The next couple of weeks may make or break Bossier City’s transformation from big small town to an economic growth machine.
A lot of very consequential decisions are coming down the pike to the city in short order. It looks to implement a key personnel move just as it faces a big strategic decision, all with the backdrop of erasing a mountain of debt and the possibility of nabbing a huge water and sewerage customer.
City Chief Administrative Officer Amanda Nottingham will take of her job at year’s end to become essentially head lobbyist at Southwestern Electric Power Company. She has been a steadying influence for Republican Mayor Tommy Chandler, who doesn’t like to get too involved in the nuts-and-bolts of administration, but also faced hamstringing by the City Council by its often altering substantially or defeating administration proposals.
Chandler has proposed few major initiatives, and among them the Council turned back large-scale defunding of SporTran operations and a property tax increase while forcing modifications to a plan to close a loophole allowing apartment complexes to pay next to nothing for water service. The recent history of the Council often taking the lead in policy-making hasn’t diminished even with a majority of new councilors on board after this year’s elections, and it might be frustrating for a CAO in that environment.
Chandler’s pick, and Council ratification, for the job can tell a lot about the city’s future direction. He could follow Shreveport’s lead of some years ago and pick the outgoing fire chief Brad Zagone, who has 14 years of experience running one of the city’s largest departments. Even though most of that tenure came under the previous free-spending Council and like-minded Mayor Lo Walker, if the Council continues to clamp down on that he seems likely to follow.
However, Chandler has a preference for loyalists, which may push him in the direction of Carol Andersen, also retained from Walker as executive assistant who has risen through the ranks and now directs the Civic Center. This would signal greater passivity from the mayor’s office and no real policy change.
An outside candidate would be GOP Councilor Brian Hammons, but only if Chandler intends to leave office after this term. Hammons has experience in running a successful large business but CAO was the launch pad for Walker and with a number of political activists looking for a more visionary, smaller- and efficient government-focused chief executive, he fits the bill as a challenger to Chandler which the incumbent would prefer to avoid empowering if he wants to run for a third term. Other potential picks from the Council would operate under the same dynamic.
Whoever ends up with the job has at least one big decision coming up. The Council, led by its presiding officer Republican Chris Smith, with Chandler tagging along has launched a strategy for accelerating economic development. The Walker years featured vast sums of money wasted on low-to-negative return concrete and steel objects, but one of its few (mostly) wise expenditures was gussying up Barksdale Boulevard from Traffic Street east. Now, the Council wants to put this East Bank District, along with the casinos, the new Chasin’ Aces golf/entertainment complex, and the troubled Louisiana Boardwalk, into a special district designed to attract more development and buildout.
The strategy would involve tax incentives, but here the city must be careful. The two options here are either an additional sales tax levied within it with funding from that dedicated to improvements or a payment-in-lieu-of-taxes arrangement where for some years any concern locating or expanding would pay some monies to the city but at an amount lower than what the improvement would have brought in if full property taxes were paid.
Relatively nearby examples should raise cautionary flags about a sales tax hike. Shreveport attempted to do this with a district solely encompassing its Mall St. Vincent (minus two anchor stores with their properties owned by themselves, not the mall) with most of the proceeds going to help the mall. Instead, little has changed, if not further decline experienced, by the mall in the more than a decade since.
West Monroe also has tried this strategy with three such districts, one narrowly confined to the area around a city-owned civic center, another along just a few blocks next to the Ouachita River, and a third which is to give a break on property taxes but has attracted no takers as yet. While both economic development districts relying on a one cent sales tax hike are doing better than the Shreveport case, with that it’s unclear whether developmental benefits compensate for the extra business lost by having higher taxes. And, the city’s contemplated district would be foisted upon a far greater amount of economic activity among very disparate-sized businesses, some of which would feel lost commercial pain much more keenly than others.
A sounder strategy would use the PILOT mechanism, which assumes additional sales tax collections from increased activity would more than compensate for the difference between the PILOT and forgone ad valorem revenues. If it’s going to happen, that’s the direction the city should pursue (and not a property tax increase, which would have the same deleterious impact as a higher sales tax).
In the background of all of this is potentially a data center of Bossier’s own. Public legal filings suggest that property outside the city limits in the parish could house one of these, even as Shreveport openly is trying to land one with the next big decision about that coming later this week. It’s unknown whether recent actions by the Bossier Parish Police Jury about this have occurred on the basis of Bossier acting as a fallback position for the Shreveport center if government bodies don’t give it the green light, or whether this is an entirely different center under consideration.
The city’s involvement would come in water and sewerage services, which could involve water sales as much as in the 13-million-gallon range. Ratifying an ordinance at its next meeting this week to permit these sales that then turns out to facilitate a center opens up a can or worms as to whether the city can provide that much or it having to fall back on a past decision that requires some tricky economics to ensure taxpayers don’t end up subsidizing the activity.
If not by year’s end, all of these uncertainties should have resolution in the first weeks of 2026. They will have a significant impact on the city’s policy direction for the foreseeable future and whether it takes additional steps to outgrow its spend-first, ask-questions-later past.
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