Goodbye rancid 2025, hello new site in 2026

A big change is coming to this blog. After just on 21 years almost exclusively on what now is Google’s Blogger, starting Jan. 2 it will be cross-posted on Substack.

Some readers already have experienced this. Those of you who also subscribe to my Bossier Views blog on Substack know this. Since mid-2022 any post that has relevance to politics within Bossier Parish has been posted here and there.

I’m doing this because the Substack formatting is easier for viewers to access, search, and likely to read. I suspect it’s also easier for indexing and subscribing, even as the audience for Bossier politics is much smaller theoretically than for Louisiana politics, it has collected almost as many subscribers as there are followers on my Twitter feed, which posts links to each entry here as they are published. In the future, it will post links to entries at the Substack site (see the bottom of this post).

Landry, LA score first with Trump grant reforms

While it was the Republican Gov. Jeff Landry Administration that won the footrace in rolling out high-speed Internet access in all of Louisiana, give the Republican Pres. Donald Trump Administration an assist.

Regarding the Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment program intended to bring this connectivity across the country stuffed into one of the many spending bills forced through Congress by Trump’s Democrat predecessor, in November Louisiana announced it was the first state to receive approval of its plan. At the time, the Trump Administration attributed this milestone to the “state broadband office’s efforts to rein in excessive costs, use diverse technologies, and collaborate effectively with the private sector demonstrate the Benefit of the Bargain reforms in action.”

Key to that alacrity was the referenced reforms. The original program, the intent of which already was becoming stale because about 99 percent of households had high-speed access by 2021, featured stipulations created by Democrats that made it more of a handout on the basis of politicized considerations, with rules giving liberal special interests and states run by those ideologues the ability to direct the money to favored groups, to subsidize favored delivery systems, and to increase the ability to regulate the Internet.

Back to basics can resolve BR constable crunch

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.

Rate hikes to compel Monroe to more efficiency

The day of reckoning has come for Monroe water, sewerage, and waste customers, with hopefully the delay induced by a penny-wise, pound-foolish City Council majority won’t end up costing ratepayers over time more than the amount of money they were able to retain over the past year.

At its last meeting of the year, councilors sent out a warning that customers of city water, sewerage, and water services could expect to see a rate hike by May. Democrat Chairman Rodney McFarland likened the increase to halt a “kicking the can down the road” on rates and said he would vote for whatever the independent Mayor Friday Ellis Administration determined was necessary. While it’s good practice to ensure these services pay for themselves and leave a healthy balance in reserve for future needs, practically speaking the fund can’t go too low because of stipulations attached to bonds issued for capital items, and as well as the lower the reserve, the higher interest rates on bonds issued will be. Indeed, existing debt was dropped two notches in quality by one of the big ratings firms because of this repeal.

It was a remarkable turnaround for McFarland, who along with fellow Democrats Verbon Muhammad and Juanita Woods blew up the mechanism that would increase rates in line with inflation. Previously, the city had an ordinance with that escalator clause to back the bonds but not long after McFarland and Muhammad joined the Council, they repealed that, saying they should look at this on a periodic basis and not forced into anything. Early this year they did take a gander and kicked the can down the road by denying an Ellis request to move rates higher by 2.7 percent.