The city of New Orleans needs funds to help pay for Mardi Gras? I get that and I understand. But why do politicians want to place an extra burden on those who already pay a lot to put on the “the Greatest Free Show on Earth?”
New Orleans leaders said Mardi Gras this year cost the city more than it brought in tax revenue, to the tune of almost $4 million. To help catch up, they are considering imposing a fee on float riders.
The situation shows the economics of Carnival Season are surprisingly complicated.
Toni Weiss, a professor at the Tulane School of Economics, published this study in 2024, examining the financial impact of Mardi Gras in 2023. She subtracted the amount of money the city spent on things like sanitation and police overtime from the tax revenue the holiday attracted.
“I found that the total tax revenue that flows in is greater than the amount that the city spends,” she said. The study indicates the difference was around $28 million.
At a press conference Thursday, Mayor Helena Moreno said in response to a WWL Louisiana question about the Mardi Gras spending that “there’s been conversations about what we can do to get additional assistance in dropping that number down a little bit.”
She said the city is talking with krewe leaders about a possible fee of $20-25 per rider. “It would bring in several hundred thousand dollars every Mardi Gras,” she added.
In a statement to WWL Louisiana Thursday afternoon, a city spokesperson said krewes had been informed of the possibility of the fee last year, but pushed back for two reasons — “first, it was too close to Mardi Gras to impose a fee. Second, the krewes expressed concern whether the math used by the City was accurate.”
Why not ask the folks who watch the parades, who drop all the trash, who require police and EMS protection, who use the sanitation system, and so on pay for a portion of the costs of the not so free show?<
To me the way to handle raising the $4 million the City says it needs to break even would be to place a small sales surcharge on all purchases within say a one mile radius of parade routes (call it the Mardi Economic Development Zone, we have plenty of zones like this, what’s one more) for the two weeks or so of the Mardi Gras season? The parade viewers would hardly notice, and the pool of available revenue may be such that the surcharge could be very small.
I haven’t researched this in state law, and it may require legislation, but it seems to me to be a fairer way to share the very real issue of increasing costs than to keep piling on the Krewes until we make them so costly that they have to cut down on quality or worse.
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