Sites vs doses

The state wants to set up a mass vaccination site at the Convention Center. Sounds like a great idea. We've been trying to put that public facility to work for the actual public for so long now. Also there's nothing else going on there right now, anyway. Of course a nice open public vaccination facility isn't much good unless it actually has vaccines to dispense. 

Kanter said the city is prepared to staff the vaccination site itself, working with LCMC Health, which operates six hospitals and urgent care centers in the region. But Kanter said the city "would like some financial reimbursement on it. And the doses would be important to all of us. So, those are the two biggest things."

The Biden administration said it intends to open 100 federal vaccination sites by the end of the month in an effort to speed the immunizations, with the first two locations opened Tuesday in California. But governors and health officials around the country are mixed on the offer because they don't necessarily need more places to administer the vaccine, but simply more doses overall.

Kanter said FEMA has set the distinction that a "pilot site" comes with extra vaccine doses supplied by the federal government, while other federally-supported vaccination sites will not.

If I am reading the current stimulus proposal correctly, I think I see $7.5 billion in federal support for vaccine activities so one would hope the reimbursement issue wouldn't be a problem.  Maybe it has to do with FEMA's procedures.  Anyway the other interesting thing here is the Biden people seem to be measuring their goals in the number of sites open as opposed to the number of doses available which sounds like it could lead to some problems if those things get too far out of sync.

You won't believe who is trying to defund the police now

Amazingly, it is New Orleans and Co. 

Facing a collapsed tourism industry due to the coronavirus pandemic, two publicly-funded tourism agencies in New Orleans have cut funding for supplemental security and infrastructure improvements in the French Quarter. And one of them is trying to take back millions of unspent funds it’s contributed in years past.

The agencies in question are the Ernest N. Morial New Orleans Convention Center — a public body — and New Orleans and Company, a private nonprofit group that serves as the marketing agency for the city’s tourism industry. Both organizations had signed agreements with the city that will expire in a few months.

New Orleans and Company, however, has already cancelled one of its contracts with the city. 

With the end of the agreements, the city stands to lose roughly $5.7 million that it had in 2019 for French Quarter security and improvements. The biggest chunk of that money, $2.5 million per year, has gone to pay for Louisiana State Police patrols in the French Quarter. Another $1.2 million per year went to the French Quarter Task Force — an initiative originally created by entrepreneur Sidney Torres that pays off-duty NOPD officers to patrol the quarter in blue-light Smart Cars.

Okay so it is the Convention Center and NO & Co. For its part, the Convention Center says they are all paid up and the deal that created this fund is expiring, all of which seems to be true. But also they have to decide how much money they want to give away to Ron Forman so you can see why that might be a priority. 

But NO & Co. is the agency that is actually trying to take some of the money back... although it will surprise no one to know that the city disputes the amount they've actually paid and says also that they may in fact be behind on these obligations.

While New Orleans and Company believes that the money should be returned, the city has recently argued that New Orleans and Company actually owes additional money to the improvement fund. At a June FQMD board meeting, Smith stated that “the City is still missing the New Orleans & Co. 2019 remittances that came to about $2,000,000.00 and they have been attempting to collect these since February,” according to meeting notes.

Disputed U-O-MEs notwithstanding, why not just let the thing drop?   It's time to start de-funding the police/surveillance state and the French Quarter is the most overly-policed and heavily surveiled neighborhood in our city.  Sounds like a great place to start. 

Not sure that's the city's plan, though. A .25 cent sales tax renewal on the ballot in December would continue supplemental patrols there. The only question, it seems, is who will be doing the patrolling. 

One of the two plans comes from Mayor LaToya Cantrell, who wants to use the money to fund a new security team made up of a mix of police officers and civilians. The other is being championed by the French Quarter Management District — a state created body whose board is largely made up of appointees from tourism industry groups and French Quarter business and neighborhood groups. It hopes to use the money to expand an existing security detail made up of off-duty New Orleans Police Department officers.

