Sharp elbows

Whoa hey watch out!

On Monday, in an extraordinary power play, Peterson ousted the highly regarded chairman of the gambling board, Ronnie Jones, during a private session of the Louisiana Senate where senators could exercise a little-known authority to veto appointees of Gov. John Bel Edwards and other statewide elected officials to dozens of boards and commissions.

Besides representing New Orleans in the Senate, Peterson is the long-time chair of the Louisiana Democratic Party, so her surprise decision also puts her at odds with Edwards, the state’s most prominent Democrat. On Tuesday, he sharply criticized the failure to confirm Jones without mentioning Peterson.

Peterson’s move, which she has not explained publicly, targeted Jones and four other appointees, including Walt Leger III, a former colleague in the Legislature and speaker pro tem who has now lost his job as chairman of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans.

The Advocate spends a lot of space in this article focusing on KCP's personal gambling problem which she has publicly admitted to and sought help for. The implication is that Jones was responsible for leaking that information originally and this action is from Peterson is payback for that.  While that might be possible, it seems a bit petty and I would rather think there is something more than just that going on.

And anyway, KCP's dispatching Jones isn't even the really interesting thing going on here. Her ejecting Walt Leger from the Convention Center board is. 

Leger, meanwhile, was an influential member of the state House for 12 years before term limits last year sidelined him. Edwards tabbed him to chair the Convention Center. The governor had to choose him from a list of names forwarded by the hospitality industry.

“I couldn’t have been more surprised to hear that I wasn’t confirmed and how that went down,” Leger said Tuesday. Asked about his relationship with Peterson, he said, “We’ve worked very closely to represent the same constituencies.”

This part of the story seems like the much bigger deal and we would hope to find more follow-up on it soon. The Convention Center and its slush fund are a major flash point in city politics right now.  This Lens op-ed from representatives of the Fair Fund coalition explains.

As in previous emergencies, the COVID-19 crisis brought out the best in many of us. Countless heroes distinguished themselves from a handful of people who put their own narrow business and political interests first.  Such was and continues to be the case with the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center and its governing board, the Exhibition Hall Authority (EHA).

A group of recently laid-off hospitality workers, unions, and advocacy organizations knew the board could do more to help our city. We formed the Coalition for a Fair Fund for Hospitality Workers and formulated the demand that the board of the Convention Center transfer $100 million, the equivalent of $1,000 per hospitality worker, to an independent fund with robust community oversight that could administer relief directly to all tourism and hospitality workers in a fair, legal, and transparent way.

Asked by these activists to put some of the $200 million plus ($235 million according to this article) they've stolen from the public over the years to good use helping out hospitality workers displaced by the pandemic, the Convention Center board recently voted instead to "donate" an infinitesimal fraction of that money to private non profit foundations managed by their wealthy compatriots. Not only is the amount an outright insult, when filtered through the usual con-profit money laundering circle of philanthropic elites and cronies connected to the board members, it's as if they're spending it on themselves anyway.

In days past, it would have been fairly simple for the board to roll over workers like this.  But the politics are a little more volatile these days and things get messy as the players scramble to reposition themselves.  This is cause for some optimism, I suppose, but it's also important to remain skeptical.  For example, many have taken notice of the city council's willingness to support the hospitality workers with words and with non-binding resolutions.  However, others of us are not impressed yet.  I mean, at first, it seems like Kristen Palmer is saying the right thing here. But is she?

Earlier this month, City Councilwoman Kristin Palmer said, in an interview with The Lens, that there was a fundamental shift in power that had to occur within the industry. Palmer wasn’t speaking directly about the coalition’s demand for $100 million. But she said that the Convention Center should be more focused on direct short-term relief for workers and less focused on its long-term development plans worth more than $1 billion.

“Their value systems are wrong,” she said. “My shtick now is: Poverty is expensive and charity doesn’t work. That’s the reality. It’s a power structure. The power structure is ‘look how great it is we’re giving to these people.’ That’s a power structure that needs to be changed.”

Being concerned about how the political power structure affects poverty in New Orleans, is your new "shtick" now?  That's nice. Please give us some notice when you want to workshop the act again sometime.

Mayor Cantrell is also trying to make sure her act plays to the right crowd in these changing times. Although the mayor is frequently a lighting rod for criticism, she's proven more than adept at navigating difficult political situations over the course of her first term. By which we mean she has a fantastic instinct for duplicity. Cantrell spent much of 2019 appearing to wrangle with the hospitality industry over various piles of dedicated funds. The fight may have embellished her "populist" image in the media but the deal she struck actually ended up being a huge capitulation to the tourism owners.

This was accomplished thanks, in no small part, to Walt Leger who, as a State Rep. wrote and shepherded the legislation that allowed Cantrell to claim "victory" while also legitimizing the convention center's reserve fund of misappropriated tax revenue.  As a reward for these services, Leger was given a seat on... chairmanship of, even... the Convention Center board immediately after leaving the legislature. By the end of 2019, the tourism cabal was happy, LaToya was happy, Walt was doing well. Working class people in New Orleans were still being victimized by the political aristocracy.  Everything was in equilibrium.

But then a series of new crises came along and knocked everything apart. The Hard Rock collapse created new points of tension between the mayor and the city's land development and tourism class, exposed her to new political flack, and opened a crease in city finances. All of this was exacerbated by a Carnival season fraught with multiple tragedies and the city's controversial handling of its response. By the time the COVID crisis turned the whole world inside out, the happy feelings between the mayor and her sometime friends in business community had all but disintegrated.

So, despite all of the previous year's efforts, the mayor still finds herself at odds with tourism promoters.  This week, even as the city cautiously prepares to move into a "Phase 2" reopening, the reactionary crowd of tourism business tyrants has grown bolder in criticizing the shutdown. Critics have become so bold, in fact, that rumors had been circulating about a possible "Business Community" candidate challenging Cantrell in the next election. That would seem ill advised for a number of reasons but there's no accounting for these people and their sense of entitlement.

In any case, it's interesting that we find Cantrell's friend and ally, KCP taking a sharp elbow to Leger now given this context. Was she sending a message? It's been a busy week since, so this story has faded into the background a bit but we'd like to hear more.