Sheriff's race aside, NO elections disappoint

Admittedly an extremely low bar to hurdle in terms of quality of governance, New Orleans possibly will be slightly better off after 2025 elections.

Maybe barely, by default, for the city’s head honcho. The dingbat Democrat LaToya Cantrell, under indictment, will give way to Democrat Councilor Helena Moreno, whose policy preferences are a mixture of anodyne appeals to better procedural execution of service delivery and wackiness by its nature that will overwhelm the former. For example, she’s all in on forcing more expensive renewable power onto Orleanians and talks of government pumping more regulation into housing provision, as if that already hasn’t left the city with a significant affordable housing shortage. It’s an agenda designed to drive even more people away and to put more into poverty, but at least the hope is she won’t be corrupt.

The incoming City Council may offer more hope. All the incumbents able to run won, and even the least awful of those who have served, District A Democrat Joe Giarusso, will be replaced by one of two of his former staffers who promise to be about as obnoxious in policy, although one, Democrat Aimee McCarron, in those terms might be a slight upgrade. And replacing Moreno for one of the two at-large posts, Democrat state Rep. Matthew Willard represents more of the same policy rubbish.

Arceneaux facing tough reelection road

Getting an early start, Republican Shreveport Mayor Tom Arceneaux formally announced his bid for reelection in 13 months, just as an example of controversy flared that will make a second term an uphill proposition.

History instructs and numbers don’t lie. Arceneaux, a white Republican in a jurisdiction then where over half the voters registered as Democrats and even a higher proportion were black, in an upset captured the office because he ran against an unpopular incumbent and entered the runoff against a longtime, controversial black Democrat who had made enemies within the black community. Now facing an electoral environment where currently 55 percent of the electorate is black and a half Democrats, if he faces off against a quality black Democrat without the baggage other such candidates carried in 2022, he will be an underdog.

To win, Arceneaux had to have a near-perfect mayoralty, and he has done well. Taking a much more grounded and serious approach than his predecessor, he has tried to solve street-level problems that tend to transcend partisan boundaries. The most recent example, and perhaps his most effective and popular, has been to aggressively go after blighted properties and some big ones at that to, at least, clear areas of them.

Past EPA politicized agenda now costing LA

That the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency seems a bit slow in doing its job in Louisiana is the wages of its now-excised obsession with conspiracy theories centered on race.

The EPA has come under criticism for a seemingly-slow response to an accident at Smitty’s Supply in Tangipahoa Parish, where an explosion and fire have spread chemical residue far and wide. Concerns have mounted about environmental contamination and both the EPA and Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, with the state response somewhat tethered to the EPA’s, have pledged and pointed to increased urgency in the cleanup.

Unrelated but another complaint about slowness in EPA response comes from researchers at Louisiana State University. They have developed an environmentally friendly and humane method to put to death outlaw quadrupeds of the porcine variety. Feral hogs do considerable damage to agriculture and even flood control efforts, and this method of scattering rubber ball-sized bait that seems to light up their taste buds but doesn’t harm other wildlife promises to be a much more effective tactic in population control than hunting. But the product isn’t in circulation because the EPA has to approve of it and the process is long and convoluted that with attention paid to it could be streamlined and hastened.

BC budget presents chance to reshape fiscal mgt

 Bossier City this year took a small step towards smarter fiscal management. Its 2026 budget reveals other opportunities where sweating other small stuff can add up to significant savings.

Tomorrow, the City Council takes up the separate budget ordinances, which largely reflect a measure of prudence. Typically, the city budgets conservatively which has paid off in recent years with a growing general fund balance – until the recently-exited long-in-the-tooth councilors concocted a city-wide pay raise built on political, not fiscal, reasons that promises to deplete that healthy surplus in a matter of years unless the city implements compensatory actions.

The Republican Mayor Tommy Chandler Administration has in a few ways, one of which was a nonstarter: property tax increases. But it did get Council approve to muscle through water and sanitation fee increases that were eating away at reserves, hopefully obviating the need for subsidization from general tax revenues. It also apparently has called a halt to the drunken sailor spending by the departed graybeards on shiny baubles that boosted egos but were fiscally imprudent for the general value they imparted to the citizenry, by making a verbal commitment to using one source of funding for these wasteful capital projects – a sales tax that dumps into the Parkway Capital Project Fund – for its legally-permissible alternative of funding city operating activities.

Still, the level at which the 2026 budget draws from this, about $10 million, isn’t sustainable as only $4 million is budgeted to replenish the $10 million remaining, so that can’t work in the long run. Another trick up the sleeve may try to ameliorate this: a proposal by the Chandler Administration to unlock, which would not happen next year but could be incorporated into the 2027 budget, the $18 million in the Public Safety and Health Trust Fund which would require voter approval. The idea would be to stake some of this as a reserve for paying out health benefits for city employees and retirees, preventing the need to dip into tax revenues.

Guard deployment must fit larger commitment

It’s as bogus, if not disingenuous, as it gets when Republican Gov. Jeff Landry’s request for National Guard troops to be activated for use in crime-fighting efforts in Louisiana’s three largest cities is disparaged.

