They did have the option of voting no

Tons of fun watching City Council completely throw up its hands last week at the prospect of having to vote for the STR tax.  There were objections from the public comment but those were met with typical condescension from our elected friends about how poorly the public supposedly understands the background details.

But that's bullshit.  New Orleanians have been following this story for the better part of the past two years that it has dominated the local political news. We know what it is and why it does what it does. The deal was bad enough even for "normal" times. It offered insufficient and mostly one time funding to shore up failing city infrastructure in exchange for authorizing permanent publicly funded slush funds for the convention center and for a private tourism promotion board called New Orleans and Company.  

The STR tax is only one piece of the deal authorized by the state legislature and then by local ballot measure. It has been criticized for two reasons. The first reason is it creates a perverse incentive for the city to promote the proliferation of short term rentals despite their destructive impact on New Orleans neighborhoods and housing costs. Residents have spent several years now fighting to rein in the STR boom but political leadership has repeatedly demonstrated its indifference. Recently, the former executive director of Sonder, one of the largest and most damaging purveyors of STRs was hired by the Cantrell administration and put in charge of city permitting and land use policy; a shocking development for the thousands of New Orleanians now threatened with the prospect of eviction. 

The second criticism of the tax is that it hands millions of dollars over to a private non-profit tourism promotion agency so that it can produce dogshit tweets like this. These were the complaints presented to City Council last week.  Members responded by shrugging and talking down to people about the "ballot language."

“This council was also not involved in the negotiation of the fair share deal when this was broken down,” Councilwoman Kristin Palmer, one of the council’s most vocal opponents of short-term rental expansion, said on Thursday. “The ballot language was what was passed by the voters, we have to adhere to that ballot language, and that’s why we’re here today. And I’m referring, of course, to the 25 percent of the tax that is to be given to New Orleans and Company.”

The ballot initiative approved by voters last year gave the Council the ability to levy a new short-term rental tax. But it didn’t require them to. And while the City Council couldn’t create the new tax unilaterally, it can create new fees for city permits and licenses, like short-term rental licenses. Prior to the fair share deal, council members had floated a fee structure on short-term rentals that would have raised an estimated $20 million for affordable housing projects.

They didn't actually have to vote for it.  Since the time that the Fair Sham deal and the ballot language of some of its component parts was finalized,  many things have changed. New Orleans is going to be hit harder than most places by the pandemic/depression/mass eviction crisis we are dealing with now.  City Council had an opportunity to at least try and force a reconsideration of the bad deal which had become far worse. Instead they chose to pretend it was out of their hands.