I hope they at least buy Valerio something nice

You may have seen a few of these signs adorning the lawns of the nicer Uptown homes this month

Here is a shocker for you.  It turns out that all of the differently branded editorial voices belonging to the Georges Media Empire Holding Company are in agreement about how everyone should vote in an election. All of the Georgeses want you to approve the Audubon millage on Saturday's ballot. The Georges-Advocate says Audubon has "done a smart thing" in lumping City Park and a pair of city agencies in with their new tax proposal. The Georges-Advocate-Gambit says some nonsense about how it overcomes "a piecemeal approach" to parks management. The Times-Georges-DotCom says it's "a smart way to maximize tax dollars."

The Mayor and her friends have also dumped several hundred thousand dollars into an all out advertising blitz in favor of the new tax. According to campaign finance filings,  the pro-tax  PAC "Together For Parks Alliance" had spent over $180,000 through March. The report for April isn't out yet. The PAC had about $35,000 on hand to start the month.  Judging from the explosion of mailers and ads on local TV and social media, I'd guess they will have spent something close to $250,000 by the time it's all over.   That's a lot to dump into a single ballot measure. They could have bought one "nurse, teacher, or first responder" a whole condo for that.

We've already talked about this in terms of the hypocrisy of the elites in the Audubon adjacent fundraising clubs who think they run the city. But, okay, what is it they're actually asking voters to do? The Georgeses opinionators all say we're being asked to "renew" existing millages.  But this isn't really what's happening.  The proposed millage is, in fact, a whole new tax that replaces three current millages set to expire two years from now. The Georgeses also tell us that Audubon is graciously redistributing its current revenues in order to "share" something with less well funded entities. That isn't quite right either.

Here is the Assessor's sheet of current dedicated millages in Orleans Parish.

Audubon has two millages set to expire in 2021. One of them (labeled "Audubon Park Zoo" here) is .32 mils and meant to supplement operations and capital improvements at the privately owned and operated facility.  The other one, labeled "Aquarium" for 2.99 mils was specifically dedicated to finance the construction of the Aquarium sometime way back in the 1900s. The bonds serviced by those funds are set to be paid off when the millage expires. In other words that tax has paid for what it was meant to pay for. It's just money that has been going directly to the bank for thirty years. Nobody will actually miss it when it's gone.

Audubon's spokesperson admits as much in this article. 

Although Audubon would lose more than $4 million a year in tax money, Dietz said it will be able to absorb most of that blow when it finishes paying off the bonds that financed building of the aquarium in 2021.

"Most" of the $4 million loss in expiring tax revenue could be "absorbed" when the debt is retired. Makes sense since that's what it was for. This is further corroborated today by a person on Twitter who informs us that Audubon has been spending approximately $3.8 million a year on debt service. If they were to come back in a couple of years and ask to renew their expiring .32 mils, that looks like it would cover the difference just fine. We could argue further about whether they're entitled to that, even. But it doesn't matter because what they're asking for is a brand new tax altogether.


The new tax is 6.31 mils. This figure is derived by combining the .32 Audubon base millage with what had been the 2.99 mils dedicated to bond financing. In order to sell the public on the deal, another 3.00 mils is added to match the amount currently shared by NORD and Parks and Parkways.  The three entities then divide up the total in a way that allows each to take a little bit of what had been the Aquarium debt fund. City Park is also cut in a share.

Critically, though, for Audubon this means a dramatic increase from .32 mils for discretionary stuff  UP to 1.95. The Parks and NORD millages expire in 2021. They could be renewed, or even increased, at that point. There is no need to tie the future of those mils to Audubon other than to provide Audubon with an excuse to bump up their own funds. The claim that Audubon is actually giving something up in order to "share" with the other parties is just a shell game.  The Georges papers certainly know this.  It's a shame they have three "brands" available with which to broadcast their lies about it. 

