The controversy over funding for the Baton Rouge city constable’s office provides yet another example of how this kind of office can suffer bloat that uses public dollars inefficiently while straying from its intended functions.
Recently, the Metropolitan Council passed the city-parish’s 2026 budget that bit the bullet. In the wake of the failure of amendments to the consolidated government’s plan of government that reconfigured revenue streams to ease a cash crunch. Republican Mayor-President Sid Edwards declared there must be cuts across the board except for public safety, chopping 11 percent from most although he more than doubled that for his own office. Caught up in those cuts was over $400,000 to the city constable’s office, of which about two-thirds funded by the city-parish’s general fund that foots salaries for 48 deputy constables and with the remainder from a small state pay contribution and self-generated revenues as specified in law, which leaves the total revenues budgeted for the year at about $3.4 million.
Democrat Constable Terrica Williams – the plan sets up this as a separately-elected office – complained about that, requesting that nearly $500,000 be added back to fund the six positions she has to provide security for court proceedings. Under statute, constables provide that for their appropriate associated courts, in this instance Baton Rouge City Court. For the last few years, the city reimbursed for that. However, short on funds Edwards and the Council turned that down. This has left Williams scrambling to fulfill that function in 2026, and presently her office and the city are trying to work something out.
Yet Williams can help out by pulling back some of the more extraneous functions that her office has acquired over the years. Unfortunately, this is a common occurrence with constables, or marshals as they are termed in mainly larger municipalities, statewide. Perhaps to justify large reimbursements they receive from local governments (and salaries; Williams’ salary is $135,000 annually with an escalator clause), often these officials create agencies that mimic coterminous larger police departments or sheriff’s offices rather than devoting efforts to revenue-raising duties in state law as authorized by courts (which can be done by other law enforcement agencies) and depend upon local governments to supplement with tax revenues in part to perform functions already done by other LEAs.
For example, the agency puts on a number of community events for youths and the elderly. These include running the DARE program for anti-drug education (funded by a grant until recently but now puts the bite on Baton Rouge taxpayers) and a Christmas toy giveaway. Indeed, its budget documentation commits to performing a certain number of these a year that is set to increase.
But in the meantime, its own revenue-raising has declined. In 2014 – and actually having fewer deputies and the city population remaining flat – self-generated revenues were just under $1 million while they are projected to be only $865,000 in 2026 (which may be optimistic, given in 2024 they were only about $550,000). Indeed, the budget metrics for activities involving bench warrants increase dramatically from 2024 actual numbers, which would indicate a shifting towards statutory duties.
Of course, the best solution would be to eliminate the constable’s office and have the police perform its functions, which likely it could do with fewer personnel and cost savings. Politically that is unlikely to happen, so the next best thing is to have the constable cut back on performing duplicative or superfluous activities and save money that way while devoting more resources to performing revenue collection and the activities associated with that.
It’s all hands on deck for Baton Rouge to clean up overspending and misspending (largely as a consequence of taking the now-detached St. George area for granted) that has caused this belt-tightening. The constable needs to contribute as well by getting back to basics.
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