Zombie Ho-Zone

We always figured it would be back.  Pope Mitch doesn't like listening to the little people who yell at him.

Legal Notices

PUBLIC NOTICE (NOTICE OF INTENTION TO INTRODUCE BILL) Public notice is hereby given that there may be introduced at the session of the Legislature to be convened on April 8, 2013, a bill relative to assessments that are levied by a comprehensive membership based tourism organization on some or all of its members that operate hotels or motels in Orleans Parish; calculated by reference either to room occupancy or room sales; and for the general purposes of the organization or otherwise for the direct or indirect benefit of economic development, hospitality infrastructure or services, and/or tourism growth; to provide for levying such assessments as surcharges on hotel or motel folios; and to provide for related matters.

H/T Lunanola 

Update:  See also

PUBLIC NOTICE (NOTICE OF INTENTION TO INTRODUCE BILL) Public notice is hereby given, as provided by Article III, Section 13 of the Constitution of Louisiana, that there may be introduced at the session of the Legislature to be convened on April 8, 2013, a bill or bills relative to the City of New Orleans: to authorize the governing authority to levy and collect a hotel and/or motel occupancy tax, a food and beverage tax; and provide for the use of the tax; and provide for related matters. 

In addition to all the nasty implications of the Hospitality Zone we looked at last year, these are proposals for local service taxes that may be levied on top of Bobby Jindal's plan to slam Louisiana residents with the highest sales taxes in the country. 

Federal City

Quite a city of juxtapositions we've become.  Our school boards and our public health services are all being farmed out to privatized management.  The streets are policed by several private security outfits. We've tried and will no doubt try again to grant taxing authority to tourism magnates.

But what hasn't been privatized has been taken over by the Feds.

Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman and U.S. Department of Justice officials announced a long-awaited agreement on Tuesday for federal oversight of the city's notoriously shoddy and dangerous jail. The 49-page consent decree amounts to a blueprint for reforms and staffing fixes at a jail facility where 38 inmates have died over the past seven years, where escapes are commonplace, and where safety and sanitary conditions are routinely compromised, critics say.

Signed and submitted to U.S. District Judge Lance Africk for approval, the document marks Gusman's office as the latest local agency in New Orleans to succumb to outside oversight.

But despite having either sold everything off or turned it over to outside direction, the cost of everything just keeps going up and up and up. Funny how that works.

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.

The news is about us, after all

The difference between these reactions in New Orleans and Birmingham doesn't have as much to do with the quality of the newspapers as it has to do with the way the locals view their cities. People in New Orleans want to read about what's happening in New Orleans and believe someone should be writing about that every day. 

Critics often look down on New Orleans for its fanatically provincial sense of community.  But they underestimate that at their peril as well.

The Boston Consulting Group report suggested that the architects of the HoZone should reach out to community/neighborhood groups but "not put too much effort" into it.  If the "stakeholders" in the HoZone proposal learned anything from this debacle I would hope they learned their 1.5 to 2 million dollar report was flawed in at least one fatal way...New Orleans neighborhood and community groups should be listened to with gravitas.   Having modeled their report on transient cities like Las Vegas, I suspect the BCG sadly underestimated the strength of New Orleans' community organizations and neighborhoods.

What's even sadder is that the "stakeholders" completely ignored the neighborhood and community organizations and tried to push the bill through without any public input or discourse.  They never even tried to involve the community in their plans.

Satire is dead

Last week I suggested that journalists displaced by the collapse of the Times-Picayune might take advantage of the boom in government Public Relations jobs and start looking for work actually writing rather than exploding the lies of our beleaguered ruling classes for a change.  Later that same day, when, the mayor offered this statement

I look forward to talking with new management and others who have a stake in the future of The Times-Picayune to discuss how we can help the newspaper grow and not diminish.

 I figured he must be on the same page I was.  Sorry to quote myself from only a week ago but, here's what I thought the plan would look like.

