Half-baked

Looks like they couldn't figure out how to make that special riverfront taxing district happen yesterday.

It was never actually part of a bill. Instead, legislators hoped to add it to another bill that never advanced. In the final days, they tried to work it into another bill to create a regional business park in New Orleans.

“We talked about our concerns and how to address our concerns,” state Sen. J.P. Morrell, D-New Orleans, said, referring to the six legislators who were on a conference committee that aimed to hammer out the specifics and bring it to a full vote. “But you can’t create any authority with the ability to tax without public vetting. You can’t just create it in conference.”

Tourism industry officials initially pushed the plan as an alternative to Landrieu’s proposal to authorize a local vote to raise hotel taxes in New Orleans. After tourism officials stopped that bill – it couldn’t get a vote on the House floor — the riverfront taxing district lost its key sponsors.

In effect, Morrell said, tourism officials “threw a half-baked idea at us and disappeared.”

Sounds about right.  Although the idea of getting the city a greater share of hotel/motel tax revenue seems like a good one. Maybe let's explore that again sometime.

Anyway now comes the process of figuring out just what did pass in the last moments of the session.  Here's an early assessment of how Mayor Landrieu's agenda fared.