Simien win challenges GOP mayor race success

Earlier this month, the election of independent Marshall Simien, Jr. to the Lake Charles mayoralty marked a curious outlier to recent success that Republicans and white candidates generally have had in Louisiana’s largest cities, and may flash a warning signal to them.

Simien defeated two-term incumbent Republican Nic Hunter in the May 3 runoff. While Hunter’s proportion of the vote barely increased from what he gathered in the Mar. 29 general election, Simien’s essentially corralled support from all others, making up more than an 18-percentage point gap. Hunter is white while Simien, who among other elected and appointed positions in government served a couple of terms on the City Council prior to a previous mayoral run in 2017, is black.

Until May, Republicans had hit their high-water mark in executive control of the ten most populated cities (in a trio of cases, consolidated with the parish) in the state. While New Orleans had a Democrat as mayor, all of Baton Rouge, Shreveport, Lafayette, St. George (newly a city with an elected mayor as of March), Lake Charles, Kenner and Bossier City – second through eighth in population – had Republican chief executives. Monroe had an independent and Alexandria a Democrat.

Stipend extension not best pay raise strategy

By inserting the stipend Louisiana public school employees have enjoyed for the past two years into the budget for next year, legislators may end up writing checks with their mouths that later they can’t cash.

Somewhat surpassingly, the fiscal year 2026 budget contains, for a third year in a row, a $2,000 stipend for educators and $1,000 for staff. Extending it one more year wasn’t supposed to happen in the wake of the defeat of a constitutional amendment that used educational trust funds to pay down unfunded accrued liabilities in pension plans, which then would have the leftover funds no longer encumbered at the local level passed along into permanent raises.

But House Republicans pulled a rabbit from their hat when the Appropriations Committee, with full support of its Democrats, included the raises again. It took near-magic to do so: blocking $91 million dollars in funding for new vehicle and heavy equipment purchases for state agencies, cutting $26 million dollars in benefits for ineligible Medicaid recipients, plowing in $20 million dollars because of a hiring freeze, by paying down debt early to save $25 million dollars in interest, and halting a $30 million intensive tutoring program in the Department of Education.

Unaccountable Port lobbies to keep privileges

Perhaps it should not surprise that the most secretive local government in northwest Louisiana, the Port of Caddo-Bossier, has been involved some double-secret moves, if not backed by misinformation whether intentionally deceptive, by officials in area local governments.

The Port was established over 60 years ago to govern commerce and traffic as a port. Practically speaking, this means it builds infrastructure around land it leases to tenants. It is governed by a commission of nine appointees, political insiders all, by Shreveport, Bossier City, Caddo Parish, and Bossier City. It rakes in the statutory maximum of 2.5 mills of property tax from residents in those parishes. That’s good enough to gather over $7 million annually and to acquire assets of over $200 million while on the hook for $58 million in debt (2023 numbers; those for 2024 were presented at today’s meeting). (That debt will increase, perhaps substantially, as at its April meeting besides officially levying the property tax for 2025 it also authorized up to $750 million in new debt issuance.)

But statute also gives it enormous powers over what is defined as the “port area” – Bossier and Caddo Parishes in their entirety – and protects it from interference from any other local government. Following a 2021 law that added that and extensively expanded its powers, that gives it pretty free run to do whatever, at whatever cost. For example, it snookered Bossier City into giving it potentially a free waterworks that, unless some unlikely assumptions transpire, will be a net cost to Bossier Citians. It also has the power to expand through expropriation unhindered by any other local government, and, as an economic development entity, to make deals out of view of taxpayers.