Say, for example, if maybe we turned Howard Avenue into a special journalism taxing district... or JoZone, if you will. Then we could direct that revenue to a superboard staffed by several mayoral appointees and the Convention and Visitors Bureau who could trickle the money back into quality news stories we all can enjoy.  You know, feel good stuff like, "Unexpected Health Benefits Of Oiled Shellfish" or "Councilmembers Enjoy Well-deserved Time Off" or "Jindal's Nationwide Speaking Tour Appreciated By All" "NOPD Lauded For (Very) Warm Treatment of Henry Glover"

Now that may look like a stupid joke to you and me but, as it turns out, Boston Consulting Group.. the people who brought you the HoZone concept.. were already a step ahead of us.  James Gill explains.

Crime stories must be kept off The Times-Picayune's front page, according to the Boston consultants who produced a tourism "master plan" for New Orleans in 2009.

They won't have to worry about that so much from now on.

The report urges hiring a PR firm to "remove negative crime perception and lower crime news-worthiness." To achieve this it is apparently necessary to "determine type of information to be reported and disbursement (sic)" and to "meet with NOPD to determine feasibility based on developed parameters."

One thing we're learning is you've got to get up pretty early in the morning to out-evil the boys and girls at BCG.  Although it looks as if the "Public-private" business lobbying monster, GNO inc is trying.  

Zombie Zone

This should be interesting.  Word comes in at this late hour that the legislature might try to sneak in the original version of the HoZone bill minus Senator Peterson's amendments this afternoon.

Update: The bill did not come up today after all.

In today's papers, the mayor made some extraordinary comments that should be noted.  For instance, here he tells City Business that the amendments, which take into account the democratically expressed concerns of actual downtown residents, “don’t make any sense from a governing perspective.”  According to the mayor. "governing perspective" comes not from listening to the concerns of the constituency so much as being in the right meetings with the relevant lords.

But Landrieu insisted he was “counting votes” in the legislature and said that Peterson refused to accept a proposal that was workable.

“Had she been in all the meetings I had been in, or if she would have taken responsibility for creating this out of nothing, instead of coming in during the middle, she may have been more attuned to the political possibilities,” Landrieu said.

Near the end of this story in this morning's Times-Picayune Landrieu explains the bank shot trickle-down economics behind his rejection of Peterson's amendments.

Landrieu said the argument that more of the new tax revenue should go to infrastructure improvements than marketing is "penny-wise and pound-foolish ... because marketing is actually the thing that actually produces more tax revenue for infrastructure."

Rrriiight. Mitch is literally proposing that we market our way to better infrastructure. 

Let's back up a few steps here just to show how absurd all this is.  The original reason Mitch and friends told us we needed a HoZone tax was because the Convention Center had offered to spend its $30 million surplus on downtown street improvements but insisted that a continuing revenue source be created in order to maintain those improvements.  Of course there's no real need to tie this money which already exists to a new HoZone tax but Mitch and friends needed a bargaining chip and figured these infrastructure improvements would do. They even used the "ticking clock" of the countdown to next year's Superbowl as a kind of false crisis in order to force the issue.

So in order to resolve this crisis that Mitch and friends had intentionally invented, they demanded that the legislature create a special district governed by an unelected superboard of hospitality magnates.  The superboard would determine how revenues generated by taxes on things like hotel rooms and restaurant bills could be dispersed.

According to their plan some of that money would  indeed go toward maintaining the promised street improvements, but most of it would go to the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corp and the Convention and Vistitors Bureau where it would be used primarily to fund advertising campaigns.  Or at least that's what we were told. Since the CVB likes to consider itself a private club its leadership insists that it need not disclose exactly what it does with the public funds it receives.

Senator Peterson's amendments reversed all of this.  The amended bill struck the superboard entirely and re-directed the larger share of the revenue away from the hoteliers' clubs and back toward the street maintenance Mitch and friends began this process by telling us were the essential issue in the first place.  But because Peterson had not "been in all the meetings" Mitch immediately declared her revisions a "nonstarter."

And now he's telling us that the real way to spend money on infrastructure... you know... the way that makes sense from a "governing perspective" works like this.  First, give all the money to the private hoteliers' clubs.  Next, the clubs use that money to make commercials for their hotels (probably... but who can know?)  Then later, through some "pound-wise" process this all trickles back into money for street maintenance.  How exactly isn't important.  Nor is it clear how long this trickle-down effect takes which is weird given that the "clock is ticking" and all.

