Shreveport Democrats’ plan to have the city’s electorate dump Republican Mayor Tom Arceneaux is fully afoot as they play Russian roulette with the city’s water and sewerage system.
The city remains under a consent decree that will demand hundreds of millions in spending to satisfy. Currently, $310.6 million worth of expenditures deemed critical need completion – most of which the city doesn’t have.
It doesn’t because of voter hesitancy triggered by the untrustworthy performance that featured many questionable spending choices of Democrat former Mayor Adrian Perkins, who on three occasions proposed large bond issues that included requests to fund water and sewerage. Out of around $600 million proposed, all of which involved property tax increases, only a $70.65 million estimated amount that ended up tacking on 2.5 mils for public safety made it onto the ballot and gained voter approval.
Meanwhile, the funding well for water and sewerage threatens to run dry. Such operations are set up so that users pay, but legally the city can apportion the cost to all property owners. However, users already have experienced a series of increases. In 2013 in response to the decree, the city decided that over a two-year span commencing in 2015 sewer rates would go up 14 percent, then that and water rates would increase 6 percent in 2020, rise 2 percent more for water in 2021, and a year later would be capped by 4 percent more there and 2 percent more for sewer.
Still, this doesn’t appear to be enough. So, Arceneaux has proposed a two-prong strategy of another bond issue including of three items that altogether total $256 million one of $82 million for water and sewerage, and an increase in rates again, of 10 percent. Last month, the city launched a road show to gather citizen input and inform them about it.
Except that the City Council, composed of a 5-2 majority of Democrats, dragged its heels on the rate hike. Twice it delayed in February authorizing that, although last week it did cue up the three bond ballot items just in time to make the Apr. 27 election.
Democrat Councilors Tabatha Taylor and James Green voted against that, and also declared they would provide minimal rhetorical assistance to mobilize electoral support for the measures. They had backed reliably the measures Perkins had put forward, including for water and sewerage, as well as generally Perkins and his initiatives. Green expanded upon his vote and intended actions, noting that his apathy was not different from that of Republican councilors on past items, inferring particularly Grayson Boucher who was on the Council then and now who gave vocal support to the measure that passed then but not for the others ultimately rejected.
This he attributed to racism – Perkins is black, Arceneaux is white – falling back on the increasingly patterned behavior of he and Taylor and Democrat Councilor Alan Jackson, all of whom are black, to cite systemic racism as the cause whenever a non-black disagrees with their policy preferences. This card they had played when Green illegally gave raises to Council employees and Boucher and Republican Jim Taliaferro, along with Democrats Ursula Bowman and Gary Brooks, united to call for an investigation that nailed Green. Far more likely, tepid Republican support over the previous bond votes came from suspicion over Perkins’ general laxity about finances – such as not vetting all available sources for funding before asking for tax increases – and his shiftiness that led to legal actions and Legislative Auditor rebukes.
Regardless, a political motive clearly presents itself. Councilors with an eye towards denying Arceneaux a second term can feel safe in supporting or ignoring a bond issue, because if voters approve the water and sewerage measure at least the people will have voted it onto themselves. But they can posture over the rate hikes, because to approve these puts the spotlight on them and to reject these makes Arceneaux look like the bad guy for bringing up the idea.
Plus, they get to take shots at Arceneaux for things Perkins left undone. In the prior administrative council meeting to the regular meeting that turned down the rate hikes but approved the bond vote, the issue of overbilling for services reemerged. A few years ago, the city settled multi-million dollar class action claims about this, and the lawyer who had led this battle alleged this still was going on. Green and Taylor particularly cast aspersions that Arceneaux’s administration was negligent on this – except that the lawyer said he had notified the Perkins Administration in 2021 about this and nothing was done.
Ironically, the hold that Council Democrats have placed on rate increases they say comes from concerns that the city’s program helping lower-income families pay water bills can’t do enough received a major shot in the arm as a result of the overbilling settlement, where class members who couldn’t be located had their shares requisitioned for this purpose. How long recalcitrant councilors stick to that story remains to be seen.
For in their ideal world, they will drag this out as long as possible – which perhaps is why Green and Taylor talked of the bond vote to come in the fall rather than spring – in order to have maximal time to paint Arceneaux as a tax- and rate-raiser with Democrat councilors as a check against his trying in this manner to impoverish the people, regardless of whether the city’s water and sewerage system receives its badly-needed and legally-required fixes. Like it or not, decades of neglect have led the city to this point, and resolution might be swifter and more effective if the Council majority, and especially those members of it prone to playing the race card, would dial down the politicking focused too much on political futures.
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