Chickens come home to roost for failed BC venture

This was how it always was going to end: the reckoning of Bossier City throwing away tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on something that now is little more than a rejected waystation for electric vehicle chargers.

For many years the writing has been on the wall concerning what’s now known as the Louisiana Boardwalk Outlets. Opening just over two decades ago to great fanfare, the outdoor mall most recently sold for less than a fifth of its cost to build and since continues to hemorrhage lessees. In the past month, four tenants, including three of the hospitality venues leaving now only two, have abandoned the area, making almost 40 retail spaces empty.

That adds to a completely discouraging picture. At the middle of last month, of the 185,000 square feet of leasable space, about 77 percent was available. Since then, the subsequent closures will add a few thousand more feet of empty space – keeping in mind that most of the remainder is dominated by the two remaining restaurants, a movie theater, and a church.

Start wringing liberal populism out of LA budget

Liberal populists largely may have been evicted from power in Louisiana, but their ethos lives on, according to budgetary politics in the Senate to date for next year’s state spending plan.

More often than not, after the general appropriations bill HB 1 makes it way from the House of Representatives where constitutionally it must start the Senate will make a few significant changes. The most far-reaching change came concerning Republican Gov. Jeff Landry’s initiative to open up voucher-like programming to families beyond the current eligible pool of students coming from lower-income households who otherwise would attend lower-ranking schools to include those from any lower-income household, wrapping all into an education savings account format called LA GATOR.

Landry asked for $43.4 million to cover the existing pool and then $50 million to expand it to a least a small portion of newly-eligible families. But instead, the Senate Finance Committee stripped the additional funds. GOP Sen. Pres. Cameron Henry led the charge, questioning whether the cost of the program would grow too big, too quickly.

Any publicity good for long shot Senate hopeful?

If as a political candidate have little in the way of campaign resources commensurate to the office you seek, a shot of free publicity surely can’t hurt – unless it threatens to make you appear to be a crank.

That’s the situation in which Republican Senate challenger Sammy Wyatt finds himself. Next to no one in the state probably paid attention to his entry into the contest to knock off GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy, which he formally announced in mid-March. Wyatt, from Shreveport originally who worked in local law enforcement mainly in Bossier City and then in security in the private sector before decamping for graduate study at Louisiana State University (after a failed run for Bossier City Marshal), returned to serve currently as Chief Compliance Officer and Investigation Officer for Louisiana State University Health-Shreveport, a senior administrative position, although in 2022 he did apply unsuccessfully for the police chief’s position in Shreveport.

Wyatt positions himself as a consistently ideological conservative in line with the agenda of Republican Pres. Donald Trump. It’s unknown how much financial support his campaign has picked up, since he first filed with the Federal Election Commission on Apr. 1, the day after a quarterly report would have been required with the next due at the end of the month, but likely it is very little.

Insurance reforms diluted by rate-setting bill

The two steps forward, one step back approach Louisiana policy-makers have taken towards insurance reform seems unlikely to make much positive impact, because they keep coming up short in addressing the most prominent impediments to reducing premiums.

Insurance reform has been the topic of this year’s legislative session. While some effort has been made on immovable structure insurance, most and most attention has gone towards vehicle insurance. Indeed, with pomp and circumstance last week Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed several bills on the subject that he had supported, although a few more that he does not languish in the legislative pipeline.

The most controversial was HB 148 by GOP state Rep. Jeff Wiley, which actually started out differently. That bill gives the insurance commissioner, at present Republican Tim Temple, the power to set rates, potentially on any basis even arbitrary, filed by insurers regardless of how competitive is the market; until then, the commissioner could review a requested increase for noncompetitive noncommercial lines for an “excessive” increase, but not those that were deemed competitive, with competitiveness now not a factor for the criterion of “excessive.”

Another LA blackout, another renewable own goal

The advice Dr. Zaius gave to Taylor at the end of Planet of the Apes applies very well to the likes of hard left politicians on the Louisiana Public Service Commission and the New Orleans City Council, in reference to the blackout that hit the New Orleans area some days ago which brings both lessons and warnings.

Parts of four parishes, including Orleans, were hit by what power companies euphemistically call a “load shed” last weekend. Over half were in New Orleans, and nearly 100,000 total customers had lights out for several hours because, with one of Entergy’s nuclear reactors down, another shut down unexpectedly presumably over concerns that if left unaddressed could have blacked out even more ratepayers and for longer.