Anyway Mitch's vote counting must have gone well for him because apparently this evening Senator Murray has brought up the bill minus the amendments for a full vote of the state senate (Update: No this is not correct as it turns out) so stay tuned.  As we noted in an earlier post, arrogance is quite the thing these days.

Taking their zone and going home

Tourism magnates show their true colors.

Sources say the proposed "Hospitality Zone" bill appears dead for this year’s legislative session. That news comes after a Senate committee amended the proposed measure at the request of state Sen. Karen Carter-Peterson, D-New Orleans. Hospitality industry leaders reportedly cannot accept Peterson’s amendments, and they are said to be ready to pull the plug on the bill.

Peterson's amendments struck the unnecessary  super board of business owners and dedicated more money to infrastructure maintenance (the bill's big selling point) than to the Convention and Visitors Bureau's slush fund (the real reason CVB wanted this in the first place). 

By pulling the bill, Mayor Landrieu and his hotelier allies are telling us that if they can't get what they want, downtown doesn't get any of these street repairs they keep telling us we need before the Superbowl.  What happened? Mitch kept telling us the "clock is ticking." Did they call a timeout?

Shifting State of the City

Just noticed on a parallel internet that the mayor's big "State of the City" address has been moved from the NOCCA campus over to the Mahalia Jackson Theater. The details copied and pasted from what I assume was a press release.

LAST-MINUTE LOCATION CHANGE FOR Mayor Landrieu's "2012 State of the City Address tomorrow at 2:00 PM

Due to an overwhelming response to attend, we are relocating the State of the City speech to the Mahalia Jackson Theatre. Thank you for your interest and we will see you there.

Mayor Landrieu’s State of the City speech

Mahalia Jackson Theatre

May 22, 2012 at 2:00 p.m.

Update: Found the actual press release here.

Meanwhile, here's the latest on the amended  HoZone bill, which Mitch is likely to bring up in tomorrow's speech.

Also, speaking of the Mahalia Jackson Theater, just this past Friday I had my first chance to visit Armstrong Park since it reopened to the public.  I happened on a small wedding ceremony in Congo Square of all places just as it was concluding. None of this has anything to do with anything other than to say that aside from the controversial statuary, it looks pretty nice in there.  Here, I took a quick photo of the lagoon.

The pie explodes

Dambala suspects the estimated revenue from the HoZone tax has been lowballed in the paper.

That's 19 million and it doesn't even take into account the restaurant and parking taxes proposed for the zone.  I am guessing this thing is going to generate between 25 and 30 million...possibly double what they are projecting.  However the RevPar number is a cumulative average of all hotel rooms rented in the city, while the bulk of hotels lie in the proposed Hospitality Zone, many do not.  I do not believe the tax will apply to hotel/motel rooms outside of the Zone so this number may be high...still it will most likely be higher than the base 16 million they are projecting for all the extra taxes imposed. 

Also, they are not factoring in the annual increase in room rentals we've seen almost every year for the past few years. The 2012 numbers are already up 20.4% (per Smith Travel Research) from last year. That puts this year's total revenues at $1,310,834,532. That would put the 2012 tax generated from only the hotel/motel tax @ $22,939,604 (Please check my math).

Since we don't have exact numbers for rooms and revenue specific to the zone, this isn't the most precise guess but you can see what he's getting at. Also if you add the fact that tourism officials are expecting to increase the annual volume of visitors to downtown amusements, there's another reason to expect that the pie is going to be plenty exploded enough for Convention and Visitors' Bureau to be more than pleased even with their reduced slice.

Dambala found the "proprietary" Ho-Zone report

Fittingly enough, it turns out the strategy it outlines involves emphasizing the "Ho".

It basically states that the city's efforts to market to an older, more mature tourist have failed over the past decade.  The goal now is to market towards a younger, drunker crowd. 

