On Tuesday we’re going to have a huge economic development win announced in Vermilion Parish, as SpaceX is about to lay down the better part of $100 billion to build a Starbase facility which will include rocket launch capability, rocket assembly, fuel manufacturing, data centers and other stuff. SpaceX’s investment comes on the heels of more than $200 billion in economic development projects currently in the pipeline for Louisiana, a number which places one of America’s longtime economic backwaters in a commanding position nationally for economic development and capital investment.

Which has almost completely missed New Orleans altogether.

There are politics involved in this, to be sure. The political class inside the city of New Orleans is, as we’ve noted, a socialist clown-car of people capable of chasing off even the most determined investors, and as such New Orleans’ only economic lifeline at present involves its tourist industry.

But even there, the city is criminally underperforming.

Conversions and refurbishments leading to small boutique properties aside, New Orleans has not built a landmark hotel in 44 years. The last one was built in 1982. As a result, while the city does have an OK amount of hotel space it’s badly underbuilt where it comes to luxury hotel rooms. And as a result, New Orleans’ bid for a Super Bowl in 2032 is questionable at best.

New Orleans is no longer seen as a premium convention destination. It has fallen behind Atlanta, Nashville, Tampa, Orlando, Dallas and Houston in that regard.

Enter Omni Hotels, which already has one property in New Orleans – that being the Bourbon Orleans Hotel, which is an old facility which at this point qualifies as a boutique property and not a major convention headquarters. The owners of the Omni Hotels chain are Robert, Terry and Blake Rowling, who hail from the Dallas area. They’re an oil and gas family who got into the high-end hotel business and turned their enterprise into a monster.

Robert Rowling is a multibillionaire. He’s also one of America’s largest political donors.

And the Rowlings want to put down a landmark convention-headquarters hotel next door to the New Orleans Convention Center. This is a $600 million construction project which would create a five-star hotel property with 1,000 rooms, putting 1,400 jobs on the books.

The project had sailed through the approval process, including twice getting unanimous votes from the New Orleans City Council, even despite a spate of idiots-in-red-tshirts commies showing up at City Council meetings to complain about the deal. Then last Friday, Cameron Henry, Louisiana’s Senate President and a member of the State Bond Commission, opened his mouth and started talking in advance of the Bond Commission’s meeting yesterday.

“I am adamantly opposed to putting anything related to Omni on next week’s agenda,” said Henry, a Republican from Metairie. “I will be there, and if it’s on the agenda, I will vote against it. The financing isn’t in place, and we don’t have a deal that’s good for the state.”

That was enough to get the Convention Center to withdraw their request and create a good deal of uncertainty around a $600 million project. Cue the screeching of the brakes.

What financing is he talking about that isn’t in place? He didn’t say.

What we know is this. The deal as it’s currently set up is to throw Omni some $120 million in tax incentives and to lock in a $2 million flat property tax payment over 45 years, which the Bureau of Governmental Research has estimated is worth around $800 million in total incentives over the course of that period. So about $18 million a year over 45 years, more or less.

In return for a guaranteed $90 million in property tax receipts the city is not currently getting, plus an estimated $213 million in economic activity every year that Jim Cook, president and CEO of the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, estimates the hotel will drive.

What’s the sales tax rate in Orleans Parish? Ten percent, half state and half local.

So if Cook is correct, you’re laying down $18 million in incentives to get $23.3 million in property and sales tax receipts.

Even then, these aren’t really hard numbers. Without that break on the property taxes, it’s a decent bet nothing gets built and there are no property taxes to collect. Let’s remember that New Orleans’ politicians had to stage a press event on Canal Street talking about how they were going to aspirationally revive the city’s commercial core now that Canal Street has been taken over by t-shirt and bong shops and homeless bums. It’s not like people are beating a path to the City Council to get permits to build big things in New Orleans.

The point is, that $2 million flat rate property tax deal is $2 million more per year than New Orleans has a right to expect.

And for this you get back into the mix for hosting Super Bowls, Final Fours, the SEC Basketball Tournament, keeping the Sugar Bowl as part of the college football playoff rotation and national championship game, you start pulling major conventions again… tourism as an economic development engine starts to actually operate again and maybe there are business owners on Canal Street who are operating going concerns and the homeless bums get pushed off somewhere else.

There have been rumors that New Orleans is up for the 2030 midterm GOP convention. Though the same complaints about a lack of top-flight hotel space are in the way.

Until Henry started squawking, there was no notable opposition to this project. Not a single other state legislator went on record complaining about it. And what he stopped was the Convention Center asking for permission to expand their bonding capacity to get the project started.

So Cameron Henry knows better than everybody else, including the people working this deal, how to structure this project. Cameron Henry, with zero economic development experience, fresh off genius moves like killing the LA GATOR Scholarship program or endorsing Bill Cassidy a couple of weeks after he came in third place in a GOP Senate primary as an incumbent, sees all the angles nobody else can see.

The Bond Commission will meet again in September. We’ll see if Henry is still “adamant” about killing the Omni deal then. Or whether he’s not steamrolled by the rest of the Commission. The September meeting is something of a drop-dead date for getting this deal going before the NFL decides on that Super Bowl.