Port seeks payoff for BC councilor investment

The Caddo-Bossier Port Commission hopes to have pay off the over $600,000 it has shuttled over the years to Republican Bossier City Councilor David Montgomery as he literally carries water on a deal likely to be favorable for it but to turn sour on Bossier City residents.

This week, in its meeting the Council delayed a motion by Montgomery to begin approval of a cooperative endeavor agreement between the Port and city. Its complicated nature reflects the maze of interests involved.

The Port seeks to have an alternative source of water and its treatment to its present hookup with Shreveport. It pledges to issue $35 million in bonds to allow buildout of additional capacity for both. However, it wants Bossier City to run the facility and pay for its construction and maintenance in the city’s exchange for transmission and distribution of water and treatment of resulting wastewater to the Port and its users with those entities paying it for that service.

Political fashion leading to police tragedies

Almost three years of a collective insanity arose to make police departments woke, Shreveport appears to be paying the price in a manner that may cost lives.

Recently, a black fleeing suspect named Alonzo Bagley was shot fatally by white Shreveport police officer Alexander Tyler. This occurred not long after black Memphis police officers appeared to break every rule in the book in the apprehension, then death, of a black suspect Tyre Nichols.

The Memphis case has drawn far more attention and commentary echoing a worldview that began taking prominence in the late spring of 2020 with the death in Minneapolis of George Floyd, a black man who died in custody of non-black police officers. From that the widespread trope, up until then largely confined to certain academic quarters and political circles, developed that unarmed black suspects dying in arrest situations was a function of police brutality as a specific manifestation of systemic racism inculcated into American society and institutions.

Shooting handling to test no drama Arceneaux

Even though whatever Shreveport can do New Orleans can do better, Republican Shreveport Mayor Tom Arceneaux’s first stiff challenge is to ensure that stays true.

Last weekend, during the Krewe of Gemini parade shootings occurred at two different locations along the parade route. The one along Shreveport-Barksdale Highway resulted in a non-life-threatening injury, but the one on Clyde Fant Parkway – and in the designated “family zone” no less – left an out-of-town teenager dead.

Not to be outdone, a day later in New Orleans during the Krewe of Bacchus parade a shooting there just yards from the route took one life and injured five. Of course, this has become old hat in the Crescent City, where in the last decade shootings on or steps from parade routes have occurred in 2015, 2018, and 2022.

On cue, Edwards produces one last bad budget

A tax-and-spend liberal to the bitter end, Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards’ last budget request reflects the irresponsibility emblematic of his fiscal policy-making that he hopes has staying power.

State governments have lived on a sugar high for two years with record-busting national deficit spending force-feeding money to them, creating false economies fattening state coffers besides allocating bonus bucks to spend. This all will dissipate starting this year. Further, Louisiana has scheduled sales tax relief commencing in a couple of years and faces escalating payments to move its pension funds towards solvency.

The responsible approach would make few if any new commitments and find ways to shrink government. Then there’s the every-man-a-king approach taken by Edwards which ignores this reality and treats the state’s finances as if throws from a carnival krewe.

Edwards legacy: more govt, worse-off citizenry

After seven years of mendacity and braggadocio, the Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards managed to top itself on those accounts when introducing Edwards’ last budget.

Last week, prior to getting into the nuts and bolts of the fiscal year 2023-24 request, Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne pelted the Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget with his version of the state’s financial health prior to and during Edwards’ terms. The presentation noted how through the eight years previous to Edwards each year at some point the Revenue Estimating Conference declared a budget deficit, how budgets routinely used funds sweeps or taking idle money out of accounts that had little or no possibility of being spent for their assigned purposes, and then since Edwards took office how those years had declared surpluses without any funds sweeps with a couple of more forecasted surpluses in the future.

Implied was the tax cuts previous to Edwards had a negative impact while the tax increases staged by Edwards and insufficiently resisted by a Republican-led Legislature had brought a bounty. A laundry list of items into which the state poured money in the period followed, and as a side note observed the state had the lowest unemployment rate ever.