BusinessReport.com

THE PARTICIPANTS

Dyke Nelson Principal/COO, Chenevert Architects

Brent Bruser Retired bank executive

Roy Fletcher Political consultant, Fletcher Communications

Henry Martinez Mayor, City of Zachary

Chad Ortte Agent, Donnie Jarreau Real Estate

Heather Savoy Co-owner, Privé

Voters dashed Mayor Kip Holden’s $989 million bond issue on Nov. 4 by a margin of 3,071 votes. While the defeat puts the bond proposition’s drainage, prison, fire and safety and traffic improvements on hold, it also brings to a halt the economic development incentives and programs, including the Baton Rouge Area Foundation’s pet project, Audubon Alive.

Despite that voters won’t revisit the issue until it is eligible for the ballot in fall 2009, the bond’s failure still has residents talking about the effects the national economic crisis, regionalism [or the lack thereof] and the age gap among Baton Rouge residents had on the result.

Dyke Nelson, a principal and the COO of Chenevert Architects; Brent Bruser, a retired bank executive; Roy Fletcher, a political consultant and owner of Fletcher Communications; Zachary Mayor Henry Martinez; Chad Ortte, an agent with Donnie Jarreau Real Estate; and Heather Savoy, a co-owner of Privé sat down with Business Report to discuss the bond issue, and what its failure says about the priorities of East Baton Rouge Parish.

Question: There are a number of reasons that may have affected the bond’s failure. What was the ultimate factor in your vote for or against it?

Bruser: The Alive component was a huge part of it. Globally, I was watching the market just melt down and felt that it was just irresponsible, almost too irresponsible, for the mayor and those with a vested interest not to elect to defer the vote.

Q: What part of it did you think was irresponsible?

Bruser: Trying to borrow $1 billion even when the brightest people that our country has right now are still trying to sort it out. It’s like the old saying, ‘You can’t skip good on your way to great.’ And I look at Baton Rouge, everything north of Government Street, and we need a reality check.

Photo by Don Kadair

Bruser

Q: Mayor Martinez, you spoke out against the bond issue because you felt like it left Zachary out of the proposition. What was behind your comments?

Martinez: When you talk about infrastructure, there wasn’t any infrastructure in the plan for Zachary. That wasn’t really it. If you’re going to have a millage, then truly look at the needs of the parish. I don’t want them to develop Zachary. As we grow, as we expand, that’s our future. I don’t want them to build a new city jail facility or police department for the city of Zachary. That’s on our nickel. But on the same token, why should all of the other cities build a new prison for the city of Baton Rouge?

Q: For those of you who live in the city of Baton Rouge, do you think that most Baton Rouge residents understand or agree with Mayor Martinez?

Fletcher: It’s certainly what I’ve seen in polling data. The one thing that clearly comes through in polling data from outside of Baton Rouge is that there’s too much emphasis placed on downtown. And so that makes people in Zachary and in Central feel that you’re not listening, not reacting to what we want to be in our communities.

Q: If and when the bond issue is revisited on the ballot in fall 2009, do you think unbundling the issues would make it successful?

Bruser: I think it would be a more appropriate way to approach the issue and would allow each one of the items to be better understood. I think Alive, kind of embedding it in with prisons, fire stations, a lot of other fine offices for the police department and the sheriff’s department and just embedding that.

Fletcher: Politically, unbundling is a necessity.

Nelson: I think what it did address was supporting a strong downtown, which becomes a center for a community, which begins to draw more young people to come and things like that. That helps to build in an area where our biggest problem is drawing the right kind of workforce. It was a bold step. I actually liked it that way. I thought it made a lot of sense.

Q: When it was announced that the bond issue failed, there was a sense of frustration from people in younger generations that Baton Rouge will never change. Why did the bond issue mean so much to so many people?

Savoy: For me, it was a clear injector into our economic system. It felt to me like it was going to be an opportunity for many rising stars to come up, be involved in economic changes and anybody, an up-and-comer, with a contracting company would have had an opportunity to get involved there. And that was a huge reason it was depressing to the younger sector because we’re ready to start believing in our government.

Q: Forum 35 recently released the results of a survey of their 800 members that revealed that 21% are planning to leave Baton Rouge in the next four years, taking an average salary of $66,000 a year with them. Do you think the bond issue’s failure was another reason for them to leave?

Photo by Don Kadair

Nelson

Fletcher: The problem is that you have a situation where there are a group of young professionals that want to change our city and our parish. But if you’re going to do it, you’re going to have to respect those people that are here that are also paying taxes and that have been paying taxes for a long time in the city that don’t necessarily trust the government that they have.

Q: Let’s say the bond issue is broken up when it is put on the ballot in the future. Does anyone here think that Alive, the parking structures or any of the economic development projects could pass?

Fletcher: I don’t.

Savoy: When you go back to the general mentality of our parish, it is no tax is a good tax. So if they are going to pass one that would have been the part of it that would have passed, it’s not the economic development part—even though I thought that was an extremely beneficial part of it.

Fletcher: And 48% agree with you, by the way, which is pretty amazing.

Ortte: I think there were about $64 billion in bonds that were on the ballots in the country; $52 billion of them passed. We represented $1 billion of them that didn’t pass. This was the perfect opportunity to pass this stimulus to keep us going. I can’t imagine that the actual taxing and the millage were going to hurt anybody drastically to where they couldn’t survive. And Mayor, to your comment about Zachary having concerns about how it helps and it doesn’t help, I think the saying is true that a rising tide lifts all boats.

Bruser: I hope you’re right. I was here in the 1980s. If we do enter into a deep and severe recession, that question hasn’t been answered. You haven’t seen bad times. And the young professionals here wanting open-air dining, not a one of them has seen bad times. I don’t know how old you were in 1988.

