Shreveport Democrats rule for Arceneaux failure

Republican Mayor Tom Arceneaux may helm Shreveport, but its gerrymandered Democrat supermajority City Council keeps spending more money than the city has that puts off a more severe day of reckoning which perhaps cloaks a cynical exercise.

This week, the Council approved the 2024 budget, making several changes to Arceneaux’s plan that had the effect of spending more or putting off debts. In all, for its general operations the city will shell out $283 million, down $11 million budgeted for this year, but overall spending is pegged at $676 million, up $81 million, largely as a result of increased revenue projections for water and sewerage and righting retained risk costs, which in the past couple of years ate into general fund reserves.

But Arceneaux’s plans to begin replenishing general fund reserves, which dove by two-thirds over that period to around $25 million, the Council thwarted by amending away a 20 percent increase in water and sewerage rates, a $3 monthly solid waste charge, and retaining open positions in public safety, with police particularly understaffed, altogether which could have recaptured $25 million. The Council unanimously wanted to keep open proactively the ability to hire into public safety departments, and in the cases of the higher charges felt the public not sufficiently prepared to endure the increases at this time.

Leftist group's beliefs, not message, fail in LA

The story remains the same, and helps explain why the group dedicated to putting leftist women in office has crashed and burned in Louisiana.

It seems the national group Emerge America is in retreat. In its decade of existence, it has established chapters in over half the states, recruiting and training female Democrats to run for office. It has roughly 1,300 of serving in elected office, eight members of Congress and 24 statewide officials among its alumnae. But discord has set in among a few of its state chapters, and some essentially have been cut loose.

That’s happened in Louisiana, in which the organization began operating in 2017, where almost two years ago the then-leader of the state’s branch left and hasn’t been replaced, with the organization asserting its strategic profile was served better by having the state’s leftist women interested in its services attend regional and national training, as well as having alumnae available for mentoring. This has disconcerted some, who see the move as surrendering and selling out leftist activist women to whom it had proffered promises of assistance.

Dubious dissent attaches to wise election ruling

The dissenting judges on Louisiana’s Second Circuit Court of Appeals advanced a novel and quite possibly ruinous interpretation of election law rooted in the wisdom of the 1967 movie The Dirty Dozen, when a five-judge panel of the Court ruled upon the ongoing suit to determine the winner of the Caddo Parish sheriff’s contest.

In the film, renegade officer Maj. John Reisman is given the job of taking twelve Army prisoners held for serious crimes during World War II to conduct a near-suicidal mission, in exchange for commutation of their sentences. One, Joseph Wladislaw, landed in prison because he shot an officer displaying cowardice in battle that threatened his entire unit. Upon hearing this during his pitch to Wladislaw to join the unit, Reisman commented that Wladislaw had done right, but made only one mistake: he let someone see him do it.

That’s the philosophy endorsed by Democrats Marcus Hunter and Shonda Stone in their dissent to the majority’s decision in the case authored by Republican Jeff Robinson and backed by Republicans Jeff Cox and Craig Marcotte. The majority upheld the district court decision of ad hoc District Judge Joseph Bleich, who ruled a new election was in order.

Subversion underscores need to repeal bad policy

Like rats leaving a sinking ship, bad policies continue fleeing the state’s executive branch as Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards’ time in office melts away – and even from unlikely sources.

One example is the loosening of high school graduation standards promulgated by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education scheduled to take effect this week. Until now, if students didn’t score barely better than fogging a mirror on two standardized tests – 38 percent and 10 percent – they didn’t qualify for graduation.

But this fall BESE, which through almost all of his eight years in office rebuffed measures favored by Edwards and his allies, awarded them a win by putting into place a highly subjective appeal process with little oversight that would waive that requirement. It narrowly passed only because as governor Edwards appointed three members who shared his view that government should maintain a monopoly on education that puts adults’ desires ahead of children’s needs – in this case, trying to make government-run schools look better and less likely to face sanctions by having higher graduation rates.

Another legal issue to slow LA map challenge

Another joker popped out of the deck last month concerning the increasingly-voluminous and complex litigation surrounding Louisiana congressional reapportionment that likely makes the odds even more certain that resolution won’t come until the 2026 election cycle.

North of the state in the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, a three-judge panel agreed in an Arkansas case that only the federal government can file judicial action against maps under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The Louisiana case, which seeks to invalidate the state’s current map with one out of six majority-minority districts in a state where residents claiming some black ancestry make up almost a third of the population, was filed by a private group, not the federal government.

That case, which has ping-ponged between the state’s Middle District and the Fifth Circuit, as part of its deliberation by a separate three-judge panel briefly addressed this issue, known as a private right of action. It conceded that as other jurisdictions had acknowledged the right exists that it would assume the same in this instance.

Calcasieu P3 toll bridge idea needs canceling

A threatened de facto tax increase mainly on denizens in the Lake Charles area now seems set to wither away by the time incoming governor Republican Atty. Gen. Jeff Landry takes command.