There's also something perverse in the idea that Mayor Cantrell, who is supposed to be leading a fight for a "fair share" of tax revenues currently enjoyed by the tourism industry would promote this plan to hold our public parks and recreation departments hostage to the greedy interests of Ron Forman's commercial tourist attractions.  But that's the standard procedure around here.  There's no such thing as a public good if it doesn't first trickle down through the usual network of oligarchs.

Just as we're finishing up this post it looks like the new plan has passed by an overwhelming margin.

And that's what having a quarter million dollars to throw around on a single ballot question will buy you.  As long as we keep funneling public money right back up into the hands of the well-to-do, there's sure to be more where that came from. 

Yelling at the mayor opportunities

Mayor Cantrell is hosting a series of public townhalls in order to promote the parks/Audubon millage on the March 4 ballot.  You can talk to her about that or... probably... whatever else might be on your mind if you stop by at one of these. Here is the schedule.

All meetings will run from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. The schedule is as follows:

DISTRICT A MEETING -- FEB. 12

City Park, Parkview Terrace Room

DISTRICT B MEETING -- FEB. 7

Lyons Recreation Center

DISTRICT C MEETING -- FEB. 13

Algiers Regional Library

DISTRICT D MEETING -- FEB. 19

Corpus Christi Community Center

DISTRICT E MEETING -- FEB. 25

East New Orleans Regional Library

Also, speaking of Audubon, New Orleans, it is time to welcome the return of your king. 

Valerio is ready to greet the public again, from a fortified pen designed to keep his bone-crushing bite to himself.

Audubon Zoo officials announced Monday that they will reopen the New Orleans zoo's jaguar habitat with 3-year-old Valerio, nearly seven months after the male jaguar broke through a steel wire barrier and mauled nine other animals early on a Saturday morning in July, killing them all. . 

Valerio will turn 4 years old on March 12, by the way.  Here is a photo from, I believe, the day he turned 1 at the San Diego Zoo where he was born

Something something Ponzi something

This is a touchy conversation to have in New Orleans. It comes too close to threatening a perpetual scam run by some Very Important people.

“Audubon Institute is not a park; it’s a large organization that runs a park,” said Mike Moffitt, a former commissioner of City Park. “It seems to me very confusing to have funding so broadly distributed, because it doesn’t get any focus. If the city needs to fund insectariums and aquariums and other projects, then they should fund them, but they shouldn’t fund them thinking they’re funding a park.”

The need for funding drives initiatives for park leaders to create “amusements” that charge admission, the panelists said, but every new amusement takes away from land that was previously open to the public, a concept described as “We pave our parks in order to save them.” Debra Howell of Save Audubon Park said that these projects often end up losing money anyway, and become part of the larger system that needs financial support, rather than contributing to it.

“Every new facility loses money rather than raises money, and the next thing you hear is yet another plan for a new facility,” Howell said. “At some point when does it become obvious that none of these new facilities are going to raise money?”

The "next facility" is the fundraising pitch that keeps everything going. When your non-profit launches a new campaign to the donor base, it's helpful to say you're raising the money for a shiny new thing. That works better than just begging for money to stay afloat.   It's sort of like the way firms like Uber leverage piles of venture capital to hide their massively unprofitable business models. Which is why Ron Forman can pull down a six figure salary running a public-private "non profit."

Of course, a park is not a start-up. It is a public resource. It isn't supposed to turn a profit. But because we like to pretend that everything is better if it is run like a business through "public-private-partnerships" we create all sorts of byzantine opportunities for socialites and oligarchs to pass public money around to each other.

Justin Kray of “City Park for Everyone” noted that City Park is also likely to begin looking for tax support from voters, and that he too thinks a single citywide system would be a better approach. He noted that while individual parks such as Audubon and City Park have conducted surveys of their users, he’s not aware of any survey of recreation of the entire city.

“We’re continuing to perpetuate bad solutions to a problem that’s structural about how parks are funded,” Kray said. “I’d like to contemplate a future where we have a unified parks governance and operational strategy citywide. All these things are related, and the health of the city is in large part related to the health of the parks system.”

