Shreveport looks to compound wage hike mistake

Shreveport’s City Council next week will conclude its 2022 budget debate, where the question isn’t whether to deplete its reserves, but whether recklessly so in order to raise how many employees’ pay, including boosting minimum wages to over twice the legal limit.

Last week, the four Democrats and two Republicans (the seventh member still as-yet undetermined after a resignation last month) agreed that no city employee should receive less than $13 an hour. This meant hiking the lowest grade’s starting pay by about $1.70 per hour, but then salary compression would set in, meaning other grades would have to see increases as well. The plan eventually adopted would apply to 750 workers and cost just over $1 million a year.

Those funds were worked into the budget. However, that it seems wasn’t enough for some councilors. Councilors Republicans Grayson Boucher and John Nickelson plus Democrat LeVette Fuller wanted a 13 percent pay raise for police and fire employees, whose compensation operates in a different system which Resolution 149 didn’t affect. They tried to insert this into Ordinance 154, the operating budget, as an amendment.

Fatigue present in Edwards map, virus actions

As he turns the quarter pole down the homestretch of his gubernatorial tenure, Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards continues to come to grips with his constrained diminishing power that inches him towards cipher status when it comes to policy-making.

Leftists both in Louisiana and across the land surely perked up when last week Edwards commented about the looming special session for reapportionment. Republicans who control the Legislature are in the process of scheduling this at the crack of February.

In an elaboration of past comments alluding to “fair” redistricting for Congress, Edwards got liberals’ hearts fluttering when he said, “Fairness, if it can be done, would be to have two out of the six congressional district be minority districts.” Since the state has nearly one-third black population, by the numbers that theoretically wouldn’t pose problems.

Report signals how LA can improve elections

While it’s good to see Louisiana near the top of a list of states for a change, it doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement, in this instance for election integrity.

The Heritage Foundation recently vetted the states on this issue, compiling a scorecard that reviewed 36 areas related to it and weighing these by importance, with the most importance at 6 points being photo identification for in-person voting. In aggregate, Louisiana scored 75/100, or seventh best.

This good relative placement prompted Republican Sec. of State Kyle Ardoin to applaud his staff and the 64 registrar offices. But before he breaks his arm patting himself and others on the back, the real value of the exercise with the state coming up a quarter short lies in showing where Louisiana can improve, something he can lead along with legislators.

NO ups ante on abusive child vax requirements

It’s as if after seeing the state of Louisiana embark on state-sponsored child abuse, New Orleans decided it should up the ante. Hopefully, legal action may thwart both.

Last week, Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards overrode a House of Representatives panel to allow bureaucrats in the Department of Health to add vaccines for the Wuhan coronavirus to the immunization schedule for all levels of schooling. It would take effect for the 2022-23 school year, although parents may opt children in elementary and secondary education out of this, and at present it would apply only to those 16 and older, although this could change to essentially all ages by then depending upon federal government full authorization for vaccine use at younger ages.

This requirement makes little scientific sense. Vaccines don’t stop transmission, so they don’t protect others from getting the virus. Further, the vaccines themselves have a limited range of effectiveness, both in duration and in coverage of ever-mutating strains, unlike any other immunization on the schedule which lasts far longer and almost perfectly suppress the underlying malady. In essence, this virus behaves like its relative influenza, only slightly more lethally to children, yet no one ever has proposed adding flu shots to the schedule.

BC must pare debt that smothered its growth

While it looks as if the move to issue $30 million in debt to fund a recreation center in north Bossier City has withered, that shouldn’t bring debate over city borrowing to a halt.

In early December, the Council witnessed a two-front offensive to bring about this project. At that meeting, members unknown asked for the Northwest Louisiana YMCA to pitch for the building that the Y would run – despite uncertain demand and that city residents not only would end up footing the bill for the building but also would have to pay hundreds of dollars a year to use it except by participating in a select few city programs.

Following that, members unknown also asked for representatives of agencies the city works with for bond issuance (the ones for work “we don’t bid”) to give their opinions about the city’s debt load. The latest authorization of $75 million combined with scheduled paying down outstanding debt in 2021 puts the available debt load at around $535 million, or over $8,500 per resident, by far the highest of any medium or large city in Louisiana.

Social media spat displays liberal fragility

Call it “liberal fragility.”

As Democrats have swung violently to the political left, party elites and ideological fellow-travelers have embraced a fringe intellectual movement known as “critical theory,” although in the context of political debate it often is referred to as Critical Race Theory. Despite a wholesale lack of empirical evidence to back its assertions, this alleges that racism against non-whites – although almost always making blacks as a group the locus – is so hardwired into American institutions, including those of government, and society that only extensive and intrusive intervention by government can bring fairness in treatment of racial minorities (even as most racial minority parents oppose the core beliefs of CRT).

