#CityOfFest

On this list of 50 most populous US metro areas, your very favorite local area is the one with the highest poverty rate.

Among the 50 most populous U.S. metro areas covered by the new data, poverty rates ranged from 7.3 percent in and around San Jose, California to 18.6 percent in the New Orleans region.

“Louisiana has struggled with poverty for a long time and continues to,” said Jan Moller, director of the liberal Louisiana Budget Project. The state “remains a very good place if you have a college degree, or if you're in oil and gas, or if you’re kind of in the economic elite.”

“But it remains a very tough place for a very significant percentage of our population,” he added.

The poverty rate estimate for last year for all of Louisiana was 19.7 percent, meaning about 899,000 of the roughly 4.5 million residents there lived in poverty. The figure is just shy of the state’s 2016 poverty rate of 20.2 percent.

Hopefully somebody will do something about that.  Over the past decade we've tried firing all the teachers, dumping millions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks into movie studios and tourist facing infrastructure, and turning all the housing into luxury apartments and/or vacation rentals nobody can afford to live in. That didn't seem to work. What else can we do?

Hey what if everybody in New Orleans learned to code created and ran their own individual festival! 

A new program, set in New Orleans, called "Fest for Success," was announced on Wednesday (Sept. 12) by Cleveland Spears III, president and CEO of the Spears Group and founder of the National Fried Chicken Festival, which is Sept. 22 and 23 in Woldenberg Riverfront Park.

At the Wednesday press conference announcing the lineup of food for the National Fried Chicken Festival, Spears said he has created a foundation called Festivals for Good, which will launch "Fest for Success, presented by Chevron."

"Fest for Success" features a "two-day boot camp for entrepreneurs, festival producers and major event organizers," according to a press release. The sessions will focus on the various elements required to start and build a profitable festivals or events.

It's finally happened. We've created a festival that is themed after making festivals. Welcome to Fest Fest presented by the Cleveland Spears Festival Industrial Complex. Here is its founding document. 

The idea for the festival-event boot camps grew out of recommendations from the Boston Consulting Group, which was commissioned by the New Orleans & Co. -- formerly known as the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation and the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau - to develop a strategic plan for the New Orleans tourism and hospitality.

Maybe not everyone remembers that BCG study. It was the hired "research" portion of a plan pushed by Mitch Landrieu in 2012 that would have designated several neighborhoods in and near the CBD as a quasi-privatized "hospitality zone" whose tax revenues would have been managed by a board of hoteliers and mayoral appointees with "substantial business interests" in the designated area.  It took a lot of heavy lifting to slap that down although aspects of it have been put into practice via piecemeal policy decisions since then.  Expect echoes of that to show up again when City Council takes up the short term rental debate next month.

BCG also has had a hand in school privatization efforts in Philadelphia and New York
and, prior to that, here in New Orleans when they advised the oligarchs assembled on Ray Nagin's infamous Bring Back New Orleans Commission.

Anyway here they are now helping Cleveland Spears do festival entrepreneurship. You can sign up for his Fest Fest seminar in order to learn how to do that too.  But I can also just go ahead and tell you it's mostly about getting a cut when bad actors like Chevron want to do PR greenwashing type stuff.

"By supporting Fest for Success, we're promoting the Crescent City's culture as well investing in its economic growth," Leah Brown, Public Affairs Manager for Chevron's Gulf of Mexico Business Unit, said in a press release. We encourage everyone with a festival idea to take part in these two-day workshops to learn more about organizing and hosting a successful event in New Orleans."

Or if you just want to see more of this business model in action, you can check out Spears's Fried Chicken Festival  this weekend.  Its "official hospitality partner" is Sonder.

"Urban Myth"

New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corp president Mark Romig presents an interesting word choice here.

Romig sought to clear up notions that tourism officials are actively trying to bring more college kids, armed with hand-grenades, into the city.

“There’s been an urban myth that a large portion of our marketing message is geared towards this girls and boys gone wild type of audience,” Romig said. “Less than 10 percent of our media mix, Buzzfeed, Flavor Pill, hits an age group of 18-24 years,” Romig explained.

In fact, the “sweet spot” for tourism is 35-65, Romig said. Mature visitors generally have more money and more “discretionary time.”  

I'm not sure the age demos you are targeting via your "media mix" necessarily says anything at all as to the content of the message you're sending.  Seems to me the "sweet spot" is grabbing visitors who have the "discretionary time" and money you're looking for but who also respond to the branding you've chosen to emphasize.  For example, it is possible to market a "girls and boys gone wild" atmosphere to dirty old men with money.

More importantly, the notion that our tourism mullahs are pursuing this angle is in no way an "urban myth."  It is the recommendation of a consultant's report the New Orleans Conventions and Visitors Bureau commissioned and then tried to keep out of the public record.  So Romig is not only being disingenuous about the overall marketing strategy, he's also insinuating that its critics are conspiracy nuts of some sort.  

This kind of snide dismissal is becoming more common among the wealth in this city and its defenders in the media, by the way.  Expect more "conspiracy theories" to proliferate in 2014.

The Boston Club

You might remember them from such boondoggles as the dead (for now) Hospitality Zone proposal, but did you know the Boston Consulting Group was also heavily involved in the move to privatize public education?

There is a new scandal in New York City. It seems the New York City Housing Authority paid $10 million to the Boston Consulting Group to write a report that is not available to the public that paid for it. According to the article in the New York Daily News, the report was commissioned by someone at the Housing Authority who used to work for the Boston Consulting Group.

Now, readers of this blog may recall that the Boston Consulting Group was paid over $1 million in private funds to draft a short little paper recommending the privatization of a large number of public schools in Philadelphia. It was also hired (not sure the price tag) to draft the plan for the Transition Planning Commission that merges the schools of Memphis and Shelby County, moving a large number of children and $212 million into private hands.

 I wonder if the New York report is not available to the public due to its "proprietary nature." 

Anyway, it turns out BCG also provided key advice to former Mayor Ray Nagin's infamous Bring Back New Orleans Commission back during the heady "blank slate" days.

The long-term plan for New Orleans schools is still unfolding, counters J. Puckett, a senior vice president at the Boston Consulting Group. His is one of the many groups advising the education subcommittee of the mayor's Bring Back New Orleans Commission.

The education committee will have the system's long-term vision hammered out by the end of the year, and then the real work of fleshing it out begins. But the idea "is to create the educational model for the US," says Mr. Puckett. "It's a very bold ambition, but one that has been met with real excitement."

The various groups are currently searching nationally and internationally for "best practices" in education. These might include strong preschool and international baccalaureate programs, stiffer standards, and more accountability.

"There seems to be a growing consensus that charter schools are a strong part of the short-term plan, but I think it's still a question in the long-term," says Puckett.

Fast forward seven years and we find current Mayor Landrieu at Aspen last month boasting that New Orleans has become "this nation's most immediate laboratory for innovation and change across a whole spectrum of disciplines." One wonders how many patents BCG can claim on the research produced by this metaphorical laboratory.  Although, that information may also be proprietary.