Spin detracts from fixing Caddo jail overcrowding

Political spin reaches its full rotational velocity during election season, as comments about the overcrowded Caddo Correctional Center illustrate that distract from the fact this problem stems from prosecutorial choices, not from law enforcement.

No, it’s not so much that burgeoning Shreveport police arrests keep the CCC “bursting at the seams,” although obviously that volume is a significant contributor without which it wouldn’t have the opportunity to inflate. That statement comes from Wayne Smith, Shreveport Police Department chief, whose boss Republican Mayor Tom Arceneaux this fall faces spirited competition to retain his job. The more Smith talks up SPD vigilance, the more it pats Arceneaux’s back as the election looms.

Yet Smith could ramp up arrests even more and it wouldn’t be a crowding problem, according to a 2023 report of the Caddo Parish Criminal Justice Task Force. It discovered a 40 percent growth in the pretrial population even as arrests declined from 2012 to 2022. It saw as the cause the median bail amount rising over 2.5 times, explained by an increase in felony arrests, from 2014 to 2022, and a 144 percent increase in days from a court case’s opening to its disposition, thought to be a result of staffing shortages which delay transmission of case materials.

BC budget subject to stormy weather ahead

Bossier City put forth a solid 2027 budget, despite a few dark clouds ahead, and perhaps a bit too optimistic.

This week, the City Council held a budget information session, where Chief Administrative Office Shane Cheatham presented it publicly. The plan concentrated on maintaining core services and continuation of existing ones with a 3.71 percent bump upwards in general fund spending to nearly $86 million. As it is, that increase is driven almost entirely by a predicted rise in sales tax collections.

Which might flash one sign of trouble. It forecasts that property tax revenues actually suffer a tiny decline, meaning resales of property would increase at the margin at best and bring little in the way of new higher valued property into service. In other words, this indicates stagnation economically with little upward movement in population.

Landry housing plan should reduce LA homelessness

The Republican Gov. Jeff Landry Administration came up aces with its recently released plan to use federal housing funds in a way that actually mitigates homelessness in Louisiana.

Each year, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development doles out grants to states to provide housing. States and local governments have established panels to recommend to HUD proposals from various lead agencies willing to coordinate spending, in Louisiana’s case, historically around $100 million combined annually.  Until this year for many years, these defaulted to a nonprofit agency called UNITY of Greater New Orleans and another outside of New Orleans, the Louisiana Balance of State Continuum of Care.

But those agencies followed a flawed worldview of optimal housing policy, and its distributional planes reflected that, where primarily the homeless were to be given permanent housing as a “solution” to homelessness, even as research has shown that approach is less effective than steering policy to make any housing most often transitional, as the large majority of homeless are that way because of behavioral issues they must solve that enable them to exit homelessness. The GOP Pres. Donald Trump Administration last year directed HUD to embrace the latter, a more effective strategy in how it distributed these grants.

Cassidy blame exercise confirms unfitness

There’s more reason than ever for Louisianans to remind Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy not to let the door hit him out the way out of the Senate with his intemperate remarks made recently about increasing numbers of measles cases in the country and health care policy under GOP Pres. Donald Trump.

At a conference sponsored by a politics website, Cassidy blamed Trump and specifically his appointee as Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy for the increase, already in annual terms the highest number in over a quarter-century. He said messaging was to blame, as HHS under Kennedy has shifted departmental communications away from unabashed stumping for vaccinations to one of seeking advice from trusted health care providers.

 

He called this an effort to “undermine faith” in vaccines generally and also claimed to have had his faith undermined by his voting to advance Kennedy’s nomination for the post in early 2025 only to have this rhetoric about vaccination develop. Cassidy lost the Republican primary for reelection this spring in part because Trump backed likely winner this fall Republican Rep. Julia Letlow, after Cassidy had flip-flopped to vote to convict Trump on questionable impeachment charges as well as had backed large-scale Democrat spending legislation.