Last week, Landry asked for the state’s National Guard to be deployed by his administration in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Shreveport, at federal government expense. Other than that, plans are as yet indeterminate as to the details of the operation.

Some Democrat officeholders, predictably, have complained about this effort, where ironically enough the loudest at the local level seem to have come from those whose areas they represent have experienced for decades the worst amount of crime. They moan about militarization and sending a negative message, although perhaps what really concerns them the appearance of troops may highlight that politicians of their stripes have been in office forever with no improvement in crime reduction and that voters might catch on to this cross-generation failure.

Closed primaries: more accountability if fewer run

If you expect candidate choice to go down significantly as a result of Louisiana expanding its (semi-)closed primary election roster, you would be wrong. If you think it would increase accountability, you’d be right.

Starting next year, closed primary elections return for federal offices and will become implemented for Public Service Commission and Supreme Court seats. But along with that, qualification methods changed beyond what was necessary to create a primary system.

Until now, to qualify under the blanket primary system, candidates had two options: get up a petition turned in by a certain date with varying numbers of signatures and locations of signers depending upon the office, or just pay up a certain amount during qualification that varied in amount as to office and what category of political party, if any, in which the candidate would enroll where the two major parties had the highest fees. Both methods remain but now are very different.

Against past type, BC better on pickleball

There is the right way of government doing business and the wrong way. Bossier City did it the right way and Caddo Parish didn’t when it comes to going from zero to 30 pickleball courts in the area.

In September, the Caddo Parish Commission voted to sink $10 million into building a 19-court facility. The appropriation would come in the from of a revenue bond, which means the parish has the chance of being paid back, as user fees it hopes will cover the principal and interest. Even if that happens, the parish will have indirect costs in putting the deal together and keeping the operation of it going, as it plans to farm out the managerial task.

This is the biggest part of the scam, as the facility will be built, and likely not opening until 2027, on land leased by the Northwest Louisiana YMCA at one of its locations, which will be the operator. In other words, the Y is leveraging parish government to get itself built for free a facility it eventually will own.

LA higher education win over DEI far from certain

Declaring victory too soon can lead to an ultimate defeat, the Louisiana Board of Regents chairwoman should know.

Recently, Regent Misti Cordell, who last year was appointed to the Board and ascended to its top position, declared and end to the state’s battle against institutionalized diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in higher education. These efforts, whether in the form of programmatic attempts to privilege students and faculty members on the basis of protected characteristic categories, usually by race, or in the form of behavioral requirements to do the same such as forcing job applicants to explain how they would do that, have stoked controversy as they rely upon the hypothesis that government and societal institutions are irredeemably racist or discriminate against others in certain protected classes, requiring discrimination in favor of the alleged victim classes that thereby becomes discrimination, if not harassment, against those not members of the favored classes.

Cordell asserted that “the DEI nonsense is DONE. The Legislature killed it. The Regents stripped it out. Louisiana is not going back. If it shows up in old paperwork, that doesn’t change the reality – those bad ideas belong to the past, not our future.” But little of that statement actually is the case in any permanent sense.

Case for LA film tax credits weaker than ever

Even the presence of tariffs doesn’t seem likely to halt the root wastefulness of Louisiana’s Motion Picture Production tax credit that doesn’t change through many its iterations — especially when there are better uses for that money coming out of taxpayers’ pockets.

Republican Pres. Donald Trump has reiterated his threat to place tariffs on movies made in foreign countries. Increasingly, film production has moved out of the country, mainly because of lower labor costs. However, the mechanics of doing so don’t lend themselves well to setting up a regime that would provide the benefits of protectionism. And part of the problem also is the falling tide of movie-making and television series because of the rise of streaming services that empty theaters and keep people from surfing the dial as demand for that kind of product diminishes.

Workable tariffs could help Louisiana’s film and television production, which has been losing ground relative to other locations both foreign and domestic. Part has to do with changes last year to the tax credit, which had its cap lowered from $150 million annually to $125 million even as other states are raising theirs. But foreign competition has been most challenging, and not just impacting negatively the state but other states as well.

Elected chiefs bad idea in Monroe, anywhere

Monroe’s politically contentious fire chief appointment saga shouldn’t be the impetus to opening the door to greater folly in the quest for the political power by other elected officials.

After a year-plus political tussle between independent Mayor Friday Ellis and a Democrat-majority City Council over naming a new fire chief, with the Council majority rejecting two appointees for somewhat conflicting reasons, the deadlock was broken this month when Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, under authority granted him by a law backed by Ellis, appointed one of the two Ellis nominees previously rejected. The issue took an ugly turn when members of the Council majority, who are black, called Ellis, who is white, “anti-black” because both nominees are white who would head up a department in a city whose population is almost two-thirds black.

In the wake of the resolution, two of the majority, Rodney McFarland and Verbon Muhammad, speculated that perhaps Monroe, in a move that would require changing the city charter, should have both its police and fire chiefs chosen at the ballot box. That’s an idea that if it ever made it onto the ballot should be rejected by voters.