There was no public discussion on Wednesday regarding the lawsuit aside from a brief statement from Convention Center board Chair Jerry Reyes. But there hadn’t been any public action taken until Wednesday. In September 2019, the City Council voted to formally support the RTA’s decision.īoth the Convention Center and the RTA discussed potential litigation throughout 2019 in executive sessions, which are closed to the public. The letter also demanded that the Convention Center return nearly $32 million, representing the portion of the taxes it had collected from the RTA since 2001.

“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.” “This is $62,000,000 that has been unavailable to the RTA for investments in transit services, improvements to infrastructure, amenities for our riders, and the replacement of aging vehicles,” the letter said. A letter from RTA board Chair Flozell Daniels said that the RTA had given up $62 million to the Convention Center and the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation in total since the agreement first went into effect in 2001. A legal settlement in 1999 forced the RTA to give up roughly half of the sales tax revenue levied on hotel room sales (about $14 million a year in recent, pre-pandemic years).īut in February 2019, the RTA announced it would stop honoring the agreement and keep all the hotel tax revenues. The majority of the RTA’s funding comes from a one percent sales tax that brought in over $80 million in 2018.

The dispute is over a 20-year-old agreement that has forced the RTA to fork over $6 million to $7 million a year to the tourism industry every year, about half of which has traditionally gone to the Convention Center. The vote was unanimous and taken without any public debate following a 30 minute executive session that was closed to the public.

Morial Convention Center on Wednesday voted in favor of filing a lawsuit against the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority over millions of dollars in contested recurring tax revenue. The governing board of the New Orleans Ernest N.

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