Cut inefficiency from Medicaid autism spending

Late to the party, Louisiana needs to go after sketchy Medicaid autism treatment and diagnoses aggressively.

Starting a few months into the second term of Republican Pres. Donald Trump, the federal government began reviews of select state Medicaid spending on treating autism, specifically applied behavioral analysis outlays. It found massive fraud in Minnesota leading to legal action, and across it and three other states extrapolated a disturbing pattern of rapidly escalating expenses capped off by some $200 million improperly paid and another $400 million in incorrect billings.

The Democrat Pres. Barack Obama Administration pushed through a rule mandating Medicaid coverage of autism not long after diagnosis guidelines were relaxed that qualified far more children so that those even slightly eccentric-acting qualified. This resulted in a near-quintupling of autism diagnoses since the turn of the century so that now over one in three children receive it, while in eight states that provide specific data on autism Medicaid spending costs sextupled to $2.2 billion in just a few years.

Reelection driving Shreveport new spending choices

Take a look at what Shreveport elected officials stump for in increased spending and you can tell it’s an election year.

Last week, Republican Mayor Tom Areceneaux announced, because of presumed higher sales tax collections from a data center siting in the city, that he would put into the budget, and start it a month before the next fiscal year (after the general election but before the runoff), pay raises and other potential bonuses for public. He thought for police the cost for around a 5 percent bump plus things like recruitment bonuses and for other achievements that could push it towards 8 percent plus a 6 percent firefighter raise would end up in the neighborhood of $7 million annually.

In essence, Arceneaux basically declares that the data center – apparently more its construction than operation as he indicated he saw this pop upwards would last only four or five years, or about the time a second term of his would end – will add 4 percent more sales tax revenues for a sustained period. Yet that asks for some optimistic math.

LA must fight to prevent dispensing dangerous drug

Louisiana’s intersection increasingly at the cutting edge of policy-making refreshingly continues with its pursuit of a suit designed to show deliberately designed unfettered access to chemical abortions can be dangerous to more than just the unborn and to reinstate rules to prevent that outcome.

The use of mifepristone as the second agent to kill in the womb (following misoprostol) the state has led the way in trying to have through the courts reimposed a Food and Drug Administration ban against doling out the drugs except during a doctor’s office visit. The Democrat Pres. Joe Biden Administration embraced the dictates of leftist abortion-on-demand advocates to remove that requirement in the wake of the Supreme Court decision that ruled unconstitutional federal government attempts to regulate abortion.

That move became a key element in the left’s strategy to prevent individual tighter state regulation from reducing abortion. The left celebrates the practice not only because of its assertive ideological-confirming performance that also counts coup over conservatives who largely favor pro-life restrictions, but also because of its background unspoken eugenics-based racism that doesn’t mind in a country that even as whites comprise almost 70 percent of the population that almost 70 percent of abortions are achieved by non-whites.

The campaign to dilute the ability of states to limit severely abortion availability within their borders has succeeded to the point that the number of abortions nationwide actually has increased since that 2022 decision despite many states imposed greater restrictions shortly thereafter. Remote prescribing largely is blame with a sharp increase in that, now making the deadly pills easily obtainable through the mail in almost an over-the-counter fashion with no guarantee that the requestor is the receiver of these, or even is legitimately asking.

Precisely as intended. The system was concocted specifically to thwart state bans and making the dispensing as easy as buying candy. And why, if the Republican Pres. Donald Trump Administration as it may do soon doesn’t return to rule to its previous form, the courts should because mifepristone, as Louisiana argues, reveals itself as an inherently dangerous drug.

Leftist media always evade the growing evidence of this, where women are being tricked, if not coerced through the use of violence, into swallowing the dangerous substance that often causes them health complications and usually killing the unborn they harbor. Almost always it’s the sperm donor who perpetrates these crimes, and frequently they obtain the pills through exploiting the now hardly-regulated system set up to fail.