This echoed two similar events in northern Louisiana in April. Affecting about a third of customers compared to the one in south Louisiana, as part of its meeting the Public Service Commission held a gripe session earlier this month about those incidents, where both the utility involved, Southwestern Electric Power Company, and the regional transmission organization Southwest Power Pool tried either to blame the other or shrugged them off as acts of the Deity.

Ignore naysayers, pass Medicaid integrity bill

It’s a bill that would improve matters tepidly, but you would think it heralded the end of the world from the rhetoric emanating courtesy of the far left that favors government as a redistribution machine.

SB 130 by Republican state Sen. Heather Cloud would increase moderately the oversight that the Louisiana Department of Health maintains over Medicaid eligibility: all of regular, expanded, children’s, and waiver provision of the program. It requires LDH to verify independently eligibility information, prohibits relying solely on automatic renewals (and for future waiver program operation prohibits these entirely), prohibits sole use of self-attestation to verify income and assets and mandates verification of residency, and mandates data matching use from a variety of sources on quarterly, semiannual, and annual bases.

Unfortunately, until the last couple of years since Democrat former Gov. John Bel Edwards had entered office, LDH didn’t often utilize these efforts listed in the bill. Vast swaths of verification occurred through self-attestation and what data-based verification did occur usually came in perfunctory form, asking for very little and skipping the finer points of eligibility requirements.

Bills would shield LA from bad energy policy

Bills moving in the Louisiana Legislature not only look to forestall potentially bad policy decisions elsewhere emanating from faith in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, but actually to reverse the chances of these inflicting harm.

For years, Europe has demonstrated the costs, both in price and reliability, of government-subsidized or -mandated moves into increasing the proportion supplied of nondispatchable energy – the considered “green” forms primarily wind and solar power – as part of an overall portfolio of energy provision. Permanent spikes upwards in average pricing along with man-made crises of late demonstrate the problem, both economic and political, of state-sponsored favoring of less reliable, if not more expensive, renewable energy forms.

Fortunately, the federal government appears to be exiting that inferior policy option, but some states in their policy agendas continue to cling to the mythical, evidence-free view that fossil fuels cause significantly negative climate change. This religious faith often manifests in official renewable portfolio standards, where about half have some mandatory standard to be met sometime in the future (some as early as five years from now) specifying the proportion of renewable energy sources behind powering that state’s homes and businesses.

Memorial Day, 2025

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 Monday through Friday associated with the otherwise-usual publication on the previous day (unless it is 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 Easter Sunday, Memorial Day and Veterans' Day.

With Monday, May 26 being Memorial Day, I invite you to explore this link.  

Bonus bucks should restore, pay down; nothing new

The relief some hoped would materialize did this week for Louisiana, but the bonus must be spent wisely in a manner that eventually shrinks government.

The state’s Revenue Estimating Conference this week determined that the state would have $130 million more for this, fiscal year 2024-25, and $139 million more predicted for next year, FY 2026. Policy-makers around the capitol had hoped to hear that the previous December projections had undershot what would be actual and forecast performance, but until now faced uncertainty with a raft of tax code changes kicking in at the start of this calendar year.

As these numbers didn’t apply to previous fiscal years (the other REC meetings throughout the year often take a look back into the just-completed fiscal year) which would be declaration of a surplus, the REC had the option to declare the additional revenues as recurring for this current period and obviously for the next, which it did. That means anything goes as far as expenditures, if even spent, as opposed to tagging these as nonrecurring where only specified, essentially one-time, expenditures could occur.

Rent seekers run faulty sob stories by BC Council

Sob stories echoed throughout the Bossier City Council chambers at its last meeting, as rent-seekers bookended the gathering intent on maintaining at least some their grifts on the citizenry or apologizing without taking responsibility for corporate mistakes.

First up during the invited public comment phase of the meeting were several representatives of apartment complex owners in Bossier City, encompassing a few thousand units. They were outraged because the close-to-free ride the city had been giving them on its sanitation fee ended early this year.

Until recently, the city charged $12 a month per multifamily dwelling water meter – whether a small strip or an entire complex of apartments, often water service isn’t apportioned by unit but the cost of which is included in rent, as it comes to all through one single intake for a set of units. But at the start of the year, it changed that to $12 per unit (the typical residence now pays $36) as part of a financial rejiggering designed to erase growing deficit spending bringing to the brink of red ink this year the city enterprise fund that collects and pays out for solid waste pickup, street cleaning, median mowing, beautification, and animal control.