Further, it borrows the Marxian concept of “false consciousness,” with a structuralist twist, to explain why protest by whites against the presumed “truth” of CRT. In Marxism, false consciousness describes why the allegedly exploited cooperate in their own exploitation, as they haven’t had their consciousnesses raised to the point of realizing this. The structuralist version expands the idea to compensate for the development of the affluent society after World War II, which extends false consciousness to much of the bourgeoisie, who don’t comprehend that they cooperate in oppressing the masses because the official capitalist state ideology has so infused all institutions, particularly public education.

No logic behind bad school vax decision

If you want to view a case study of how illogic and skewed information combine to create bad policy, look no further than Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards’ decision to add Wuhan coronavirus vaccines to the required schedule for school and college attendees.

Proposed by his Department of Health, the House Health and Welfare Committee as allowed by law vetoed this, in bipartisan fashion. Members and other critics cited the overly intrusive nature of the requirement, questioned the wisdom with little long-term research on the effects of vaccination of children coupled with the known negative side effect of increase myocarditis risk, and noted that vaccines don’t prevent transmission or in a significant number of instances protect the injected person, especially as the many mutations of the virus have made its presence endemic rather than pandemic, like influenza that Edwards seems to have no worries about.

Also as allowed by law, Edwards overrode it, but admitted both directly and indirectly that the opponents were right. Vaccine development “in time to help us put this pandemic behind us also requires us to do everything we can to add COVID-19 to the list of diseases that no longer pose a serious threat. This rule does just that, and it should remain in place,” he argued.

LA must eschew "progressive" prosecution

Crime problems plaguing New Orleans at present don’t come just from lenient bail policies, but also from putting a “progressive” chief prosecutor in place – a problem that also might have contributed to the marked increase in homicides haunting Shreveport as well.

As recently noted, bail policies that have ratcheted down amounts paid and increased release on recognizance – implemented by New Orleans – while crime has increased follow a pattern in other jurisdictions doing the same. The same phenomenon appears to have Baton Rouge in its clutches as it, along with 11 other larger cities in the country, have hit record numbers of homicides, a condition its police chief Murray Paul attributes to lenient bail conditions.

Yet increasing the numbers of accused out on the streets by forgoing adequate means to make them appear in court, some with lengthy and/or dangerous criminal histories, isn’t solely the province of lax standards. Prosecutorial discretion also contributes, a review of large city statistics and policies though 2020 shows. And it has gotten worse in 2021.

Bail laxness in NO endangering community

If data from other cities indicate anything, New Orleanians’ suffering only will grow because of ill-considered bail reform policies.

The numbers continue to accumulate for a number of cities that over the past few years, several in just the past year or so, have sought to minimize, if not eliminate, the role of cash bail in determining the pretrial circumstances of criminal defendants. They don’t look good; across America, significant increases in criminal activity, especially homicides, and in repeat offenses have occurred in cities that very publicly ratcheted down the likelihood of requiring bail and/or its amounts for those accused of crime, including violent crimes.

Bail as a concept tries to encourage trial appearance. Paying a refundable amount upon appearing discourages becoming a fugitive, and typically if a defendant doesn’t have it a bondsman will front the money for a fee something like 12 percent of the balance. If not paying bail, the charged person is incarcerated until and through the trial. The amount theoretically is set so that it’s low enough that people not a threat to the community can secure release, but for those that are (and in a few instances the law doesn’t allow for bail because of accusation of such a heinous crime assumes a person inherently dangerous to the community) it will keep them jailed and unable to harm society.

NW LA voters act sane, NO bunch go crazy

In Louisiana’s final elections of the year, northwest Louisiana voters largely hewed to fiscal restraint, while their New Orleans counterparts cautioned people seeking quality local governance to look elsewhere.

Bossier City’s District 1 City Council contest delivered a second ally to Republican Mayor Tommy Chandler with Republican Brian Hammons’ runoff win. He almost avoided a runoff against no party Mike Lombardino, and garnered endorsements from area GOP bigwigs – most notably from known consistent conservatives – which now puts Chandler a Council vote away from having enough panel backers to uphold vetoes, and Hammons taking the seat slows further the big-spending tendencies of the Council majority.

Hundreds of miles away, a decision made by voters in St. Tammany Parish also impacted Bossier City. Down south, voters overwhelmingly rejected changing their rejection of casino gambling in that parish a quarter century ago, thus keeping the former DiamondJacks boat high and dry up north. It shut down operations almost two years ago and its owners have said they won’t reopen it there, and they lobbied hard to send it south. But many political and social elites in St. Tammany opposed altering the parish status, and the people ratified that rejection at about the same proportion as they had originally.