There's more there so go read it.  But the key point is that the purpose of the Ho-Zone was always about turning neighborhoods into Adult Disneylands operated by "stakeholder" hoteliers and such.

Update:  It's important not to report Mitch's phony justifications in this form.

Landrieu, who as Louisiana's lieutenant governor served as the state's top tourism official, has led the charge to create a hospitality zone in part to create a funding stream to maintain $30 million in infrastructure improvements that the convention center's board has promised to make in and around the Quarter in preparation for next year's Super Bowl. Another $10 million in FEMA money is slated to be spent on the neighborhood's crumbling streets and sidewalks.

But wait. According to this same article, two thirds of the estimated $16 million in revenue generated from the HoZone taxes will go directly to NOTMC and NOCVB for marketing purposes.  Furthermore, HoZone proponents have already claimed that the entire HoZone scheme is based on the recommendations of a consultant's report which we've now seen is basically a strategy for selling the Quarter as a puke pad for frat boys. 

This isn't about "maintaining infrastructure improvements" that are already scheduled and funded regardless of whether the HoZone happens.  It's about funding the hoteliers' marketing campaign and also granting them an inappropriate quasi-governmental role over the New Orleans neighborhoods their businesses already exploit.

This week's Gambit endorses the HoZone

No link yet but the gist is they think the bill has been "fixed" because the board will now (at least nominally) function in an "advisory" role and because they think the distribution of funds between the city and the tourism associations has been improved somehow.

But the problem was always that the hoteliers shouldn't be given any sort of quasi-private official capacity for deciding how the city allocates resources. If they want to fund their own marketing campaign through their professional associations they're welcome to go right ahead and do that on their own. 

Gambit also cites the promise of $40 million in "improvements" made available from the Convention Center and from CDBG funds as compelling reason for approving the HoZone.  But it's never been clear why one necessitates the other. To a lot of people, it looks like the Convention Center is holding a pile of surplus money hostage.

Just because the Convention Center board voted during March 2012 to contribute up to $30 million for refurbishing the Vieux Carré and a larger hospitality zone in advance of next year’s Super Bowl event on February 3, 2013 does not mean that vague and over-reaching legislation should be rushed through as an on-demand commodity in response to a proffered enticement. Where is the integrity in this process?

Anyway, my guess is the HoZone is going to pass with a little cosmetic tweaking to give the appearance of a vector for "community input". Maybe some of the Very Important Persons in the neighborhood associations will get seats on the board or something.

Well, then...

Mitch calls on the Hospitality Lords to "storm the castle" and fight for their Ho-Zone fiefdom... or something.

In a brief but fiery speech, Mayor Mitch Landrieu urged hundreds of hospitality industry executives and workers to storm the state capitol next week to show support for a controversial proposal to create a new hospitality district in downtown New Orleans and the French Quarter, even as one of the bill's original backers in the legislature withdrew his support Thursday. Landrieu criticized opponents of the proposal for being focused on "small details" while ignoring the "big picture" that New Orleans is trying to position itself to more than double its visitation numbers and tourism revenue by 2018.

"All we want to do is get to work," Landrieu said. "If you show up and let your voice be heard, (legislators) will follow you."

Clear enough?  It's their city.  The Mayor is telling them to take it. 

It's their city

Want to take a look at the documents that form the basis of their public policy proposals?  Yeah that's really none of your business.

Unfortunately my request for access to the full version of the report was denied by New Orleans Convention & Visitors Bureau staff due to its “proprietary” nature. Instead, I was offered a link to the press release issued by this agency in January 2010: New Orleans Launches Strategic Unified Master Plan for the Tourism Industry.

But consider this: If this report is serving as the rationale for major policy decisions, taxing authority considerations, and unprecedented acts of legislation in our city, then shouldn’t it be available for review in the public realm for proper review and consideration?

If a private business association wants to deny public records requests on the grounds that such records are "proprietary" information, isn't that precisely the problem with the whole concept of turning government authority over to these business associations in the first place? 

This is similar to the charter school boards who don't think open meetings law applies to them.  This is what the mayor means when he talks about "public-private partnerships."  For the most part, the public is expected to be the silent partner.

