BC establishment ready to chuck new charter

Months of work on potential Bossier City Charter changes circle the drain, an apparent victim of a feature, not a bug, of the process shaped by City Council graybeards and their allies.

This week, the city’s Charter Review Commission attempted to meet for one last time to complete votes for changes and to pass an enabling motion sending the whole package to the Council. That officially would compel the Council to place the changes, shaped as a replacement (despite the questionable legality of that) of the document, on the Dec. 7 ballot.

At its previous meeting, taking advantage of a couple of absences among the five appointees of city councilors against term limits – Republicans David Montgomery, Jeff Free, and Vince Maggio, Democrat Bubba Williams, and no party Jeff Darby, the only votes originally in favor of establishing the Commission – the four other appointees added into the package of consensus and voted-upon approvals a retroactive three-term limit for the mayor and councilors. With eventual voter approval, all but Maggio would be ineligible to run in next year’s city elections as a result.

Landry Regents picks, agenda to shape policy

While conservatives aren’t wrong in expressing concern over some of Republican Gov. Jeff Landry’s appointments to the Louisiana State University Board of Supervisors, understand that in policy terms that it does little injury to their cause.

Last week, after a June meeting where several just-expired appointees served, Landry made his picks to replace them. Some weren’t and rewarded with new terms, while other new picks were promising. However, three irked observers on the political right because these new supervisors, especially in one case, hadn’t been their allies if one having been an outright opponent.

The choices of Jimmy Woods and Rémy Starns appeared to be forms of political payback. Holdovers, Woods is an ally of Landry non-enemy Democrat state Sen. Cleo Fields, who fronts the most extensive network of black Democrat party activists in the state and who stayed largely out of the governor’s race last year despite Landry facing his main opposition from a black Democrat, while Starns is the state public defender who went to bat for Landry’s reforms of the soon-to-be-renamed-to Office of the State Public Defender, but who otherwise has stumped for Democrats.

BC term limits subject to last ditch power play

The empire will try to strike back at the upcoming Bossier City Charter Review Commission meeting, aided by questionable collusion, but potentially failing to bear fruit depending upon who shows up and perhaps what courts of law may have to say in the future.

Of course, the issue in question is term limits, which at its last meeting were voted in favor to forward for citizen approval as part of the entire package, three terms and retroactive in nature starting at the end of this year in advance of next year’s city elections. It passed 4-3 with two absences, one of whom by past rhetoric seemed likely to vote against it.

The Commission generally has been debating changes, classifying them as consensus or not, with the intent of bringing the latter to a vote at this, the final meeting. But at the previous one, term limits was moved and approved already, to the chagrin of the political establishment whose membership comprises the four city councilors – Republicans David Montgomery and Jeff Free, Democrat Bubba Williams, and no party Jeff Darby – who could not run for reelection with these limits in place, plus rookie GOP Councilor Vince Maggio. Lights began burning late at night at City Hall to come up with a countermove to prevent the measure from going to a vote of the people, utilizing the appointees of these five who make for a majority of the Commission.

Graves political exit not likely to last long

The announcement by Republican Rep. Garret Graves that he will not seek reelection might constitute a short-term setback for him, but leaves him other valuable opportunities in the future.

Graves faced an uphill battle to preserve the seat he has in the Sixth District. It was redrawn dramatically earlier this year to create two majority-minority districts in response to a Middle District federal court decision that declared the 2022 map that had kept the Sixth little changed as one of five out of six non-M/M districts likely violated the Voting Rights Act – into a form that a Western District special court panel recently declared was unconstitutional.

But that district and map on which it is part will stand for fall elections, as the U.S. Supreme Court enjoined throwing it out for now on the basis that the impending election created too little time to administer voting properly if suddenly changing the map. That transformed Graves’ district into a majority-minority district almost all of which he never has represented and which would favor a black Democrat, one of the prominent of which, state Sen. Cleo Fields, already has started campaigning to represent it.

BC term limits edging closer to reality

The high-stakes game of poker goes on between citizens rebellious to the Bossier City political establishment and those insiders who will fight by any means necessary to suppress any threat to their power, which may include a tactical retreat on term limits that, once again, is consumed by lawfare?

That may be at issue after the latest meeting of the city’s Charter Review Commission, which over the past four months has plowed through proposed charter changes. Upon releasing a final product, the charter dictates that the City Council must accept it and schedule for an election. The earliest possible date for citizen approval would be for the Dec. 7 general election runoff, which means if approved changes would go into effect prior to 2025 city elections.

The whole rationale for commission formation came as a result of a near-miss for the establishment on the issue of term limits. A petition amending the charter to include a three-term retroactive limit for all elected officials gained enough signatures to land it on the ballot last year, but a City Council majority – comprised of Republicans David Montgomery and Jeff Free, Democrat Bubba Williams, and no party Jeff Darby, all of whom would have become ineligible to run, plus GOP rookie Vince Maggio – a few times voted to violate the Charter by not scheduling the vote of a certified petition, and then went to court to knock out the petition through a legal technicality about its format.

