WASHINGTON, D.C. — While national issues continue to garner the bulk of attention across the hotel industry, leaders with the American Hotels & Lodging Association say more and more of their bandwidth is focusing on local and state issues that directly impact hoteliers.
Speaking during the spring meeting of the Hospitality Asset Managers Association, AHLA President and CEO Rosanna Maietta said Los Angeles, New Orleans and New York present some of the biggest challenge in terms of hotel regulations. For much of the past year, the organization has focused on expanding its efforts on a local level, particularly when it comes to labor and workforce issues.
"This is about building an infrastructure, building a ground game and taking a longer view in terms of how we approach a lot of the challenges that we have," she said. "We can no longer do old-school lobbying the way it's been done, which is trying to defeat a bill or waiting for a bill to drop and then trying to amend it. It doesn't work that way anymore. There's too much at stake."
She said developing relationships on a city council level should be a top priority for hoteliers, and her group is putting more effort into "championing candidates and promoting some candidate for office" at the city level, at least for major markets.
"Just this week, our team was down in New Orleans meeting with the mayor, meeting with state officials, meeting with council members who run economic development and determine policy, and having one-on-one conversations about the impact and importance of tourism," Maietta said.
She said part of the thinking with this strategy is that local policy changes often have a way of spreading around the country.
"We expect some wage issues to be coming out soon, and typically what happens on the East and West Coast moves inward," she said. "So we're preempting that by laying the groundwork and laying those relationships. In New York in the next couple of weeks, we're going to see a workforce mandate. ... Our team is preparing a multi-pronged campaign to address that."
During the same meeting, Matt Carrier, senior vice president of federal government affairs at AHLA, held a discussion with Kirsten Chadwick, a partner at lobbying firm Fierce Government Relations.
They discussed how among the potential federal legislation right now the American Franchising Act, which would clarify the federal joint employer rule, is perhaps the most important. The federal interpretation of a joint employer, which defines whether franchisors are considered an official employer of someone working at a franchised business such as a hotel, has flipped back and forth over the past decade as the White House has shifted between Democratic and Republican administrations.
But despite that, Carrier said support for more permanently clarifying the rule has been bipartisan.
"Codifying joint employer, that's bipartisan," he said. "That's something where we're thinking about lame duck opportunities."
Chadwick noted the most likely path forward for that legislation is to be attached to a larger bill.
"It's probably not going to be able to go by itself, so it's probably going to need to have a legislative vehicle to attach itself to," she said.