Black voter antipathy to Broome denies last term

And now Louisiana can say its second through eighth largest cities have Republican chief executives (and the ninth-largest has a non-Democrat; fifth largest will be St. George whose first elected mayor inevitably should come from the GOP), now that East Baton Rouge Parish has elected Republican Sid Edwards to boot out of office current Democrat Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome – thanks to black voters.

Broome had a fight on her hands for a third term when she trailed Edwards by five percentage points in the general election, not even cracking 30 percent of the multi-candidate field. Incumbents showing that poorly are in trouble, and this weekend Edwards, a high school football coach of renown and school administrator but rookie politician, closed the deal with voters.

He did it because of turnout. The 331 precincts can be parsed by race of registrants to determine this, assigning these to “favorable” or “unfavorable” precincts for each candidate, where from Broome a favorable precinct was one with greater than 80 percent black registrants – overwhelmingly Democrats – and an unfavorable one was where more than 80 percent of registrants were white – a plurality if not a majority of Republican typically. For Edwards, the definitions for each would swap.

Bossier Parish Jury: black hole of transparency

Like a successful burglar in the night, the Bossier Parish Police Jury passed a budget that nobody can decipher outside of the courthouse much less knew about, perhaps because nobody outside of parish government really could tell what was in it.

This should come as no surprise, as the Jury has a history as the most opaque of major northwest Louisiana governments, if not of any nine-figure local government in the state. Unlike other are larger local governments, in its agendas, other than some maps to go along with zoning decisions (which is the bulk of its decision-making), its various ordinances and resolutions contain no documentation or attachments, just their titles and extremely brief descriptions. Compelled by state law to transmit its meetings and those of its committees, for the former it chooses a low-quality Facebook Live format which at least creates an archival copy, as for the latter it uses Zoom that keeps no copy for future viewing.

Its staff can’t even get right the new state law that compels such governments to send out agendas to its meetings and any of its committee meetings to any requestor. I made such a request originally to the parish’s public information officer Rod White, which got shuttled to the assistant parish secretary Ashley Ezell who then wrote after the Nov. 20 meeting saying the agenda bounced to the e-mail address to which she had sent that note (no mention about the committees). It baffles me why it would bounce when she subsequently sent successfully a message to that account, but I wrote her back saying the address was good, for obvious reasons.

Caddo must reject budget-busting wage hike

Recently headed in the right direction, the Caddo Parish Commission can’t veer back into stupidity, as it threatens to do by compounding a mistake it has made previously.

This week, the Commission will decide whether to extend a $15 an hour minimum wage policy to significant contracts and contractors. Earlier this year it committed the folly of doing that to its employees. The silly argument made at the time for that was it made for a “living” wage that would diminish poverty and therefore crime.

Of course, research demonstrates that setting artificial wage floors that overpay for the contribution a particular activity makes for society ends up to the detriment of society. Visibly, it eliminates jobs either by having to spread out more work to fewer people in order to make it economically viable and has a similar ripple effect upwards in pay grades, and/or in background this increases automation as that becomes relatively cheaper eventually to the point of the most cost effective strategy.

GOP has real shot at winning EBR mayor-president

If early voting is any indication, the GOP has a real shot at grabbing the chief executive’s job in the parish with the state’s most voters

East Baton Rouge Parish is where most of the runoff election action is for Louisiana thus fall. It’s got a slate of city-parish elections (now whittled to a couple of Metropolitan Council spots) topped by the mayor-president’s showdown between Democrat incumbent Sharon Weston Broome and challenger Republican high school football coach and administrator Sid Edwards.

It’s a pairing that surprised a number of media analysts that should not have, given that about a third of parish voters are Republicans and Broome had to split Democrats with eventual third-place finisher former state Rep. Ted James, as well as Broome’s unimpressive tenure heading the city that ranks low in quality of life and stagnant from 2010 to 2020 in population and estimated to lose numbers since. More recently, Broome fought then botched the transition of parish unincorporated areas into St. George that could cost the city hundreds of millions of dollars.

LA must do more to ban DEI, promote civics

It’s time for Louisiana not only to ban legally race-conscious practices in programming and personnel actions in the state’s higher education institutions, but to go beyond that to aid in understanding why.

Recently, the Louisiana State University Board of Supervisors voted to end practices such as requiring diversity statements for hiring and review programs for whether these privilege race-conscious activities and to institute a policy of neutrality in institutional communications on issues of the day. Some, like LSU’s Baton Rouge campus, have taken this a step further voluntarily by at least renaming, and presumably repurposing, academic offices and positions fundamentally tied to the diversity, equity, and inclusion concepts.

But it’s not enough. The three other systems since then have not done the same. Two will have their supervisors meet int December and the Southern University System’s supervisors met this past weekend; it didn’t address the topic and the other two don’t indicate that they will.

Bad & good of unprofessional professor incident

Just what Louisiana higher education needs, another black eye that invites only more disdain and scorn when it needs to reassure the public it’s there to teach critical thinking and all various theories and information to achieve that, not as a platform for proselytizing.

