A lot can happen in 22 minutes with the Bossier City Council – at its most recent meeting, too much of it not good for taxpayers in America’s biggest small town.
The Council faced a short agenda last week, having just met the week before with a holiday thrown in. Nonetheless, it managed to revisit two contentious items from the past and managed to botch both.
One readdressed the convoluted scheme to pay extra for crossing guards at city roads around two schools. Each institution lies just outside of city limits, but city roads access these. Until last year, the Bossier Parish School Board – with a budget substantially larger than the city’s – had school resource officers, who are sheriff’s deputies contracted to schools, direct traffic prior to and just after the school day but decided to have SROs stay in schools during these times. Instead of absorbing the costs, the Board cheekily billed both the city and parish for these, both of whom knuckled under – even though in the city’s case it didn’t pay up until three months after the school year started with the Board eating several thousand dollars of cost until the city forked over.
At the time, City Attorney Charles Jacobs alleged the only way the city could provide these extra 20 or so hours a week out of the about 8,000 for each of three shifts weekly was to pay overtime, which would make it more expensive than the contracting. This inability to schedule properly with so few hours out of so many either displays insufficient will to do so or poor performance. Further, the city already pays $100,000 annually to cover nine schools entirely within city limits for crossing guards, so the necessity of paying more than twice as much seems doubtful.
However, supposedly the presumed need should have disappeared. Jacobs said then plans were afoot to install traffic control devices at the intersections in question, so that this would be a one-time deal affecting only the 2022-23 academic year. Even so, the 2023 budget passed at the same meeting included the $25,200 amount that appeared to cover AY 2023-24 as well.
Which turned out either as prophetic or self-fulfilling, when last week the Council had come before it the same cooperative endeavor agreement for next AY, as apparently these plans fell through, at least partially. Jacobs and Chief Administrative Office Amanda Nottingham did say they thought before the AY concluded that, apparently through efforts not undertaken by the city, the desired access would happen at W.T. Lewis, which would mean less spent.
But not so at the other, Parkway. Nottingham, in response to a question by Republican Councilor Chris Smith, intimated that different access to the high school depended upon a state appropriation that was not forthcoming, alleging that it had been a line item in an appropriations bill that had been yanked by state House of Representatives leadership to punish area representatives who had tried to force redirection of surplus dollars towards shoring up pensions and the state’s primary savings account (and which would have triggered tax cuts) rather than have these enable increased continuing expenses and go towards more capital expenditures.
Yet there’s no evidence that legislative leaders ever considered such a request. No version of the state’s general appropriations bill, capital outlay bill, or supplemental appropriations bill contained such a line item. While several other items in Bossier Parish representatives’ districts did get pulled late in the session, for this particular allegation the item never formally made it into any version of any appropriations bill that would contain capital outlay items. Possibly it was spoken of in conceptual terms, but Nottingham’s characterization of it was completely baseless. (This prompted Smith to make a curious insinuation that GOP state Sen. Robert Mills had a hand in torpedoing the phantom item, even though Parkway is far outside of Mills’ current district nor is within the boundaries of the one for which Mills is running for reelection, and Democrat Councilor Bubba Williams piped up that he agreed with Smith’s assessment that the legislative delegation “had failed” the city.)
Regardless, the city had months to plan for realigning police forces to save up to $25,000 and failed to do so. This speaks to a lack of will and indifference to taxpayers by Republican Mayor Tommy Chandler and his administration.
That money wasted, the Council decided to set the stage to give away more taxpayer resources. Minutes later, the Council resolved to have the city hire an architect to design a new maintenance building at Walbrook Park. Testimony revealed the existing facility was considered decrepit and insufficient in need of upgrades.
It also revealed its origins as the place allowed Democrat former Mayor George Dement’s son to have his boxing club meet there. Since then, it has transitioned into the space where Dixie League baseball has offices. That organization for decades has garnered preferential access, at taxpayer expense, to city recreational facilities to the point that it can veto citizen use of these (Williams has a long-time association with the organization).
Smith asked whether Dixie was charged rent, and was told it wasn’t. Subsequently, Smith’s was the only vote against letting the contract.
That lone dissent points the city where it needs to go. Building a better facility is appropriate, but not granting its rent-free status to a private but favored organization that it historically has benefitted from such an arrangement. Officials argue allowing Dixie a gatekeeping role over taxpayer facilities is compensated for by its upkeep of some playing diamonds, but this is an unseemly and inappropriate arrangement. The city should assume responsibility for all maintenance to and charge all organizations impartially for use of facilities without cutting deals behind the scenes that invite abuse of taxpayer resources.
Whether it’s throwing away money onto other governments or favored private interests, Bossier City needs to grow up from its small-town mentality.
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