Shreveport MPC autonomy debate tempest in teapot

In the background of an important decision made by the Shreveport City Council today is whether it needs the extra layer of bureaucracy that put it in this spot in the first place.

At December’s beginning, the Shreveport Metropolitan Planning Commission registered a tie vote (because of one absence) on whether to grant a special land use permit for a data center in the city’s west. This effectively denied the application, to the consternation of some policy-makers and especially Republican Mayor Tom Arceneaux.

Statute defines and empowers the MPC. Its nine members with six-year staggered terms the mayor appoints with Council approval, all Shreveport residents. It concocts a master plan of zoning and development and must approve changes outside of those parameters. Its budget the Council sets, from which it hires a staff that analyzes proposals and makes recommendations – a staff which had recommended center approval. However, dissenting members said visible public opposition at the meeting had swayed them to reject it.

Overbuilt LA higher education causing conflict

Battles over university and university system governance in Louisiana really boil down to the fact that Louisiana’s higher education provision is overbuilt.

Culminating a years-long effort that has developed in bits and pieces, the Louisiana State University System has moved to reorganize. It has abandoned the combination of the Baton Rouge campus with the system within leadership by its new recent hires, and rightly so.

Back when system and LSU leadership was combined, the plan for the system was to combine campus governance and implementation as much as possible. On the business sides, campuses were to find economies of scale, and in that aspect the strategy succeeded in creating a central back-office operation among other ways to save.

Big decisions soon to shape BC economic future

The next couple of weeks may make or break Bossier City’s transformation from big small town to an economic growth machine.

A lot of very consequential decisions are coming down the pike to the city in short order. It looks to implement a key personnel move just as it faces a big strategic decision, all with the backdrop of erasing a mountain of debt and the possibility of nabbing a huge water and sewerage customer.

City Chief Administrative Officer Amanda Nottingham will take of her job at year’s end to become essentially head lobbyist at Southwestern Electric Power Company. She has been a steadying influence for Republican Mayor Tommy Chandler, who doesn’t like to get too involved in the nuts-and-bolts of administration, but also faced hamstringing by the City Council by its often altering substantially or defeating administration proposals.

BESE must clarify unexcused absence policy

Louisiana’s Department of Education needs to cut through the confusion and make it clear: if a child doesn’t show up to school because parents fear la Immigración, it’s not an excused absence.

Last week, as the federal government publicized and launched an inter-agency effort to detain illegal aliens in the New Orleans metropolitan area, the location with a concentration of these scofflaw residents, Jefferson Parish, saw significantly higher truancy in its schools. It is conjectured that this resulted from families of illegal aliens keeping their children out of school for fear that agents would bust into schools and round up children illegally in the country.

That notion is ridiculous, given official directives that the only such intrusions now permitted would occur if a known criminal (likely incognito) was at a school and only after intensive vetting of the process. There are no jump-out boys launching into a school going door-to-door demanding papeles affirming citizenship or permanent residency; all that has been a fantasy propagated by left-wing education administrators and teachers, special interests, politicians, and media to try to score political points.

Tax reform paying off more quickly than thought

 With apologies for stealing and changing this line: OK, Landry, Nelson, Emerson, et. al. were right.

Last week, Louisiana’s Revenue Estimating Conference held its end-of-calendar-year meeting to revise numbers. These revisions can mean the state might have extra money from past budget years to spend on essentially one-time items, extra money for this budget year to spend on anything, and more to spend on the upcoming fiscal year 2027 budget – or it might be reversals in this year where forecasts could cause retrenchments and reduced future expenditures, respectively.

With almost a year of data from changes made during last year’s Third Extraordinary Session of the Legislature now on the books, many of the usual suspects from the collectivist political left then predicted at best “uncertainty,” at worst “budget shortfalls” as a result of flattening tax individual and corporate tax rates, broadening the base a little by excising some exemptions, increasing individual exemption levels, and increasing the sales tax rate. Howls of protest came about how this would prove to be regressive and hurt lowest-income people’s pocketbooks (although one analysis estimated it would cost a whopping $5 extra a year for such a household).

LA coastal planning must avoid past mistakes

The philosophical change concerning Louisiana’s coastal policy will bring greater benefits when a more scientifically-based approach infuses the upcoming 2029 Master Plan for the coast.

The Republican Gov. Jeff Landry Administration since taking office signaled a strategy alteration in how to handle the state’s receding coastline. Rather than spend enormously on a very few big projects designed to reshape water carriage and runoff to entice this to become a conduit of sediment in a fashion that should rebuild land, the new leadership over the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority plans to emphasize many smaller projects that rebuild discrete locations and augment protection from flooding. This approach minimizes disruption of existing economies and ecosystems.

The Master Plan, devised every six years, provides overall guidance, but annually the CPRA after its Board’s approval must present a list of specific projects for funding by the Legislature. Those selected must be congruent with the direction of the Plan. The roster for fiscal year 2027 contains less spending because the previous main strategy of flowing water diversions was so much more expensive, absent now as the Landry Administration halted that work.

