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That's the result of an apparent agreement struck between the city's Finance Department, which is under an Aug. 5 court order to start collecting a Regional Transit Authority tax from hotels and motels, and the Greater New Orleans Hotel-Motel Association, which asked that the collection of the tax be delayed until the first of the month so its members could reprogram their computers to handle the charge.

City officials originally said they planned to start collecting the tax Sunday to raise the money that they say will pay the local 20 percent contribution needed to unleash tens of millions of federal dollars for the planned $153 million restoration of streetcar service on Canal Street.

Meanwhile, the hotels and motels are continuing their public relations and legal fights to kill the RTA's efforts to win final court approval to apply the tax to them. They argue that when voters approved the RTA sales tax in 1985, the ballot measure specifically excluded hotels and motels from the charge.

Greater New Orleans Hotel-Motel Association Executive Vice President Bill Langkopp said the hospitality industry has no objection to the streetcar extension. But he said other projects, in particular the plans for a Phase IV enlargement of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, are a higher priority if the city's largest industry, tourism, is to remain competitive.

He accused City Hall of arrogance in trying to impose the added room tax without consulting industry leaders -- further evidence, he said, of the chronic lack of a coherent policy. Slapping yet another tax on room rates eventually will kill the city's golden goose, he said.

RTA officials insist that the 1985 exemption for hotels and motels was invalid to begin with. They contend that income from the tax would pay for transit improvements that would be a boon to the tourism industry.

The issue burst into the public arena in late July, when the RTA sought a ruling from an Orleans Parish Civil District Court judge that would allow it to lift the tax exemption on hotels and motels and begin collecting the tax from them.

Civil District Judge Terri Love, in an Aug. 5 ruling, ordered that the city must collect the tax from hotels and motels while she decides the RTA lawsuit. She allowed individual hotels to intervene in the case to oppose the tax but denied the same right to the hotel-motel group, the New Orleans Convention and Visitors' Bureau and the Louisiana Restaurant Association.

Those groups have asked the state 4th Circuit Court of Appeal to reverse Love on all those issues. In papers filed with the appeals court this week, their attorneys argued that the RTA is seeking to lift the tax exemption that applies not only to hotel and motel rooms, but also to food and drugs.

RTA attorneys said the food and drug exemption is not being challenged.

Meanwhile, attorneys for the RTA and the hotel industry cannot agree on the meaning of an Aug. 6 order from the appeals court saying, "All proceedings in this matter are hereby stayed pending further orders of this court."

Hotel association attorney John M. Wilson said he views that language as an order to the city not to start collecting the tax from hotels and motels. "The court was intending to keep the matter from going forward until they had a chance to look at it," he said.

But RTA attorney Mark Flake disagreed: "I don't see it as a bar to the city to collect the tax," he said. The appeals court order, he said, does not suspend Love's Aug. 5 judgment.