Ideally, all of this would fall under one unified NORD/Parks and Parkways department with its own dedicated funding and a mandate to provide free open and equal access to facilities in each and every neighborhood.  But that would be horning in on too many rackets.

Here's how you can tell which is not the serious candidate

At a recent Council At-Large forum, Keith Hardie asked candidates an interesting question about the city's "Balkanized" parks management system. 

Keith Hardie, a Carrollton neighborhood activist, reminded the candidates that a proposed property-tax to support the Audubon Institute had failed, in part because voters wanted their tax money to go to a wider range of recreation activities. The city, however, has no unified public parks system — it has individual boards that govern specific properties like Audubon Park, a recreation department, and even a Parks and Parkways department that handles other green spaces.

Would the candidates be in favor of uniting this “Balkanized” collection of agencies, Hardie asked, into a single public parks department like other cities? And would they then support a new property tax dedicated to funding it?

The worst of those individual boards serve as little semi-private fiefdoms people like Ron Foreman use to turn public subsidies into six figure salaries. The NORDC model introduced by Landrieu also engenders a kind of territorial jealousy over the best use of amenities that tends to favor friends wealthier interests and commercial partners. There are other concerns but Hardie's question was primarily about the most equitable use of public resources.  Judging from the answers only Joseph Bouie seemed to understand this.

What the parks and the schools have in common, said State Rep. Joe Bouie, is that both have suffered from the post-Katrina trend of “privatizing” governmental services — through chartering the local schools to individual nonprofit boards or outsourcing the parks to the New Orleans Recreation Department Commission.

“We are actually privatizing almost all of our public assets. I have serious concerns about that … to take the community’s voice out of their tax dollars,” Bouie said, noting that the school were open to more neighborhood events before charters took them over. “Prior to the privatization of our schools, that’s how we used the schools.”

Helena Moreno had actually brought up the schools first but in a slightly different sense than how Bouie means it.  She suggested more "partnerships" between schools and parks. That's fine if she means it the way Bouie does when he says school facilities can host community events sometimes. But, in her version, the school facilities and the "open to the public" parks facilities really ought to be the same thing. That's a less good thought. 

To be clear, though, her answer wasn't bad. It was just incomplete. Only Bouie talked about the privatization problem.  Which means, of course, he is not the serious candidate in this race.

Boardwalk Empire

Here's a project that seems to have come out of left field.

A pair of developers, headed by the owner of Tipitina's, is negotiating the lease of a stretch of disused lakefront property in the hopes of constructing a 4.5 acre water park and outdoor concert-festival venue.

The development would sit on the site of the old Bally's riverboat casino landing in eastern New Orleans.

The Orleans Parish Non-Flood Protection Asset Management Board, which owns the land, is negotiating lease terms with Studio Network-Lakefront LLC, a company formed by Tipitina's owner Roland von Kurnatowski and his business partner, Dr. Eric George, a prominent New Orleans orthopedic surgeon.

It looks like they finally want to redevelop the Jazzland/Six Flags site... only they're not doing it at the Jazzland/Six Flags site.

Studio Network's proposal for the lakefront, dubbed Tipitina's Festival Park, would include:

• An outdoor amphitheater with a 5,000 capacity.
• A lazy river and splash park.
• Water slides and zip lines.
• A two-story, covered boardwalk with shops.
• The conversion of the old riverboat terminal into an open-air market.

The "Non-Flood Protection Asset Management Board" exists as a result of the a post-Katrina reorganization of the levee board.  Even though the city had been flooded because of levee design failures on the part of the US Army Corps of Engineers, some felt as though it was inappropriate for the levee board to go on managing real estate and other recreational assets such as this riverboat landing.  That same some argued that, since managing these properties exposed the levee board to the dreaded appearance of possible corruption, that this somehow made us less safe from catastrophic flooding.. even though it hadn't.

In any case, what they decided to do was outsource the appearance of corruption to its own independent board.  Problem solved, right?   I mean who could get the wrong idea from this?

