Shreveport MPC autonomy debate tempest in teapot

In the background of an important decision made by the Shreveport City Council today is whether it needs the extra layer of bureaucracy that put it in this spot in the first place.

At December’s beginning, the Shreveport Metropolitan Planning Commission registered a tie vote (because of one absence) on whether to grant a special land use permit for a data center in the city’s west. This effectively denied the application, to the consternation of some policy-makers and especially Republican Mayor Tom Arceneaux.

Statute defines and empowers the MPC. Its nine members with six-year staggered terms the mayor appoints with Council approval, all Shreveport residents. It concocts a master plan of zoning and development and must approve changes outside of those parameters. Its budget the Council sets, from which it hires a staff that analyzes proposals and makes recommendations – a staff which had recommended center approval. However, dissenting members said visible public opposition at the meeting had swayed them to reject it.

Overbuilt LA higher education causing conflict

Battles over university and university system governance in Louisiana really boil down to the fact that Louisiana’s higher education provision is overbuilt.

Culminating a years-long effort that has developed in bits and pieces, the Louisiana State University System has moved to reorganize. It has abandoned the combination of the Baton Rouge campus with the system within leadership by its new recent hires, and rightly so.

Back when system and LSU leadership was combined, the plan for the system was to combine campus governance and implementation as much as possible. On the business sides, campuses were to find economies of scale, and in that aspect the strategy succeeded in creating a central back-office operation among other ways to save.

Big decisions soon to shape BC economic future

The next couple of weeks may make or break Bossier City’s transformation from big small town to an economic growth machine.

A lot of very consequential decisions are coming down the pike to the city in short order. It looks to implement a key personnel move just as it faces a big strategic decision, all with the backdrop of erasing a mountain of debt and the possibility of nabbing a huge water and sewerage customer.

City Chief Administrative Officer Amanda Nottingham will take of her job at year’s end to become essentially head lobbyist at Southwestern Electric Power Company. She has been a steadying influence for Republican Mayor Tommy Chandler, who doesn’t like to get too involved in the nuts-and-bolts of administration, but also faced hamstringing by the City Council by its often altering substantially or defeating administration proposals.

BESE must clarify unexcused absence policy

Louisiana’s Department of Education needs to cut through the confusion and make it clear: if a child doesn’t show up to school because parents fear la Immigración, it’s not an excused absence.

Last week, as the federal government publicized and launched an inter-agency effort to detain illegal aliens in the New Orleans metropolitan area, the location with a concentration of these scofflaw residents, Jefferson Parish, saw significantly higher truancy in its schools. It is conjectured that this resulted from families of illegal aliens keeping their children out of school for fear that agents would bust into schools and round up children illegally in the country.

That notion is ridiculous, given official directives that the only such intrusions now permitted would occur if a known criminal (likely incognito) was at a school and only after intensive vetting of the process. There are no jump-out boys launching into a school going door-to-door demanding papeles affirming citizenship or permanent residency; all that has been a fantasy propagated by left-wing education administrators and teachers, special interests, politicians, and media to try to score political points.

Tax reform paying off more quickly than thought

 With apologies for stealing and changing this line: OK, Landry, Nelson, Emerson, et. al. were right.

Last week, Louisiana’s Revenue Estimating Conference held its end-of-calendar-year meeting to revise numbers. These revisions can mean the state might have extra money from past budget years to spend on essentially one-time items, extra money for this budget year to spend on anything, and more to spend on the upcoming fiscal year 2027 budget – or it might be reversals in this year where forecasts could cause retrenchments and reduced future expenditures, respectively.

With almost a year of data from changes made during last year’s Third Extraordinary Session of the Legislature now on the books, many of the usual suspects from the collectivist political left then predicted at best “uncertainty,” at worst “budget shortfalls” as a result of flattening tax individual and corporate tax rates, broadening the base a little by excising some exemptions, increasing individual exemption levels, and increasing the sales tax rate. Howls of protest came about how this would prove to be regressive and hurt lowest-income people’s pocketbooks (although one analysis estimated it would cost a whopping $5 extra a year for such a household).