It seems like the dispute here is really about control over turf.  While FQMD's plan is to keep paying the task force (famously founded by Sidney Torres) the mayor wants to give it to something called a "Grounds Patrol" operated by the city's Homeland Security department.  The key difference is that the Grounds Patrol would deputize civilian "quality of life" officers relegated to code enforcement which, the claim is, would free up NOPD to focus on real police work.  This sounds dubious.  In fact, The Lens points out in that article that model is very much along the lines of a failed Landrieu Administration experiment known as NOLA Patrol which had to be discontinued after the citizen deputies were found out to have been issuing traffic tickets.  

Again, it would appear that this dispute isn't so much about how best to spend a shrinking pot of policing money.  It's about who controls the pot and how much extra patronage they can wring from it. 

But even if the tax is renewed, the city is projecting that collections will be significantly lower than in years past due to a shrinking tourism industry brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Current projections for 2021 are $1.8 million, compared to $3 million last year. 

But that level of funding would expand the current size of the French Quarter Task force if all the revenue is dedicated to FQMD, even if New Orleans and Company ceased their $1.2 million contribution to the French Quarter Task Force.

Under Cantrell’s plan, the first $1.3 million raised by the sales tax would go to the Unified French Quarter Patrol along with an additional $1.5 million in funding from the French Market Corporation. 

The remainder of the sales tax, estimated to be $500,000 in 2021, would be administered by a newly created French Quarter Economic Development Oversight Committee. That extra money would be used for other public safety and quality of life initiatives within the French Quarter.

"Other public safety and quality of life initiatives" = what, exactly?  Well, that's for you to find out.  Suffice to say anytime you see something disbursed in the name of "economic development" in this city, you can begin looking for the crony capitalists right then and there.

More to the point, though, all of this petty squabbling and attendant corruption could be avoided (and patrons of French Quarter businesses could get a sales tax break) if we would just agree to de-fund the wholly unnecessary police-surveillance apparatus altogether.   But for some reason nobody is talking about doing that except the tourism agencies.  Never thought we'd see the day.

Hide the moneeeys!

It's been an adventurous couple of years for the Convention Center.  Seems like every few months they have to come up with a brand new way to hide their slush fund stash from somebody.  Recall during the height of negotiations with Cantrell administration over what eventually came to be known as the "fair share" deal, they rolled out a slate of make-work projects they could commit funds to in order to look like they had less available to share fairly.  

"Fair share" turned out to be a pretty favorable deal for them anyway. But even so, they immediately set to work shuffling money around in order to use its new hotel project as a kind of tax shelter to further reduce their eventual contribution.  

And, of course, when the pandemic hit, local hospitality workers began organizing to demand their own fair share of the stash.   This, in turn, set off a new round of creative accounting by the Convention Center in order to hide as much of it as possible. Which is why, this week, as they claim that the reserve fund is dwindling, it's harder than ever to discern what they actual have left. 

The Convention Center recently changed how it categorized different pockets of assets, leading to the appearance that its reserves are quickly dwindling. 

In a November report, the Convention center claimed it had $215 million in unrestricted assets — money that isn’t earmarked by law or contract for a specific purpose — at the end of July. Thursday’s report claimed that the center only had $43 million in unrestricted assets left. 

The pandemic-related drawdown is only $49 million thus far, so that doesn’t explain the entire decrease. Most of the difference is caused by an accounting change, specifically a change in how the Convention Center categorizes their assets on financial documents. Instead of “unrestricted” assets versus “restricted” assets, the center is now using the categories of “unrestricted” assets versus “restricted and designated assets.”

Thursday’s report says that along with the $43 million in unrestricted assets, the center also has $209 million in “designated or restricted” assets. 

The 2019 independent audit includes definitions of “restricted” and “designated” assets. Restricted assets include “capital projects, funded by the proceeds of taxes, restricted for building expansion and improvements.” Designated assets, meanwhile, can include money for projects that are “in the planning stages, or in the acquisition phase.”

That article also says we might expect an announcement next month on cuts, perhaps to the 400 or so workers the Convention Center employs.   The accountants, on the other hand, will probably be expecting a raise.