Chandler's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Bad 10 Days

New Bossier City Council, same dynamic as the old: spirited dialogue between councilors and speakers. But in this version, instead of now-departed councilors berating inquiring citizens, it’s embattled Republican Mayor Tommy Chandler and members of his administration suffering political defeats and fending off inquiring councilor minds that could lead to much worse for him and some staffers.

The first days of August have not been kind to Chandler and his subalterns. The day prior to month’s beginning the Council altered, over his objections, a new fee schedule for sanitation that will negate collection of several hundreds of thousands of dollars this year and every year to come. Then, without prior warning to the Council his administration called a public hearing for a property tax increase of about a million bucks a year that within a couple of days every single councilor publicly opposed, making the scheduled Sep. 9 meeting futile.

Days later, SOBO.live’s Wes Merriott published evidence that Chandler, his Chief Administrative Officer Amanda Nottingham, Public Information Officer Louis Johnson, and the city’s Assistant City Attorney Richard Ray were illegally operating city-owned vehicles – Chandler, Nottingham, and Johnson because their vehicles were unmarked as city vehicles and Ray because, although his was marked, he is a part-time employee without authorization to use such a vehicle. Under R.S. 49:121 every vehicle owned by the state or any political subdivision, including cities, is required to display the name of the public body to which it belongs except in instances used for undercover law enforcement.

Caddo stuck on stupid by subsidizing pickleball

It only took Bossier City government over 30 years to wise up, yet despite that example Caddo Parish is about to launch itself further into stupidity when it comes to supposed economic development.

Over the past few years, the Caddo Parish Commission slowly but surely has been careening farther off the rails. If it’s not general inanity such as commissioners exhibiting Trump Derangement Syndrome or attempts to violate the Constitution, it’s flailing about with useless symbolic gestures opposing everything under the sun out of its jurisdiction but crossways to the majority Democrats’ sensibilities or advancing wasteful spending based on economic ignorance. And, of course, there is flouting of open meetings law that may bring civil penalties. But now it’s entertaining graduate studies in economic development asininities.

The tipping point seems to have come with an alleged agreement between the parish and a truck stop in an economic development district narrowly defined to include only it at present for a payment-in-lieu-of-taxes for improvements made by the business that the parish apparently got snookered on. Unwilling to wait out an apparently extremely long payback period, the parish then authorized this spring a special sales tax increase at the location even as the business was subject to a raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the fallout of both leading the enterprise to sue Republican Commissioner Chris Kracman – who blew the whistle on the open meetings violation – for negative comments he made about the business and the raid (and who the parish refuses to defend; payback, anyone?).

LA needs trigger law to reckon with inevitability

Louisiana needs to have better preparation for the inescapable future when Medicaid spending meets reality.

With Democrats far out of the mainstream on the issue, with them and their media allies still spreading the falsehood that there are “cuts” to the program over the next few years (when, in fact, the recent budget reconciliation increases spending over the next several years), the state still should prepare itself for reduced federal allocations. The active authorizations moving forward over the next several years assure the state will continue to receive the same federal funding in proportion to the portion of individuals eligible to receive services.

However, if the state is cross-subsidizing Medicaid recipients, that will be inconvenient. That means that the state takes advantage of the cynical and purely political apportionment designed by Democrats when rammed into law of federal Medicaid assistance: the far healthier expansion population has the state paying for only 10 percent of the costs – over $400 million annually at last count in Louisiana – while for the far less healthy adult population receives (varying slightly from year to year) the state must pay around 25 to 35 percent (this year about 32), an arrangement that beggars the less-healthy and provides no better care for all than if they were uninsured. If the latest budgetary changes result in fewer people qualifying for Medicaid – because they were (about a third) ineligible in the first place or they are unmotivated enough to try to qualify – those excess federal dollars from this population can’t be shuttled over to the needier population.

Report confirms renewable power blackout cause

A report last month confirmed much of the blame for the Caddo and Bossier Parish blackouts of Apr. 26 rested with the pell-mell rush of power providers into use of less-reliable renewable sources of energy.

Urged by the Public Service Commission, this document by American Electric Power-Southwestern Electric Power Company (AEP the parent of SWEPCO) and the regional transmission organization to which it belongs the Southwest Power Pool detailed why tens of thousands of structures were left without power for several hours. It claimed essentially that a degraded environment for power provision suffered bad luck that could be mitigated to some degree in the future with changes to more conservative procedures until that environment improves.

The environment, it explained, was degraded for two reasons: insufficient transmission capacity and local generative capacity. What it didn’t explain was the more general transition away from fossil fuels by utilities towards especially wind and solar sources, and particularly by SWEPCO, were the root causes of less capacity and therefore greater need for transmission lines into the service area.

Decision signal to impact LA govts at all levels

The U.S. Supreme Court gave its strongest indication yet that it would rework, if not abandon, reapportionment jurisprudence that increasingly has pushed creating maps where the proportion of representatives mirrors the proportion of racial minorities in the population – based on a Louisiana case that also would affect Louisiana cases at other levels of government.

The first shoe dropped when in late June the Court issued a statement it would rehear Louisiana v. Callais, an appeal to a ruling that the state’s congressional districts had been drawn impermissibly on the basis of race and the only case it heard all year on mandatory appeal, this fall. Assoc. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented, saying the facts were clear and that the Court shouldn’t avoid addressing conflict between current Voting Rights Act judicial interpretations and the Constitution about to what extent race could be used as a criterion in apportionment.

Thomas got his wish when the other shoe dropped last week. The Court scheduled submission of briefs essentially asking that question. Further, it did it on a timeline that portends the hearing with that additional question at the start of its term, which could set things up for an early decision in time to govern the 2026 election cycle for the state.