New standards boost LA education accountability

After years of tolerating a somewhat misleading evaluation system of individual schools and their districts, starting in academic year 2025 Louisiana will enjoy an improved version that provides better information for families and policy-makers.

The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education today promulgated new rules to determine accountability, which didn’t happen overnight. An attempt failed two years ago, made from a growing recognition that the scoring system under use aligned poorly with actual student proficiency, as measured by testing, as they progressed and received diplomas which had the effect of making some schools and districts appear to be doing a better job than they actually were.

This attempt replaces a more complicated computational exercise, and reverses emphasis on proficiency, or knowledge and skill gained, and growth, or how much students improve in achievement. Through the eighth grade, the growth factor is increased at the expense of proficiency.

LA should junk 2024 map, party like it's 2022

A recent Supreme Court ruling clarified why the Court allowed Louisiana fall congressional elections to continue under a map declared unconstitutional, and increased the chances this will be the only such election this decade that will have a two majority-minority district map.

In Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference, the Court ruled that a congressional map that otherwise didn’t violate traditional principles of reapportionment, such as compactness and contiguity of districts, did not have to have the proportion of M/M districts somewhat equivalent to the proportion of minority race (almost always black, but sometimes others) residents in the state if the legislature wished to draw districts to maximize partisan advantage even if incidentally related to racial division in voting. This launched panic among leftist and far left commentators because it signaled that in reapportionment disputes the Court no longer would permit the left’s and Democrats’ shadow agenda to remain in the shadows.

That is, those forces try to gain partisan advantage in reapportionment by equating maps that give them that as necessary to prevent racial discrimination, made possible because for the past half-century blacks typically have voted overwhelmingly for candidate of the left, almost always black candidates. This has been tolerated because courts for decades had made the presumption that racial prejudice against a minority group had to lay behind any reapportionment decision that did not draw district majorities roughly proportional to that group’s proportion in the population, and so to do this required satisfying certain criteria that didn’t include partisan advantage as a mitigating factor.

Spiked column exemplifies newspaper meltdown

If you had any questions about why the mainstream media is dying and it steadily is losing influence politically in Louisiana and elsewhere, look no further than the rumpus over a column by Republican Sen. John Kennedy the largest newspaper chain in the state recently accepted and then rejected.

Last month, Kennedy, whose opinion pieces the media frequently have published spanning more than a decade, initially had one published in the Shreveport Times and farmed out to the several other Gannett newspapers in the state. The piece exhorted Congress to prohibit natal males from competing as and against natal females in female-only competitions, citing sustained evidence about the physiological advantages those born male would have regardless of attempts, if any, to change physical sex.

After a few days, without making any announcement or informing Kennedy, the piece was removed from the sites that had published it. Later still, an explanation to the broken web link was infused, saying the content had been removed because it didn’t “meet our editorial standards.”

Veto bill weakening education accountability

A last-minute end-around sabotaging Louisiana’s school accountability measures that prominently featured two Bossier Parish Republican legislators with extensive connections to local schools now may be stopped only by GOP Gov. Jeff Landry.

HB 762 by Republican state Rep. Dennis Bamburg originally would have repealed the state’s requirement that students take the ACT, one of the two standardized tests offered for college admission nationally and the one designated by Louisiana public universities to gain admittance. For several years Louisiana statutorily has required this of all students seeking a diploma, one of eight states that does so. Even the career diploma graduates must, although they also can take the WorkKeys test designed for more vocational-oriented learning. The rationale for this has been not only to allow students to have this in place should they wish to enroll in higher education but also as a means of measuring performance of high schools and school districts.

This has chafed among legislators generally Democrats and some Republicans like Bamburg, a former Bossier Parish School Board member, with ties to the educational establishment, and has aggravated many local school board members and their district superintendents. This is because the nationally-normed ACT continues to show generally low performance, along with end-of-course tests, among Louisiana students (although ranked in the middle of the eight) that meshes poorly with performance scores given out to high schools that feeds into district scores. Currently, for accountability determinations all ACT scores count unless a WorkKey score equivalent is higher.

Law may force sunshine onto Bossier Jury actions

Many local governments across Louisiana, and inside Bossier Parish especially the parish’s Police Jury, will have to increase substantially transparency as the result of a bill poised to become law.

HB 103 by Republican state Rep. Mike Johnson headed to GOP Gov. Jeff Landry’s desk just before the 2024 Regular Session of the Louisiana Legislature ended this week. The bill, which Landry is expected to sign into law, expands real-time broadcast of governing authority meetings, in whole or part, for a number of jurisdictions across the state.

At present, any multimember taxing authority in the state must record, by audio or video, meetings of the entire body, but it doesn’t have to broadcast these live. The bill changes that to require live broadcast of parish governing authorities and school boards in jurisdictions of greater than 24,999 residents and for municipalities with populations greater than 9,999. All in all, that means 36 parishes, 58 cities, and 41 school districts, if they already aren’t, by the effective date of Aug. 1 must broadcast (presumably through video and audio) their parish commission or police jury, city council, and school board meetings live and advertise how to view that for each meeting.