The Baton Rouge Hospitality Management Association, a group of hotel operators, say they are against tax increment financing for a Hilton Garden Inn in the Perkins Rowe development. Scott Michelet, president of the group’s board, says the organization opposed the original bill by Rep. Steve Carter, R-Baton Rouge, to set up a TIF to turn an old Jimmy Swaggart Ministries dormitory into a hotel. On Wednesday, Rep. Clif Richardson, R-Central, introduced an amendment adding the Perkins Rowe hotel to the original bill. “It’s not fair to give one hotel a TIF and not the other hotel,” he says. “I don’t want one hotel to have an advantage over the other.” Richardson says he heard financing for the Perkins Rowe hotel might be lost if the Bluebonnet hotel gets a TIF.
Michelet says his group has opposed a TIF for the Bluebonnet hotel from the beginning, arguing that the projects won’t bring new business to Baton Rouge. “You’ve already got nine hotels in a three-mile radius of both of those places,” he says. He notes that the developers of the hotels—Mike Wampold on Bluebonnet and Tommy Spinosa at Perkins Rowe—run strong companies. “It’s getting to the point where if you build a hotel, you see if you can get a TIF,” Michelet says. Wampold has asked to strip his Bluebonnet hotel out of the House bill, casting his lot with a measure sponsored by Senate President Pro Tem Sharon Weston Broome, D-Baton Rouge. To read Business Report Executive Editor JR Ball’s column about the hotel TIFs, click here.