That was the proposal by the outgoing Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards to have tolls finance $1.3 billion of a projected $2.1 billion to construct a new Interstate 10 bridge across the Calcasieu River in Lake Charles, as well as perform some widening around its bases. The remainder of the money the state planned to leverage with a mix of state and federal dollars, primarily complemented by a $40 million a year revenue stream from the switchover of vehicle taxes from the general fund to transportation.

The plan announced this summer raised hackles immediately. The economics behind it weren’t all that bad, in that users rather than general taxpayers statewide would foot the bill, and likely it could have been completed at lower cost through a public-private partnership relying on tolls to keep the state’s maintenance costs close to zero for a half-century.

Potemkin group to try subverting BC petitioners

The race is on, as the Bossier City Council this week launched its Potemkin attempt to run down citizens who threaten to end the political careers of a majority of its members.

The Council unanimously voted to establish the second charter review committee in this city’s history. Mind you, a year ago this was the furthest thing from the minds of graybeards Republicans Jeff Free and David Montgomery, Democrat Bubba Williams, and no party Jeff Darby. But then a group of citizens loosely organized as the Bossier Term Limits Coalition, with the support of Republican rookie councilors Chris Smith and Brian Hammons and republican Mayor Tommy Chandler, came together to gather enough signatures to amend the city charter by slapping a lifetime three-term limit retroactively on city officials, with an affirmative vote by the electorate. None of the graybeards could run in the Mar. 29, 2025 city elections if this passed by the Dec. 7, 2024 election, as it almost certainly would.

By a series of legal maneuvers and open defiance four times of the charter, the graybeards plus Republican rookie Vince Maggio so far have kept the matter off the ballot, hoping to extend that for more than the upcoming year by tying up the matter in the courts. Undaunted, the Coalition has launched another as well as a separate petition amending the charter to drop the petitioning requirement from a third to a fifth of registered voters participating in the last city-wide election that would make even easier outflanking the Council.

Likely rerun Caddo sheriff contest tossup

With a rerun of the 2023 Caddo Parish sheriff’s election now a virtual certainty, the question turns to whom seems the likely winner between Democrat former Shreveport chief administrative officer and police chief Henry Whitehorn and Republican former city councilor John Nickelson.

Today, retired and ad hoc judge Joseph Bleich ruled a new election would have to take place, which fulfilled as big a legal slam dunk as there ever was. The law is quite clear that if illegal votes were cast in a contest in numbers beyond the margin between one or more sets of candidates that, barring the highly unlikely chance that such votes for whom could be identified and their excision would change the outcome, a new election would be ordered, a circumstance that featured in this election which Bleich vetted thoroughly in his ruling.

Given that Whitehorn emerged after the election and machine recount with a single vote lead, the Nickelson campaign’s legal team thoroughly documented irregularities, finding at least 11 suspicious enough, that convinced Bleich to order a new election. In large part, this was the fault of the Caddo Parish Registrar’s Office, who disregarded procedures that could have removed those votes from being cast or counted. Still, with a single vote margin, it would have been difficult to avoid any slipup that could have triggered a new contest.

Data betray claim 2023 not conservative mandate

As Louisiana leftists continue to move through their stages of grief over this year’s statewide election, they pursue yet another narrative that fails under the cold hard light of data.

So far, liberals among Democrats, within the media, and in academia have tried to comfort themselves over their blowout losses that leave perhaps the most conservative governor, Legislature, and Board of Elementary and Secondary Education in history about to take over. They do this by telling themselves they delivered their message poorly – when in reality it’s the message itself at fault – and by bolstering themselves over the illusion that outgoing Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards had notable lasting accomplishments – only if you believe during his years in office fewer jobs, fewer people choosing to work, many fewer residents, tepid personal income growth well behind most states, pandemic policy that cost more lives than preserved, and government growing at three times the rate of inflation are good things.

The other narrative is that the victory of Republican Atty. Gen. Jeff Landry to replace Edwards, as well as legislative gains, is somehow less legitimate because overall turnout was the lowest since 2011 (slightly lower in the general election, slightly higher in the runoff). You have journalists and academicians propagating that “apathy” suggests there isn’t a groundswell to follow diametrically different options than with which Edwards tried to outflank the GOP-run Legislature.

Bossier needs rethink of school clinic policy

What appears to be the signature initiative of Bossier Parish’s new school superintendent threatens to bring controversy if not implemented correctly and for the right reason.

Last week, the Bossier Parish School Board unanimously awarded the job to assistant superintendent for administration and personnel Jason Rowland. Oddly, he was the only applicant in contrast to the last several occasions when the district hired a superintendent, perhaps because the district over this span only promoted from within and this discouraged outside candidates and in-home potential candidates who considered Rowland’s ascension as inevitable.

In the months leading up to his promotion Rowland worked on establishing school-based health clinics, both permanent and rotating, on the belief that this would discourage absenteeism. Indeed, since the onset of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic and lingering beyond that, nationally truancy (defined as a student missing at least 10 percent of class days) has doubled to about one in five.