The sound of 100 hands not clapping

VCPORA gathered  a large group of residents at St. Mark's Church last night to voice objections to the Ho-Zone proposal.  But nobody was there to listen so it can't have made much of a sound.

As currently written, the proposal, crafted by Mayor Mitch Landrieu's administration and local tourism leaders and sponsored by state Sen. Ed Murray and state Rep. Walt Leger III, would create a new board comprising as many as 11 appointees, about half of whom would serve at the mayor's pleasure and without set terms. But to the dismay of those who came seeking a better understanding of the nuances of the bill, no one from Landrieu's staff, the city's legislative delegation or the tourism industry attended the meeting.

Miscellaneous reminders, links, etc.

•  Bill Clinton reviewed Robert Caro's new book about LBJ in the New York Times yesterday. 
  
  

  You don’t have to be a policy wonk to marvel at the political skill L.B.J. wielded to resuscitate a bill that seemed doomed to never get a vote on the floor of either chamber. Southern Democrats were masters at bottling up legislation they hated, particularly bills expanding civil rights for black Americans. Their skills at obstruction were so admired that the newly sworn-in Johnson was firmly counseled by an ally against using the political capital he’d inherited as a result of the assassination on such a hopeless cause. 

  
  

  According to Caro, Johnson responded, “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?” 

  
  

  This is the question every president must ask and answer. For Lyndon Johnson in the final weeks of 1963, the presidency was for two things: passing a civil rights bill with teeth, to replace the much weaker 1957 law he’d helped to pass as Senate majority leader, and launching the War on Poverty. That neither of these causes was in fact hopeless was clear possibly only to him, as few Americans in our history have matched Johnson’s knowledge of how to move legislation, and legislators.

  Clinton himself being one of those Americans who failed to match "Johnson’s knowledge of how to move legislation, and legislators."



• A federal judge in Virginia has ruled that clicking the "Like" button on Facebook is not protected speech.
  
  

  Exactly what a “like” means — if anything — played a part in a case in Virginia involving six people who say Sheriff B. J. Roberts of Hampton fired them for supporting an opponent in his 2009 re-election bid, which he won. The workers sued, saying their First Amendment rights were violated. 

  
  

  Sheriff Roberts said some of the workers were let go because he wanted to replace them with sworn deputies while others were dismissed because of poor performance or his belief that their actions “hindered the harmony and efficiency of the office.” 

  
  

  One of those workers, Daniel Ray Carter, had “liked” the Facebook page of Sheriff Roberts’s opponent, Jim Adams. 

  
  

  While public employees are allowed to speak as citizens on matters of public concern, Judge Raymond A. Jackson of Federal District Court ruled that clicking the “like” button did not amount to expressive speech. In other words, it was not the same as actually writing out a message and posting it on the site.

  
  
  This is actually even more complicated than it seems. For example, clicking "Like" is often just a request for more information about a subject that has a Facebook page. I may not support a candidate but if I want to keep up with his or her campaign just for informational purposes, the way to do that is by "liking" the campaign's Facebook page.  In essence, the "Like" button is really just a means of subscribing to a news feed and, as such, is just a way a voter might keep up with developments in an upcoming race.  Voters using Facebook this way could "like" all of the candidates running for a particular office without necessarily supporting any of them. What this ruling says, then, is that a person can be punished simply for reading unapproved content.  Scary stuff.


• The long sad story of the "Katrina Cottage" is coming to its sad sad end.
  
  

  Within a day of the program’s announcement, in October 2006, a company known as  Cypress Realty Partners secured incorporation papers in Louisiana and, despite its lack of a track record, was chosen by the state from among 45 companies seeking to be the sole developer of Katrina Cottages in Louisiana.
  
  Cypress was founded by four college friends, according to profile of them in the University of Virginia’s alumni magazine: Jonathon Cave, William Smith Jr., Kristopher Kirkpatrick and Benjamin Dupuy, all of whom graduated from UVA in the 1990s.
  
