In April, most Bossier City residents will be solicited
to slap upon themselves again a large amount of property taxes, and to a
smaller degree parish residents outside of municipalities face the same. As a
result, chances are good that at least some portion of current taxes will be
rejected.
All of Bossier City, Bossier Parish, and the
majority part of both encapsulated in the Cypress Black Bayou Recreation and
Water Conservation District have cued up property tax renewals on the Apr. 27
ballot. The State Bond Commission last week approved
for the date a pair of city levies for 8.32 and 2.71 mils for public safety,
the parish levy 7.43 mils for the library system, and the district levy of 1.54
for general operations and capital outlay.
The four are for ten years, although the district’s starts
in 2025 while the other two wouldn’t renew until 2026. If all were approved,
city property owners with a $225,000 primary residential property within the
district boundaries would reestablish onto themselves $350.88 annually in property
taxes; those not in the boundaries would add back $327.78; and outside a
municipality in the district would sign on again to $134.55, and those only in
the parish would re-up to $111.45. (Parish Administrator Butch Ford’s shack,
which permits
him to evade legal prohibition against his employment, is valued so low,
below the homestead exemption, that his taxes paid won’t change regardless of
the outcome of the parish and district votes.)
Citizens within and among these various
jurisdictions have reason for skepticism in renewing these taxes. In the case
of Bossier City, it would be general profligate spending, in part on luxuries
that serve few citizens such as maintaining
tennis courts for a private sector operator that hardly any city residents use;
high-dollar
recreation facilities residents are discouraged, if not prohibited, from using;
and huge capital outlay projects that have low overall value such as the duplicative
Walter O. Bigby Carriageway.
This has put the city into a debt bind. At the end
of 2022,
it had $434.5 million in debt, with this declining slowly over the past couple
of years. With an estimated mid-2022 population of 62,971,
that left it at $6,900 per capita, or in terms of government activities
(excluding enterprise activities, in this instance the city-run water and
sewerage system) $3,400 per capita. These are the highest levels of any
major city in Louisiana, which in part explains why the two major investment
services rank the quality of its debt as only in the third-highest and
fourth-highest categories (high quality with low credit risk, but with some
susceptibility to long-term risks).
Having frittered away dollars on nonessential, if
not questionable, items has had consequences such as government activities long-term
debt interest of about $9 million paid out (its business activities also cost
another $5 million in interest) in 2022 that just a portion of which if freed could
back things like firefighter
pensions or pay raises for city employees, particularly in public safety. Ironically,
adequate funding of public safety is the issue that probably won’t lead to a citizens’
revolt at the ballot box on city millages because those address public safety,
as city fathers decades ago clearly must have envisioned since they cleverly tied
these levies explicitly to the most important function local government can
have.
That fact will discourage citizens from voting
down the items in order to teach a lesson to the likes of City Council
graybeards Republicans David
Montgomery and Jeff Free, Democrat
Bubba
Williams, and no party Jeff Darby
who oversaw the fiscal mismanagement over recent decades. After all, even as graybeard
actions have precluded better pay for public safety, removing the millages would
mean no pay and no job for many first responders.
A bit more vulnerable is the parish levy, not only
because library operations aren’t nearly as central to parish citizens’ lives –
likely the majority of them, aside from early voting, never have set foot in or
connected to the Internet sites of Bossier Parish Libraries – but also as the
parish’s Police Jury has engaged in a series of legally
questionable, if not outright illegal, acts in regards to the library. In
particular:
- It has had jurors serve on the Library Board of
Control since 2016. State law is somewhat ambiguous about the legality of
this practice – in fact, Bossier is the only parish for which information is readily
available on the web that does this – but an attorney general’s opinion on that
question soon will be released.
- At one point, it appointed Ford as head of libraries
on an interim basis for several months, which unambiguously broke the law as he
did not under state statute have the proper qualifications.
- Most
recently, it appointed all 12 jurors to the Board. Even as it appears they
will meet in a kind of rotation fashion, that violates state statute that
limits membership to as many as seven parish residents.
- And, even as some jurors allege they needed to take
over the Board because of problems they refuse to specify were endemic to the
library system that only they could solve – which rings entirely hollow since
jurors were board members for many years before making the board an all-juror
affair – if one of those problems was unsupervised availability of graphic
materials to children, the problem
continues.
These kinds of shenanigans might induce the
electorate to pull the plug on library funding, which would still leave around
100 mils of taxation for the parish that could be reallocated for library
purposes if so desired. Still, the magnitude of the money that would disappear,
as well as arguments that the library does serve school children and others,
likely will save the day for this renewal.
None of that applies to the district levy. Few
parish residents use the park (and have to pay to get in) yet most get taxed
for it, and many of the few hundred property owners to which it is highly
relevant since it foists land use controls upon them who pay hundreds or even
thousands of dollars a year to it depending upon the activities in which they
engage are nonplussed at it. The latter especially have had to endure years of
evasive and opaque management accentuated by a series of questionable decisions
by its Board
of Commissioners and its recently-departed member and (illegally
employed) executive director Robert Berry, from favoritism
to elected officials who appoint them to resisting
accountability to wasting tens
of thousands of dollars in fruitless legal expenses and more on grandiose,
unrealistic plans (which the renewal still advocates, as it in part would
be dedicated to operating a zoo the conceptualization and intentions of which have
been thoroughly botched).
That and the size of the millage and the election
date conspire to put this renewal in real jeopardy. Already asked to approve about
20 mils, voters might think they can afford to drop 7.5 percent of it that they
would see the 1.54 mils as not being missed, even as that comprises over half
of park revenues for 2022.
And while the election date helps the other levies’ chances of renewal, because
as very likely these four items will complete the ballot’s entirety which will
disproportionately attract to the polls the beneficiaries and families and friends
of most of the items (i.e., Bossier City public safety employees and Bossier
Parish library employees) in favor of these, with close to zero direct
beneficiaries of the district more than offset by a number of disgruntled
landowners, this hurts the chances of that millage passing (although it could get another shot
later in the year if this failed).
Commissioners seem to recognize this and have been
trying to engage landowners in a public relations campaign to improve their
image. They may need to extend that to the public, who will see their ballots
asking for taxes for something most never have heard of, and of those who have
many will have heard negative things, that would seem easy for government to do
without. Of course, a large PR campaign will cost money of which the district
has none, being in the hole $92,650 which would have been nearly three times as
much at the end of 2022 if not for an unspecified one-time insurance payout
that year.
While each of the three entities smartly asked for
renewing at the current millages being paid rather that at the higher amounts
that the measures originally authorized, that may not save the District’s
request from tax-fatigued voters. Rejection of that would send a signal to the District at present as
well as to Bossier City and the Parish for the future that voters will take
only so much misrule before they start casting retribution.