Fingerprinting, felony check now required every two years, not just at first application
Though New Orleans tour guides spend their days trying to bring the city's history to life for visitors, some in the industry are bristling at Mayor Mitch Landrieu's revival of an age-old city law that governs their livelihoods.
View full sizeSome tour guides who lead visitors through New Orleans' most famous culinary, historic and cultural landmarks are reeling over a change in licensing rules enacted recently by Mayor Mitch Landrieu's administration. This tour group was photographed outside Antoine's Restaurant in the French Quarter in January 2005. The crackdown marks the latest example of Landrieu's fervor to enforce regulations that have been on the books for years but have been ignored or interpreted differently by previous administrations.
Since taking office last May, the administration has moved to regulate traditional brass bands' playing outdoors in the residential French Quarter, crack down on absentee owners and their blighted properties, and shut down off-the-books guest houses that undercut legitimate businesses.
Among the recent changes riling up some of the city's 555 tour guides is the requirement that they submit to a background check, including fingerprinting, when they renew their licenses every two years.
The fingerprinting mandate used to be enforced only when tour guides first became licensed through a process that also includes written and verbal exams that test applicants' knowledge of the city.
The mayor's new reading of the law, his spokesman said, aims to ensure that convicted felons aren't leading tourists around the city's most famous sites.
"It's a protection for our visitors and a protection for the tour-guides themselves," spokesman Ryan Berni said.
Besides adding a tedious step to the biennial renewal process, City Hall requires tour guides to get fingerprinted at Louis Armstrong International Airport, where the test costs $50, more than twice the price of other locations around town, said tour guide Candance Kagan.
"It's really causing an undue hardship on a lot of people, and a lot of it for me is just general principles," she said.
Airport spokeswoman Michelle Wilcut said federal security regulations require her facility to have the capacity to run background checks. After Hurricane Katrina, airport staff began conducting the checks for City Hall "as a courtesy," she said, adding that "this is not a money-making venture for us."
Berni said city officials are trying to get the Sheriff's Office to provide the service, though it wasn't immediately clear what the price would be.
Besides the added cost is the implication, at least to some, that the tour-guide industry is populated by crooks.
"What's most offensive about it is we're being treated like criminals," said Joycelyn Cole, owner of Tour-New-Orleans.com.
Cole surmised that a recent scandal involving taxi-inspection stickers caused city officials to crack down not only on cab drivers but also on tour guides. Both industries long have been governed by the Ground Transportation division of the city's Department of Safety & Permits.
"Because we're under them, they're not making distinctions between the groups that have problems and groups that have no problems," Cole said. Referring to herself and her colleagues, she added, "We're not the Police Department, after all."