New Orleans – City officials boldly decided last fall to hold the parades of Mardi Gras, even though the treasury was empty and large swaths of the city still lay in ruins. The price was their demand that the beloved party abandon tradition and seek corporate sponsors.
With the first of dozens of parades scheduled to start Saturday, no corporation has come up with the $2 million the city was hoping to receive for the naming rights to Mardi Gras, first celebrated here 150 years ago. So far only one company, trash-bag-maker Glad Products, has said it will contribute, announcing an unspecified six-figure donation and a gift of 100,000 trash bags.
If no additional corporate sponsors step forward, the city will have to dig into its nonexistent treasury to pay for the celebration, which many officials say the city needs to raise its spirit and its economy.
“Yes, it will be a challenge for us to come up with money, but this is a tourist economy, and we need to have it,” said Ernest Collins, the city’s director of arts and entertainment.
Reginald Zeno, the city’s finance director, said he was “concerned” that the costs of Mardi Gras would “put a further drain on a budget at a time we’re already facing a deep deficit.”
But like Collins, Zeno sees Mardi Gras as an investment the city must make.
“The business of New Orleans is tourism, and New Orleans has got to get back to business,” said David Rubenstein, a co-owner of a clothing store on Canal Street. “There’s all this talk about bringing people back to New Orleans, but without tourism, there won’t be any jobs for them to come home to.”
Officials are still optimistic that more sponsors will materialize, even at this late date, to help cover an estimated $2.7 million in police overtime, trash collection and other expenses.
Collins says he doubts a white knight will sign up as a marquee sponsor, but he still hopes that other corporations will follow Glad’s example and help defray the costs.
Not everyone accepts the wisdom of putting on Mardi Gras, which has been canceled 13 times in the past, almost always because of wars, said Arthur Hardy, who has written extensively on the celebration.
That sentiment is particularly true among the tens of thousands of people who have been evacuated, many of whom have said the city’s priorities are misplaced.
Only after a protracted, sometimes clamorous debate did city officials decide to host an abbreviated version of the Mardi Gras parade season, which will last eight days this year, rather than the customary 12. Twenty-eight of the krewes, or social clubs, that build the elaborate floats and organize the parades will be participating this year, compared with 34 last year, Hardy said.
One early concern expressed by small-business owners and others was that a lack of money might mean the city could not provide adequate police protection, but those worries seem to have dissipated.
The city has 1,300 police officers on its payroll, compared with 1,600 before Hurricane Katrina hit, said Tami Frazier, a spokeswoman for Mayor C. Ray Nagin. But they are keeping watch over a much smaller city, and Frazier pointed out that the National Guard troops still in town were supplementing their efforts.
The real worry, many say, is financial.
Those in the sponsorship business say the city should have started searching for donors in August, when companies typically start thinking about their marketing budget for the coming year.
“Corporations expect a return on investment for these kind of sponsorship deals,” said Phil Strober of Wakeham & Associates Marketing, which has offices in New York and Los Angeles.
For their contribution, he said, companies want to produce marketing materials that will help them “maximize their bang for the buck” and see their logo displayed prominently in advertising campaigns – efforts that require months of preparation.
“We knew this would be an uphill struggle to find corporate sponsors in so short a time frame,” Collins said.
It was not until late December, he said, that the city enlisted the firm MediaBuys, based in Los Angeles, to seek corporate sponsors. The goals were to help cover the costs of the celebration and to finance a limited national campaign related to Mardi Gras to increase tourism.
MediaBuys has approached about 75 corporations in search of sponsors, said the company’s chief executive, Chick Ciccarelli.
“We’re still in negotiations with other corporations,” said Ciccarelli, who was confident that more would commit money before the weekend.
There is a chance, of course, that Mardi Gras will more than pay for itself through a significant increase in hotel and sales-tax revenue.
There are about 36,000 hotel rooms in and around the city, nearly two-thirds of which are taking guests.
The hotels are telling city officials that they will be running at or near capacity during Mardi Gras, but that has been the case for months with evacuees, contractors and emergency workers keeping them busy.
“It’s impossible for me to predict what kind of revenues we’ll see from Mardi Gras,” said Zeno, the finance director. “We’re expecting a pretty good turnout, but how this will all fall out is anyone’s guess.”
Before the storm, metropolitan New Orleans had 3,414 restaurants that generated $2.1 billion in annual sales, according to the Louisiana Restaurant Association. Since Katrina, roughly one-third of those restaurants have reopened, the association said.