It turns out the reelection of Republican former Pres. Donald Trump proved somewhat unnerving to one special snowflake in Louisiana State University’s School of Law. Assoc. Prof. Nicholas Bryner shortly afterwards loosed a diatribe to one of his classes in which he asserted (1) if you voted for Trump, you have to prove you’re a good person because apparently that behavior makes you otherwise suspiciously evil and (2) a vote for Trump is a “rejection of the idea that we are governed by a people with expertise.” Not only are these statements easily falsifiable, but they also drew the ire of GOP Gov. Jeff Landry, who fired off a note to LSU’s president, law school dean, the LSU Board of Supervisors, and Republican Atty. Gen. Liz Murrill suggesting some kind of legal violation may have occurred requiring some sort of punishment.

There is quite a bit of self-deception and/or lack of awareness by Bryner in his screed that careens to the hypocritical. He claimed “my job is not to teach you about politics” while clearly making politicized statements. Even more laughably, his comments included a summation of an administrative imperative for government to make “rational” decisions “ideally based on evidence” – risible because in at least one public forum he opined in a way that explicitly rejected that in the most ironic way.

Thanksgiving Day, 2024

This column publishes every Sunday through Thursday around noon U.S. Central Time (maybe even after sundown on busy days, or maybe before noon if things work out, or even sometimes on the weekend if there's big news) except whenever a significant national holiday falls on the Sunday through Thursday associated with the otherwise-usual publication on the previous day (unless it is Easter, Thanksgiving Day, Independence Day, Christmas, or New Year's Day when it is the day on which the holiday is observed by the U.S. government). In my opinion, in addition to these are also Memorial Day and Veterans' Day.

With Thursday, Nov. 28 being Thanksgiving Day, I invite you to explore this link.

Plaudits due not just to Landry for reform win

Certainly Republican Gov. Jeff Landry gets to take a lot of credit for changes poised to alter significantly Louisiana’s fiscal structure. But he crossed the goal line after others had helped him down the field, some of whom no longer serve in government.

It took quite a bit of political capital investment for something of this magnitude, the biggest change in half a century, to be pulled off, and not all political leaders have the skill to do it. That may have been where over a decade ago GOP former Gov. Bobby Jindal came up short. As originally constituted, Landry’s plan looked at its core like Jindal’s – swapping income taxation for broader sales taxation and increasing the overall load on business – and became even closer when hiking the sales tax rate after broadening the sales tax shriveled substantially as did curtailing income tax breaks.

Jindal, however, threw in the towel rather quickly in the face of opposition, while Landry rolled with the punches and kept on the pressure. He had to reduce benefits enjoyed by individuals to appease corporate interests, although these were done in a way that benefits trickled down to individuals also with the exception of a few things like keeping the wasteful Motion Picture Production tax credit that benefits enormously only a few. What Landry ended with (technically still be to be signed into law by him and dependent upon passage of an omnibus constitutional amendment next spring) wasn’t nearly as promising as what he started with, but it is a considerable improvement over what currently is.

LPSC can't let climate alarmists botch project

Finally, Louisiana’s status as a low-cost destination for huge power users has begun to pay off. Now its up to wise heads to make sure deluded climate alarmists don’t spoil things.

At the last Public Service Commission meeting, as part of a filing it was announced that Meta would build a data site at the state’s Franklin Farm location just off of Interstate 20 on State Highway 183 in Holly Ridge, Richland Parish. The 1,400 acre tract has been owned by the state since 2006 and until recently was considered a white elephant as the state had hoped to have a large manufacturer with thousands of jobs take up the spot. However, that never caught on since the site was undeveloped without utilities infrastructure.

Instead, it hit the jackpot with Meta, who said it will employ only 300 to 500 but with an average salary of $82,000 and will plow in as much as $5 billion to develop essentially a server farm. Information technology companies generally have been on a buying spree for servers as the backbone for artificial intelligence application, which take an enormous amount of computing power.

BC councilors choose deficit over prudence

Electoral politics in all of its glory gave Bossier City a 2025 budget in deficit, complete with an upside-down spirited if fantasy-based defense right out of George Orwell’s 1984 and a bowdlerized version of the ridiculed old saw that begs, “Trust us, we’re the government.”

The City Council unanimously passed a budget about $8.5 million unbalanced, knowingly and willingly engaging in deficit spending for city operations through the general fund. That was shaved to under $6 million by the transferring in from a few other funds along with the usual (over the past few years) transfer out of $4 million to pay in part debt. The bulk of the transfer in also is typical, $6.8 million from the “1991 Sales Tax,” a shorthand for transfer from funds collecting for the 1991 half-cent levy that can go to towards fire, jail, and municipal buildings operations, along with other things not eligible for general fund backing.

This is unprecedented. Councilors Democrat Bubba Williams and independent Jeff Darby have served since 1997, Republican David Montgomery since 2001, and Republican Jeff Free since 2013. Since 2013, the city never intentionally passed a budget with a deficit, much less one with expenditures about 110 percent of revenues, transfers included. In fact, from 1997 through 2017, the city consistently in budgeting for surpluses missed every single year with deficit spending that had to be balanced by tapping other funds. 2018 saw for the first time actual revenues (and expenditures) exceed those budgeted, but then the next three budgets missed with actual numbers below those budgeted, but unlike the previous two decades excepting 2018 their actual revenues exceeded expenses. Only in 2022 and 2023, skewed by Wuhan coronavirus pandemic fiscal dynamics that have since passed did the budget underestimate expenses and overestimate revenues, rapidly building up general fund reserves.