Those invested in the prior approach squawked when the paradigm shift occurred and currently claim they will support the list as long as, in their opinion, it comports to the Plan. But the longstanding problem with the plan extant is how it strays from depoliticized science as its foundation.

The past two plans, both ratified under the Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards Administration, used entirely unrealistic modeling, for example, of exaggerated eustatic sea level rise based upon highly unlikely scenarios. Ensuing research has verified that misfire, and with this as a part of growing evidence that hyperventilated claims have no evidentiary or theoretical backing even acolytes of the ideology behind that “science,” catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, are losing faith.

Garbage in, garbage out, so that makes the Plan’s focus suspect. Thus, it’s wise for CPRA leadership to rein in the vastly expensive projects and concentrate on smaller, more protective ones in light of the fact that the larger were formulated with apocalyptic scenarios given credence as a significant possibility, which only wastes money by an overexaggerated approach.

But the real work remains with the next iteration of the Plan returning to a more science-based approach free of ideology. Work on it already has started with a series of public solicitations and more planned.

Coming up with a plan based on realistic assumptions will serve taxpayers better and target better the right interventions to prevent coastal land loss and to protect vulnerable populations from natural disasters. That will be a welcome change, and while the Landry Administration is doing the best it can to compensate for past mistakes, there’s no substitute for having the correct foundation in place by which to make project decisions.

LA housing policy needs quick corrective shift

Louisiana needs to pick up the pace in transforming its housing provision strategy, which spends hundreds of millions of dollars annually, due to a major programmatic shift at the national level.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recently announced a retreat from allowing a near-purist “housing first” methodology by introducing more elements of a “treatment first” model. Housing first concentrates funding on provision of housing as quickly and as permanently as possible, while treatment first seeks to address potential health and behavioral issues prior to access to permanent housing.

Ideally, dosages of both approaches would be applied, with the housing model focused mainly on temporary rental and other assistance with government-financed residence construction as a last resort, but subordinate to the treatment model because the central cause of homelessness, for the nondisabled population, is from behavioral problems often stemming from mental health issues. Indeed, just over three-quarters of the adult homeless population has such issues, the large majority stemming from alcohol and drug abuse.

LA library boards need to exercise ratified power

Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court and Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, clarity now exists (although perhaps requiring a confirmatory future Court opinion) for Louisiana library boards of control in what they can regulate as content in their parish libraries. It’s now up to them to act.

This week, the Court denied a hearing of Little v. Llano Co., ratifying the Fifth Circuit’s ruling. Llano County’s (TX) library commission had removed several books from circulation that it found unworthy of backing with public dollars, prompting a few aggrieved residents to sue on First Amendment grounds.

The Fifth Circuit made quick work of that ridiculous argument. It said the amendment had no historical and intended basis of giving an individual the right to demand that taxpayer dollars be spent on or the judgment of public servants conform to putting into circulation a certain book. If people in a jurisdiction wanted a different outcome, they should elect officials that, in exercising the power of their offices or in delegation of those, who would select those books.

Deshae Elizabeth Lott Sadow, 1971-2025

Some readers already know of this. I was hesitant to alert all of you because publicizing obituaries or funerals in particular can end up, as I have witnessed, as instruments of distraction from the rendering of a person's life and character. But among people I know more than in an incidental way who have had an impact on the political world, from great to small, I have published reflections on their lives, which included my father and mother who were on the smaller side in impact. Thus, by that metric I can't exclude Deshae, who served for (basically) two-and-a-half years on the Louisiana Developmental Disabilities Council and had very definitive policy preferences about how the state interacts with its people with disabilities -- opinions that have been reflected in posts here from time to time and which I may give a fuller airing in the future here and in other channels -- as well as had other strong political views unrelated to that.

Do not feel sorrow for me. Save that for the fact we have lost such a remarkable person and that the world is poorer for everybody without her among us. The first two links above will tell you why, which I encourage all readers to review.

Birthright case could increase LA GOP legislators

Maybe Republican former Sen. David Vitter was right, and if Louisiana causes one momentum-shifting constitutional case outcome, it might get caught up with another that would cause changes in its state legislature just as politically consequential.

Any day now the U.S. Supreme Court could rule on Callais v. Louisiana, which could declare that reapportionment of legislative districts becomes too race-conscious if drawing maps to reflect roughly a proportion of a jurisdiction’s minority population onto its proportion of majority-minority seats of that minority. That would mean for Louisiana’s congressional map its Legislature could draw a plan that favors the election of five Republicans and one Democrat, as opposed to the current map that has produced two Democrats.

Such a decision would leave current legislative maps with slight Republican supermajorities in stasis. Nairne v. Landry currently challenges the two chamber maps but using the same logic contested in Callais. If the Court rules as expected to negate the use of race in such an intrusive fashion, the complaint in Nairne vanishes.