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.