Photo by Don Kadair

Ortte

Ortte: That’s probably how I should have started the conversation. I am 26 and I’m from Lafayette, and all I’ve heard all my life is you’ve never seen bad times. So believe me, I may not have experienced it, but I know the stories.

Nelson: How does that change the idea that new money coming into our economy is now a bad thing? Beating the bond issue isn’t going to help us get through any economic downturn.

Fletcher: It is not so much that it would affect the pocketbook terribly adversely. But any time you have an economic downturn, it is going to affect the politics. Just look at the presidential election.

Martinez: Do you think he [Holden] had that taken care of with his loop proposal?

Fletcher: No, I don’t. I think he thought he could pass whatever he wanted to in this situation because of high voter turnout, and he was almost right.

Q: One of the things Baton Rouge has been doing to learn from other economic models across the country is to promote the Baton Rouge Area Chamber trips to places like Portland, Ore., and Richmond, Va. Do you think the failure of the bond issue is in line with achieving those goals?

Martinez: First, I think we have to identify community character. Are we like Richmond or Portland? Are the characters in our city like that? Or is that what you’re trying to change, not only the character of our city, but also the characters in our city? Different parts of the region of the country feel different ways.

Fletcher: Maybe people don’t want to be like Portland. Maybe that’s just the bottom line.

Q: What if we’re talking about Richmond, which is a more socially conservative city?

Savoy: Is there a thriving city that we’d want to model ourselves on that doesn’t have a thriving downtown? It seems to me that they are synonymous — a thriving downtown and successful city model, outlying areas benefiting from the process.

Nelson: I think the models that work are those that build into the center of the city rather than the city building out. That’s generally what happens.

Bruser: It is remarkable what has happened to this city. It may be one of the most successful urban development programs in this country.

Nelson: I don’t think anybody wants Baton Rouge to be any of those cities. I think that gets said a lot. We certainly don’t want to be like Portland. The point being that they learn from them. I think that that no one is going to leave because of it, and the big issue was that the bond issue was a symbol. It said something to the young people, the same way the downtown library was a symbol, in that we’re getting behind this and we support it and then it doesn’t happen. And it’s the same thing, they get behind it and it doesn’t happen.

Q: So how do you bridge the gap between the baby boomers and those young professionals who are caught between conservative prudence and the desire for instant change?

Photo by Don Kadair

Martinez

Fletcher: You’ve got to learn what it takes to do anything in the parish, and there is the older vs. the younger that has to be bridged, but it is also the city vs. the rest of the parish. Anything that is in the parish has to be cognizant of that which is outside of the city. And that has been a basic division within the parish for a long time. And you can see how that works out with the mayors of the past who were typically from north Baton Rouge.

Q: How do you approach the argument that the total revenue generated from the projects in the city of Baton Rouge would have been distributed later in projects throughout the rest of the parish?

Fletcher: That’s tangential. People don’t look at that broad kind of thing. They look at specific kinds of things. Am I getting a four-lane road from Zachary to Baton Rouge? Am I getting College Drive done in a way that I don’t have to sit in traffic for eight hours at noon?

Q: So is that how you bridge the generation gap to build a coalition?

Fletcher: Yeah.

Ortte: I live in the Garden District and I don’t ever have a problem going anywhere I need to go. It takes me five minutes to get downtown, to Coursey. I don’t have a traffic problem, although I do know that everyone else may have one.

Nelson: The mentality is more global vs. more specific. I think Chad’s example is a great example. I think his specific issue is that he has gridded streets, and he can navigate that very easy. But we’ve made 30 years of decisions about my neighborhood needs a cul-de-sac here and that’s how we’ve made our decisions, and that built the current traffic situation.

Fletcher: The only problem is: How do you get the global done if you don’t get the local done? And that’s the way you put together a coalition.

Ortte: I think to get it done you have to have a coalition of people that support it.

Q: So for those people in the outlying areas, do they not benefit at all from anything in the bond proposal? They don’t benefit from anything as simple even as the light synchronization when they come into town?

Martinez: You’re assuming that they want to come in to go to the mall. Ask those people why they don’t want to. They don’t want to come to Baton Rouge because of all the issues that they got—the traffic and the people. And a lot of them don’t like the people in Baton Rouge. We’re about to put a farmer’s market in Zachary. I said, ‘Baton Rouge is doing it.’ And they said, ‘You don’t understand, not everybody wants to go to Baton Rouge.’

Ortte: Do you think their kids are going to live in Zachary for their entire lives? Or do you think their kids will probably want to live in Baton Rouge?

Martinez: Communities like Zachary send a signal to their young people that we don’t want you to live here. How can a young person get out of college and afford 80 mills of property tax and out of the city, 3.97 mills.

Photo by Don Kadair

Fletcher

Q: So let me ask something to clarify what you just said. Zachary wants to charge enough to keep young people out of Zachary and wants them to move into Baton Rouge, where they’ve not been willing to pay into the city? How does that translate? They say we’ll raise you here in our city and we’re willing to pay those taxes, but we’re not willing to pay the taxes that will benefit you when you get older and go into the city to get a job?

Martinez: I think the leadership of Zachary sent this message without knowing it, because they can’t afford it.

Nelson: Is there an opportunity for people to come in and have a small roundtable like this and talk about it? A true dialogue about these issues? We all want the same things. It is just a different avenue to get there. All these things could be passed.

Fletcher: That is if everybody gets something out of the deal.

Q: So how do you craft the message so that everyone knows what they’re getting?

Martinez: If it is going to be for the parish, then show the parish the benefits. Bring together a parish coalition. It is very simple.