  Cave is a co-founder of The Cypress Group, a Washington, D.C.-based corporation that “provides institutional investment and corporate managers with actionable intelligence and analysis of political processes with outcome-specific probability and immediate market relevance,” according to marketing materials.
  
  Before the Katrina Cottages came along, the Cypress Group had no experience in real estate development.
  Dupuy was a Washington lobbyist at the time Cypress Realty Partners was incorporated.
  
  Kirkpatrick, a scion of one-time state Rep. Claude Kirkpatrick of Baton Rouge, in June 2007 formed a second entity, Katrina Cottage Partners, LLC, to claim a piece of the action under the federal program Cypress Realty Partners was managing. Louisiana System Built Homes, operating out of the abandoned Fruit of the Loom site in St. Martinville, was to do the actual fabricating of the modular units.

  I'll bet you're thinking you can pretty much write the rest of the story given that much information right there.



• The parts of this column about the death of Adam Yauch where Dave Zirin describes the New York City of the 1980s remind me a little bit of New Orleans today.
  
  

  The Beasties were global ambassadors from a lost New York City since smothered under the weight of police violence and gentrification. It was a city that churned out hip hop and basketball legends with arrogant ease. It was a city where the question “what do you do” was less about your job than what you did after work. It was a city where the clubs you could get into were less important than the neighborhoods you could get into – and out of. It was a city where if you could see over the counter, you were getting served. It was a city where a scuffle on 42nd and Broadway might spark and you would not even blink.
  
  It was a city that's remembered as being "divided" and those divisions were real. Few realized it at the time that these divisions comprised two competing visions of the city's future, particularly who would live, work, and die in it's borders.



• Speaking of which, tonight the Vieux Carre Property Owners and Residents Association will host a public meeting on the status of the proposed Hospitality Zone legislation under consideration in Baton Rouge. The meeting will be at St. Mark's Church (1120 N. Rampart St.) at 7:00 PM.  Much potential for high comedy.

Ho Zone Postponed

Lunanola accompanied a contingent of about 20 with her to Baton Rouge today to comment in opposition to the proposed Hospitality Zone legislation which would carve out downtown neighborhoods to form a quasi-private fiefdom governed by hoteliers and restaurant owners. But the group never got to speak, possibly because the moderate amount of pushback has already begun to  have some effect.

I am pleased to report that I personally collected and handed in a stack of at least a dozen opposition speaker comment cards; even more were submitted directly by those in attendance. And although we didn’t get the opportunity to address the committee today, those who were in attendance were clearly willing to go the distance.

It is also known that approximately 40 people wrote personal and individual emails (not form letters) expressing opposition to this act of legislation. It is entirely possible that more emails were sent (these are simply the ones that a particular neighborhood association also received as the result of being included an addressee). This was characterized by someone who is more familiar than myself with this kind of effort as a “bombardment.”

It is believed that these factors contributed significantly to LA State Senator Edwin R. Murray (District 4) deciding to request that LA SB 573 (the “parent bill” for this matter) be temporarily postponed until next week (it was withdrawn from consideration as a part of today’s agenda). However, the Local & Municipal Affairs Committee members also expressed interest in reviewing this matter via a “special meeting” — as a result, it is unclear how or when the next hearing regarding this matter will occur.

As Lunanola notes, it's likely that if and when this comes back up for a public hearing, the Zone's proponents will spend enough of their ample time and money to make a strong show of force on their own behalf.  In the meantime, the Ho-Zone planning moves back behind closed doors.

Speaking of which, earlier this week, Dambala shared some thoughts on what he "imagines" might have been discussed at the last closed door meeting. 

Zoning out

Some neighborhoods are already rebelling against the Hospitality Zone CityBiz:

The Faubourg Marigny Improvement Association is asking Sen. Ed Murray to adjust the borders of a proposed Hospitality and Entertainment District to exclude the Marigny. Frenchmen Street, the neighborhood’s prime tourist attraction, is currently included in the proposal for a sweeping zone in which new hotel and food-beverage taxes would be controlled by a board largely composed of hospitality industry executives and the mayor.