When those properties were returned to local control with the 2010 creation of the authority, the Bally's parcel was just one in a long list of battered assets that the newly-created entity, which lacks tax-funding, was incapable of repairing and returning to commerce on its own.

Last year, the authority decided to let the private sector have a go, issuing a request for development proposals.

Studio Network's proposal was the only submittal.

Speaking of non-flood assets, this story reminded me of  another  waterfront development in roughly the same part of town. When last I saw they also wanted to build a boardwalk.

Among other amenities, Pontchartrain Landing boasts 105 RV sites, 40 boat slips, a swimming pool, the Lighthouse Bar and Restaurant, three houseboats and regular shuttle service to the French Quarter. According to Bob MacKinnon, the founder of GuestReviews, a kind of TripAdvisor for the camping and RV industry, Pontchartrain Landing has consistently ranked among the top 1 percent of campgrounds in the country.

"It's part of a pretty exclusive group," MacKinnon said.

And it's currently in the midst of a makeover. In time for Mardi Gras, Schenck plans to  add a large reception hall, a new seafood restaurant, a coffee shop, 10 boat slips, 20 RV sites and 51 hotel-style rental units.

"Our goal is to create a boardwalk atmosphere on the north end of the canal," Schenck said during a tour of the property, as excavators tore up the earth around him. "We want to be what the West End of New Orleans used to be."

When that story was published they were lobbying City Council for an "overlay district" zoning exception.  Whatever happened there?

Better build some more luxury housing

We've got all sorts of neat stuff we need to pay for.

With the exception of City Park, which falls under the auspices of the state of Louisiana, New Orleans foots the bill for these green spaces out of its general fund (though the city uses $1 million in federal Community Development Block Funds for recreation expenses.) Crescent Park and the greenway alone will add roughly $1 million more to a maintenance budget that tops $7 million. Parks and Parkways, which keeps up road medians, some parks and other public spaces, now swallows up $3.3 million per year. The New Orleans Recreation Department Commission is up to $3.1 million, and operating and maintenance for Crescent Park is $659,000. The greenway is still under construction, but the city estimates it will add $300,000 to the yearly maintenance tab. There have been discussions about putting a parks millage on the ballot, but nothing official has yet been announced.

As we've seen time and again, the city's official policy response to rising infrastructure costs continues to be a campaign to attract wealthier residents who can pay higher rents and property taxes. In order to keep them, though, we may have to build even more parks.

Recently, the Downtown Development District (DDD), the fastest growing census tract in town, created an advisory board to find a way to bring more parks to downtown New Orleans. Developers creating luxury and warehouse apartments in the district told the board that the professionals they rent to rank greenspace near the top of their required amenities. Sarah Olivier from the Trust for Public Land’s New Orleans office, who served on the advisory board, says that the DDD’s research showed that the district’s new residents like urban areas but they are also looking for ways to escape. “They want parks,” Olivier says.  

It's either a virtuous or a vicious circle depending on whether you're a wealthy newcomer (or "snowbird" if you like) who can afford to play the parks and condos game or if you're among the rest of us who'll be moved out of the way in order to make room for it to proceed.

The rent (for the public parkways) is also too damn high

"We have not established a fee schedule"  but here is the fee schedule.

The Bucket Brigade's experience appears to be the city's first attempt to impose a new "fair-market value" system of fees for use of the bayou and, possibly, other public spaces.

If applied across all city parks, (LA Bucket Brigade director Anne) Rolfes said, such prices would devastate nonprofits like Bucket Brigade that rely on the use of public spaces for fundraisers.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu's office declined to make any officials available for an interview regarding its fees for the bayou or other parks.

"At this time, we have not established a fee structure," Tyler Gamble, a Landrieu spokesman, said in an email.

Rolfes provided NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune with a copy of the fee schedule given to her by the city. It shows a graduated schedule of prices, based on the number of attendees at the event. Events with 5,000 attendees or more would be charged $7,500 per day.