Task Force — an initiative originally created by entrepreneur Sidney Torres that pays off-duty NOPD officers to patrol the quarter in blue-light Smart Cars.

Okay so it is the Convention Center and NO & Co. For its part, the Convention Center says they are all paid up and the deal that created this fund is expiring, all of which seems to be true. But also they have to decide how much money they want to give away to Ron Forman so you can see why that might be a priority. 

But NO & Co. is the agency that is actually trying to take some of the money back... although it will surprise no one to know that the city disputes the amount they've actually paid and says also that they may in fact be behind on these obligations.

While New Orleans and Company believes that the money should be returned, the city has recently argued that New Orleans and Company actually owes additional money to the improvement fund. At a June FQMD board meeting, Smith stated that “the City is still missing the New Orleans & Co. 2019 remittances that came to about $2,000,000.00 and they have been attempting to collect these since February,” according to meeting notes.

Disputed U-O-MEs notwithstanding, why not just let the thing drop?   It's time to start de-funding the police/surveillance state and the French Quarter is the most overly-policed and heavily surveiled neighborhood in our city.  Sounds like a great place to start. 

Not sure that's the city's plan, though. A .25 cent sales tax renewal on the ballot in December would continue supplemental patrols there. The only question, it seems, is who will be doing the patrolling. 

One of the two plans comes from Mayor LaToya Cantrell, who wants to use the money to fund a new security team made up of a mix of police officers and civilians. The other is being championed by the French Quarter Management District — a state created body whose board is largely made up of appointees from tourism industry groups and French Quarter business and neighborhood groups. It hopes to use the money to expand an existing security detail made up of off-duty New Orleans Police Department officers.

It seems like the dispute here is really about control over turf.  While FQMD's plan is to keep paying the task force (famously founded by Sidney Torres) the mayor wants to give it to something called a "Grounds Patrol" operated by the city's Homeland Security department.  The key difference is that the Grounds Patrol would deputize civilian "quality of life" officers relegated to code enforcement which, the claim is, would free up NOPD to focus on real police work.  This sounds dubious.  In fact, The Lens points out in that article that model is very much along the lines of a failed Landrieu Administration experiment known as NOLA Patrol which had to be discontinued after the citizen deputies were found out to have been issuing traffic tickets.  

Again, it would appear that this dispute isn't so much about how best to spend a shrinking pot of policing money.  It's about who controls the pot and how much extra patronage they can wring from it. 

But even if the tax is renewed, the city is projecting that collections will be significantly lower than in years past due to a shrinking tourism industry brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Current projections for 2021 are $1.8 million, compared to $3 million last year. 

But that level of funding would expand the current size of the French Quarter Task force if all the revenue is dedicated to FQMD, even if New Orleans and Company ceased their $1.2 million contribution to the French Quarter Task Force.

Under Cantrell’s plan, the first $1.3 million raised by the sales tax would go to the Unified French Quarter Patrol along with an additional $1.5 million in funding from the French Market Corporation. 

The remainder of the sales tax, estimated to be $500,000 in 2021, would be administered by a newly created French Quarter Economic Development Oversight Committee. That extra money would be used for other public safety and quality of life initiatives within the French Quarter.

"Other public safety and quality of life initiatives" = what, exactly?  Well, that's for you to find out.  Suffice to say anytime you see something disbursed in the name of "economic development" in this city, you can begin looking for the crony capitalists right then and there.

More to the point, though, all of this petty squabbling and attendant corruption could be avoided (and patrons of French Quarter businesses could get a sales tax break) if we would just agree to de-fund the wholly unnecessary police-surveillance apparatus altogether.   But for some reason nobody is talking about doing that except the tourism agencies.  Never thought we'd see the day.