Pressing the advantage

Well you at least have to hand it to the Convention Center board for being on the ball.  A week ago we spoke into the Twitter tube half in jest that they'd be this cynical in a few months.

Give it a few months and they will come back and tell us the hotel is a COVID crisis "recovery" project

— skooks (@skooks) April 9, 2020

 

Turns out it only took them five days to get there.

On Tuesday, the Convention Center board’s finance committee advanced a $5.4 million contract to hire an executive architect for the center’s five-year, $557 million capital plan. The board shot down the contract twice earlier this year over complaints that the proposed contractor, Populous Architects, did not include any locally owned small or minority-owned firms as part of its bid.

Populous is attempting to address those concerns by adding two subcontractors, both of which are small businesses. The total contract amount increased from the originally proposed roughly $4 million for Populous alone, to $5.4 million for all three companies. The contract still needs approval from the full board, which is next scheduled to meet on April 22.

“This is the first step in getting that moving and making sure we reinvest in our facilities so that we can be part of the economic recovery from this current crisis, and certainly the right thing to do,” Morial Convention Center President and General Manager Michael Sawaya said during Tuesday’s meeting. “One of the most important things we can do today and for the future is improve our facilities and make sure they are more competitive going forward.”

Remarkable.  Of course if they really wanted to "be part of the economic recovery" they would release the hundreds of millions of dollars of public money sitting in their ill gotten slush fund to relieve the economic hardship of the hospitality workers off of whose backs that money was stolen in the first place.   But why should they do that? We're only a few months away from people like Senator Kennedy here forcing all those poor saps back to work in a labor market that is going to be even friendlier to the bosses than before.

In other words, the bosses are winning the pandemic just like they win every disaster. As usual it's going to take a while for people to realize that.