New Orleans City Council also gave the new taxi regulations force of law
With the 2013 Super Bowl at the Mercedes Benz Superdome 80 days away, the New Orleans City Council added a few extra stitches to New Orleans' red carpet Thursday, approving a landscaping project at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport and giving the strength of law to new rules for airport taxis.
Officials have been billing the airport as the city's gateway and the taxis there as its first ambassadors. In that vein, the City Council unanimously supported the sprucing up of the access road that snakes from Veterans Memorial Boulevard to Airline Drive. The strip will soon be replete with bike lanes and fresh shrubbery along the neutral ground, according to artists' renderings. The French Quarter-style lanterns will be repaired.
The $760,000 project will be paid for by the state and Jefferson Parish, but the City Council gets to weigh in because New Orleans owns the airport. The landscaping is expected to done in time for the big game.
The council's action on taxi regulations was little more than housekeeping, but important nonetheless if officials ever want the law behind them when they go after derelict cabs.
The city won a bitter fight in August to make its roughly 1,600 cabs uniformly modernized. If cabs want to pass inspections and work on New Orleans' roads, they now have to have working air conditioners, credit card machines, GPS devices and security cameras. The drivers must speak English and know the city, and cabs can be no older than seven years starting in 2014.
The City Council extended the same rules to any taxis wishing to shuttle passengers to and from the city-owned airport in Kenner. Those drivers can buy a $200 decal from the New Orleans Aviation Board after passing inspection.
When the council approved those rules two weeks ago, it did so as a resolution. To give them the strength of laws that could be enforced, they had to be delivered as an ordinance. That happened Tuesday with the council's unanimous vote.
The council also quietly looked to the airport's future after the Super Bowl, granting it permission Tuesday to auction off 260 dormant properties that surround its runways. The airport bought the properties almost 20 years ago after Kenner won a federal lawsuit about jet noise. They've since lain fallow save for a few holdout residents who refused to sell their homes in the 1990s.
Kenner Chief Administrative Officer Mike Quigley said officials are working to rezone the properties from residential to commercial to put them back on Kenner's tax rolls. New Orleans will get the money from the initial sales, but will have to repay the Federal Aviation Administration for the seed money it contributed to buy the properties in the first place.
Selling the lots will take some planning, Quigley said. Kenner is working with UNO to devise a "bundling" plan that would keep potential buyers from parsing out more valuable properties and leaving the rest. "We want to try to sell it, but the last thing you want to do is sell the most valuable pieces and have the rest of the land languish forever," Quigley said.
The New Orleans City Council approved the measure unanimously without discussion.