During the summer months, a time when tourists are scarce, the restaurants of New Orleans suffer for a lack of customers. The restaurant industry is forced to resort to all kinds of promotions to lure enough patrons just to cover their overhead until the tourist season returns.

There’s a message for us in this cyclical downturn. That message is that local people from the city and the region just don’t go to our restaurants to offset downturns from fewer tourists. But why don’t enough locals want to patronize the great restaurants of New Orleans? In my experience if one asks a local that question, the answer is invariably because of crime.

Crime or at least the fear of crime decisively undermines the hospitality industry and directly hurts low-income folks who work in it. Yet when the city is offered a chance for Federal help to clean up crime, its leadership acts outraged that their turf is being intruded upon.

Does anyone actually believe that without serious change in direction the criminal justice system in New Orleans is capable of becoming effective? Does anyone actually believe that if nothing dramatic is done locals’ fears will suddenly abate? Afterall locals more than anyone else know that the system that leaders are defending has for as long as anyone remembers left us rated as one of the most violent, crime ridden cities in the nation.

But there they are, the very political leaders that could at any time restructure our criminal justice system, defending the status quo by looking the President’s gift horse in the mouth. Perhaps this is because the leadership of New Orleans is afraid that the President would succeed and their failures will stand out. Perhaps it is simply because they are afraid that the President would take credit for something that they should have done all along. Who knows, who cares, just fix it!

Here’s my advice to all the candidates for office, get over it. Take all the help that we are offered, and maybe then local people will want to return to dining in the city! Taken another way just imagine all the added tax revenue for politicians to spend and the decrease in poverty if restaurants were as profitable year-round as when the tourists are here.

My dad always said, “never look a gift horse in the mouth”