As election looms, Shreveport promising higher pay

You can tell it’s election season in Shreveport when pay raises for all coexists with a budget that looks as if it’s running on fumes.

Last week, the Republican Mayor Tom Arceneaux Administration presented a preliminary piece of the city’s 2027 budget. After having previously announced a round of pay hikes concentrating on public safety commencing before the next budget cycle, here comes another. Actually, two.

One will focus on issues of salary compression, which occurs when starting wages creep upwards without periodic adjustments to salary for existing employees, meaning relatively speaking green employees make more than seasoned. As well, Arceneaux’s last budget unwisely hiked city pay at the lowest levels to a minimum wage of $15 per hour, exacerbating the compression as well as inducing budgetary strain with millions of dollars in new recurring costs.

Landrieu next LA vanity presidential aspirant

Don’t look now, but it looks like Louisiana has another vanity project running for president, this time in the form of Democrat former Lt. Gov. and New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu.

The state occasionally experiences a credible politician (meaning not Prisoner #28213-034) taking a Quixotic stab at the country’s top office. Republican former Gov. Bobby Jindal’s attempt for 2016 falls outside this category, because he would have had a real chance after beginning a populist turn in the last couple of years of his governorship had not the most unimpeachably conservative populist of all time GOP Pres. Donald Trump trumped Jindal and other competitive Republicans with his outsider and semi-celebrity status. He was, for a while, a serious candidate.

Jindal actually had a really good shot for the nomination in 2012, but demurred. Instead, that year Louisiana sent forth a former GOP governor as a novelty candidate, Buddy Roemer. He got sucked into this idea that a major party could form on a temporary basis and make someone like him competitive. Of course it didn’t happen.

Spin detracts from fixing Caddo jail overcrowding

Political spin reaches its full rotational velocity during election season, as comments about the overcrowded Caddo Correctional Center illustrate that distract from the fact this problem stems from prosecutorial choices, not from law enforcement.

No, it’s not so much that burgeoning Shreveport police arrests keep the CCC “bursting at the seams,” although obviously that volume is a significant contributor without which it wouldn’t have the opportunity to inflate. That statement comes from Wayne Smith, Shreveport Police Department chief, whose boss Republican Mayor Tom Arceneaux this fall faces spirited competition to retain his job. The more Smith talks up SPD vigilance, the more it pats Arceneaux’s back as the election looms.

Yet Smith could ramp up arrests even more and it wouldn’t be a crowding problem, according to a 2023 report of the Caddo Parish Criminal Justice Task Force. It discovered a 40 percent growth in the pretrial population even as arrests declined from 2012 to 2022. It saw as the cause the median bail amount rising over 2.5 times, explained by an increase in felony arrests, from 2014 to 2022, and a 144 percent increase in days from a court case’s opening to its disposition, thought to be a result of staffing shortages which delay transmission of case materials.

BC budget subject to stormy weather ahead

Bossier City put forth a solid 2027 budget, despite a few dark clouds ahead, and perhaps a bit too optimistic.

This week, the City Council held a budget information session, where Chief Administrative Office Shane Cheatham presented it publicly. The plan concentrated on maintaining core services and continuation of existing ones with a 3.71 percent bump upwards in general fund spending to nearly $86 million. As it is, that increase is driven almost entirely by a predicted rise in sales tax collections.

Which might flash one sign of trouble. It forecasts that property tax revenues actually suffer a tiny decline, meaning resales of property would increase at the margin at best and bring little in the way of new higher valued property into service. In other words, this indicates stagnation economically with little upward movement in population.

Landry housing plan should reduce LA homelessness

The Republican Gov. Jeff Landry Administration came up aces with its recently released plan to use federal housing funds in a way that actually mitigates homelessness in Louisiana.

Each year, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development doles out grants to states to provide housing. States and local governments have established panels to recommend to HUD proposals from various lead agencies willing to coordinate spending, in Louisiana’s case, historically around $100 million combined annually.  Until this year for many years, these defaulted to a nonprofit agency called UNITY of Greater New Orleans and another outside of New Orleans, the Louisiana Balance of State Continuum of Care.

But those agencies followed a flawed worldview of optimal housing policy, and its distributional planes reflected that, where primarily the homeless were to be given permanent housing as a “solution” to homelessness, even as research has shown that approach is less effective than steering policy to make any housing most often transitional, as the large majority of homeless are that way because of behavioral issues they must solve that enable them to exit homelessness. The GOP Pres. Donald Trump Administration last year directed HUD to embrace the latter, a more effective strategy in how it distributed these grants.