They gave the hotel forty-five years and called it a win-win. I know the sentence. Somebody always says it from the dais just before the vote, and it is always true in the narrowest way: there are two winners, and they are both in the room. One owns the hotel. One owns the ribbon. The public is the hallway they shake hands in. I have stayed in a great many convention hotels, in a great many cardigans, at conferences about inequality where the panel was sponsored by the bank, and I have never once asked who paid for the lobby. I am asking now. Forty-five years is longer than I have been an adult. It is longer than most mortgages, most marriages and every party platform I ever believed in.
Here is the record. The Times-Picayune | The Advocate’s Rich Collins reported Oct. 28, 2026, that a New Orleans City Council committee on Tuesday, Oct. 27, approved a tax break for the Omni New Orleans, the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center’s long-sought headquarters hotel — a roughly $600 million, 1,006-room project by Dallas-based Omni Hotels & Resorts targeting a 2030 opening — and sent it to the full council for a vote next week, without opposition. Deputy Mayor Jeff Schwartz recommended a 45-year payment in lieu of taxes, or PILOT, under which Omni will pay most of its annual property tax based on a rate averaged from the per-room tax bills at five large downtown hotels already in operation; because a bill based on the brand-new hotel’s own assessed value would be higher, the paper reports, the deal is expected to save the developer money. The Orleans Parish School Board will be taxed on the new hotel’s assessed rate. Schwartz projected $8 million a year in local tax revenue, more than $18 million in one-time taxes and 2,500 construction jobs. That sits on top of the rest of the public package: in August the Convention Center board voted to pay the developers $120 million up front, in addition to $80 million already in the deal, instead of nearly $837 million over 45 years; even after the revisions, the center will give back to the developers its own share of the hotel, food-and-beverage and sales taxes generated on site, plus taxes from a special subdistrict over the property, for 45 years, with an option to buy them out. The Bureau of Governmental Research, the nonprofit watchdog, recommended in December that the city limit any PILOT to 20 years and phase up to full taxation; its report said Omni told it the chain typically gets 20 to 25 years of tax rebates for convention hotels and had never before received 45. “We are concerned about any potential abatement of taxes beyond what is necessary because it denies the public resources that are necessary to improve city services and public infrastructure,” BGR’s Rebecca Mowbray told the committee.
Now the defense, and they have one. “The Omni headquarters hotel will pay property taxes, and the proposed PILOT will ensure the 1,000-room hotel will generate new revenue for schools, the city and other local public entities,” said Convention Center CEO Jim Cook. “The site, formerly home to the Sugar Mill event venue, currently generates no property tax revenue.” Council member at-large Matthew Willard, from the dais: “I think we have a win-win here. This is an economic development boon to the City of New Orleans.” The center has wanted this hotel for more than a decade to keep up with Nashville, Atlanta and Houston, and the August rewrite really did trim a lot of what BGR objected to. Fine. Something is better than nothing, I am told, by every authority that ever wanted to keep most of something. But read who is in the room. The Convention Center is a public authority; it negotiated the deal with Omni, is paying Omni and is handing Omni back its own tax share. The PILOT term sheet, Schwartz told the committee, was negotiated back in June with council members’ help, and now the council votes on it. Next, the paper reports, the terms go to the board of the economic development district over the hotel site — a board made up of Convention Center board members and two City Council members — and then to the state Bond Commission. Every stop on the approval route is somebody who already shook hands. (A man whose own assessment recently found new and creative numbers reads “an average of five older hotels” with a certain longing.) Meanwhile Troy Dupuis of the Warehouse District Neighborhood Association said the obvious thing nobody on the dais would: “This seems like a lot of money going to the profit of one hotel.”
Deb wants to know if she can pay her taxes at the average rate of the five oldest houses on the block, because one of them still has a root cellar that floods every spring. Buck says forty-five years is longer than he’s owned the boat and the boat is a member of the family. I love them. They are seasoning.
“A win-win” is the alibi. The forty-five years are the story. Sit with them until they confess. A public convention authority, a city and a state board are lining up to give one hotel company a tax bill pegged to its older neighbors and a tax rebate pegged to my lifetime, after a watchdog said twenty years would do and the company itself said it had never gotten forty-five. Maybe the conventions come. I hope they do; New Orleans earns every visitor it gets. But a deal that has to pass four public stops, most of them already at the table, is not a market and it is not a government. It is a handshake with a 45-year grip. The cardigan stays. Fill the notebook. Then ask the City Council, out loud, before the full vote next week: what does the hotel’s own assessed value say the bill should be, what is the difference over 45 years, and why is twenty not enough for a company that told the watchdog twenty to twenty-five was its usual?
Sources:
- The Times-Picayune | The Advocate (NOLA.com), Rich Collins, “New Orleans City Council committee approves tax break for Convention Center hotel,” Oct. 28, 2026
- Bureau of Governmental Research, “Reducing Public Subsidies for New Orleans Convention Hotel,” Dec. 18, 2025
- Open Publica, New Orleans City Council Joint Economic Development and Climate Change and Sustainability Committee meeting record, Oct. 27, 2026
— Theo Ashford-Lindström
Leave a Reply