In New Orleans we call this "bucking the trend"

On the heels of Tom Friedman having been named the "One True Wanker Of The Decade" by Atrios, Tom Tomorrow reminds us of the time he fact-checked a Friedman column about how we're all about to get rich selling clever T-shirts to one another.

Look, my argument is obviously not, as Friedman interprets it, that "Americans are not innovative"--it is that selling novelty t-shirts is not a replacement for a decent paying job with health benefits.

Of course it could be that these rules don't apply inside the Hospitality Zone where Stephen Perry will have dominion over the elemental forces of nature or something. Or... you know... maybe not.

Deformedelicious

Gulf seafood deformities alarm scientists

"The dispersants used in BP's draconian experiment contain solvents, such as petroleum distillates and 2-butoxyethanol. Solvents dissolve oil, grease, and rubber," Dr Riki Ott, a toxicologist, marine biologist and Exxon Valdez survivor told Al Jazeera. "It should be no surprise that solvents are also notoriously toxic to people, something the medical community has long known".

The dispersants are known to be mutagenic, a disturbing fact that could be evidenced in the seafood deformities. Shrimp, for example, have a life-cycle short enough that two to three generations have existed since BP's disaster began, giving the chemicals time to enter the genome.

Not to worry, of course. As soon as Mayor Landrieu's Hospitality Zone plan is up and running, NOTMC and NOCVB can advertise all of these problems away for us.

At least they can until Geauxjira shows up. Then more drastic measures may have to be taken.



Update: And if Geuxjira doesn't get you, maybe one of these blue creatures from the lagoon will.

The persistence of Corexit mixed with crude oil has now weathered to tar, yet is traceable to BP's Deepwater Horizon brew through its chemical fingerprint. The mix creates a fluorescent signature visible under UV light. From the report:

The program uses newly developed UV light equipment to detect tar product and reveal where it is buried in many beach areas and also where it still remains on the surface in the shoreline plunge step area. The tar product samples are then analyzed…to determine which toxins may be present and at what concentrations. By returning to locations several times over the past year and analyzing samples, we've been able to determine that PAH concentrations in most locations are not degrading as hoped for and expected.


Worse, the toxins in this unholy mix of Corexit and crude actually penetrate wet skin faster than dry skin (photos above)—the author describes it as the equivalent of a built-in accelerant—though you'd never know it unless you happened to look under fluorescent light in the 370nm spectrum. The stuff can't be wiped off. It's absorbed into the skin.

Hoarding coins in the competition zone

The Coliseum Square Association met last night to discuss the possibility that perhaps one day their neighborhood might be annexed by the Hospitality Zone.

A proposal to place a swath of downtown New Orleans under a new appointed board with the power to levy taxes drew the attention of the Coliseum Square Association on Monday night, based on the possibility that the “hospitality zone” could easily be expanded into Uptown.

The "Zone" would be governed by an unelected board of business owners with the power to tax residents in order to hire security, sanitation, and advertising for their businesses. It is understood that the Zone could be expanded should the board of business owners decide that any other parts of town are particularly desirable to them. Places like Coliseum Square, for example, might fit that bill. At one time, it was considered America's "hippest" neighborhood, you know.

Finally, there’s a strong possibility that the city will reduce the amount of services it provides in the “hospitality zone,” letting the new taxes pick up the slack — instead of increasing services as they were intended to do.

“We’d prefer we all have a lot more time to review this, because it’s creating a new government structure for the city,” (VCPORA Executive Director Meg) Lousteau said, noting that the idea usurps some authority and responsibility from the City Council.

That doesn't sound good. Naturally residents living in potentially Zoned-in neighborhoods are going to be wary of such a coup d'etat. Of course some of them might just welcome their new tourist-focused overlords. It's at least implied here that we should have some confidence in their "wisdom" anyway.

After the meeting, (CS Association President Robert) Wolf said that the “devil is in the details” when it comes to the plan’s merits, especially if the zone could move up St. Charles Avenue. Ensuring that money is invested wisely in tourist areas is important, but the burden on downtown residents should be carefully considered, he said.

Update: And now, please, see also Dambala who has much more on this business.