A key piece of economic legislation this year may be a new deal for the New Orleans Saints, whose management has been making noise about moving elsewhere. The NFL Saints are Louisiana's only major professional sports team. Historically, the game is held only in or near cities where there is an NFL franchise. In recent years, the city has expanded its giant convention center and is planning yet another expansion. But tourism and conventions aren't the problem.
Large businesses are.
American Classic Voyages, parent of the Delta Queen steamboats, is now moving to Florida. High oil prices and record natural gas prices haven't helped. Petroleum employment was hammered by a price collapse in the mid-1980s, but it rebounded some 40 percent to about 20,000 in 1991 because of deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. But company consolidations toward Houston dropped the city's oil employment under 13,000 last year, according to figures from the University of New Orleans. Many downtown buildings that once housed businesses have been converted to hotels.