A reality against which pro-abortion views have no defense. After all, pro-abortionists admit humanity to an organism genetically human only when it’s “wanted,” making the validity of human life and the individual involved contingent on somebody else’s emotions. Yet in these abuse cases the women involved look forward to giving birth but pro-abortion attitudes by permitting lack of restrictions in essence put these females in positions where they have no choice, which ironically the pro-abortion crowd alleges, to shield themselves from the moral implications of what they advocate, that “choice” lies behind their advocacy.

Simply, by nature the drug is dangerous, but pro-abortionists redefine that away when it’s used willingly to kill the unborn. But in the current regulatory regime where anything goes, those who don’t want to kill the young humans they carry cannot be protected adequately from others who wish their unborn charges dead. Only by restoring the regime to its previous state can that risk be minimized adequately.

That’s why it’s important that Louisiana continue its legal quest to have restored, one way or the other, the old rules. Lives and women’s desires depend upon that.

Tweaked BC district should replace those junked

Not inherent flaws leaving something fixable but trying to do too much too perfectly sunk the proposed pair of economic development districts proposed in Bossier City.

Last week, the city threw in the towel, for now, on an EDD encompassing only the city’s four casinos and another taking in the East Bank district plus capturing hotels, the Louisiana Boardwalk, and the Chasing Aces golf driving complex. The legislative author of the idea, Republican City Councilor Chris Smith, conceded it went too far too fast, with confusion over what was being taxed or alarmed with a 2 percent sales or occupancy surcharge within the districts, concern over a nebulous governing structure that appeared to favor out-of-town casino interests, and uncertainty over spending because of that structure and its outsourcing management to an area interest group that had no experience in these matters who seemed to drive the process in the first place.

That said, the idea isn’t irredeemable. The city finds itself in a tough spot, burdened by three decades of foolish spending choices that left too much debt, without the servicing of which money could be dedicated to district matters. With a more constrained budget as a result, district occupants could swallow a fair and equitable tax increase, knowing it will reduce their business for pricing reasons, if the proceeds go to the district and stimulate business at least enough to compensate.

Time ripe to zero out LA residential property taxes

Debate over Amendment #6 that voters will weigh in upon this fall illustrates a tax system so riddled with exceptions that the best strategy might be to dispense with property tax on homesteads.

The amendment would build upon the special assessment level now granted constitutionally to individuals 65 or older, as well as to some younger who are disabled or who are widows and widowers of those who once qualified (which includes active duty members of the armed service killed in the line of duty), as long as they remain at that homestead that is not significantly improved and their income doesn’t exceed (starting next year) $150,000. This exemption freezes the assessed value of the property at the last quadrennial round’s amount, almost certainly reducing property taxes that otherwise would be paid.

Each municipality and parish would have a chance to opt into this by popular vote, and if passed all taxing bodies in their jurisdictions would have to abide by the decision. If passed, it would increase the homestead exemption based on age, at the oldest range going far above the current $75,000. School boards in particular have complained that with this they would have no say in what happens to their ability to raise revenues, and it would create confusion and inequity if some municipalities in a district opt in and other out, or the parish does or doesn’t compared to the municipalities within it. For example, while Monroe derives about 8 percent of its total non-business revenues from ad valorem taxation, Monroe City Schools with the same boundaries gets about 16 percent.

Reworking, not money, best for child care policy

Rather than throw more money at a perceived problem, perhaps Louisiana should reconceptualize how it addresses child care.

Money that the country didn’t have was thrown at states, through federal government grants, during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic to give families – read single parents mostly mothers, who comprise the vast bulk of Child Care Assistance Program recipients – more money to pay for child care. The program will subsidize at varying amounts (plus for some a small co-payment) depending on family resources for at least part-time working or training parents with children under age 13 (18 if with disability) and who are citizens or legal residents.

While the leftist agenda of growing government and hoping it sticks lasted well after the pandemic could be used as a justification for it, eventually the bonus money faded away. Regardless, Louisiana chronically has had a waiting list for participation, even as it has chipped in the range of $80 million annually over the last few years (the federal government will provide a match for state spending).