Just take the moneeys back

A lot of what the mayor wants to do in order to claw back from the tourism cabal has to go through Baton Rouge first. That's going to be difficult. The Governor has already signaled some opposition to her plans and most lawmakers from other parts of the state are more likely to respond to requests from tourism lobbyists and less likely to care about funding drainage in New Orleans. Also everybody up there is just used to the money piling up in the direction it currently does and, well, there's a lot of inertia to overcome.

But that doesn't mean there aren't some options available outside of all that if you know where the pressure points are. Flozell Daniels has an idea about that.

The RTA sent a letter to New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corp. CEO Mark Romig this month demanding the return of more than $31 million to the transit agency. The RTA's current chairman, Flozell Daniels, said the agency now believes the 2001 agreement that diverted the funding was unconstitutional.

Daniels added that the agency isn't planning to give up any more money under that agreement.

"For two decades our service has been impacted by limitations on financial resources, while the resources available to the tourism and hospitality marketing agencies have steadily increased," Daniels wrote. "New Orleans cannot be a 21st century city without 21st century transit."

The legal stuff here is tricky. By the terms of a 2001 settlement, RTA gets to collect sales tax on hotel rooms but it has to kick back some of that to NOTMC.  What Daniels is saying, now, though, is that NOTMC doesn't use the money for the purposes specified in the ballot referendum authorizing the sales tax.  So, I guess, as a steward of these public funds, he is stopping the payments. 

This is a fun argument to present because it forces Romig to justify his organization's use of the funds in terms of whether or not they "specifically benefit public transit," as Daniels puts it.  I don't think he succeeds at this.

But Romig said the Marketing Corp. often promotes the RTA's streetcars in the ads it aims at tourists, and that it has used the roughly $2.9 million a year it gets from the tax to support local festivals and other events for which public transit is used.

Ha ha, yeah, making ads that tell more tourists to get on the streetcar isn't doing much to benefit public transit.  It does crowd the streetcar lines a bit and reinforce the notion that public transit is an amusement ride. It might also get some tourists to dinner at Commander's, although not necessarily on time. I suppose this provides some benefit to that wing of the Brennan family. 

As for the festivals, that's really more a case of creating a challenge for RTA, isn't it?   Romig's phrasing suggests they should be happy to have been brought more "customers." But public transit doesn't exist just to collect more fares. It is the transit agency's job to move people to and from these events without disrupting too badly the commutes of their regular riders in the process. If anything it's RTA who needs extra support from tourism agencies to meet the demand these events create.

And if they can't do that then maybe RTA is better off just taking its money back.