While supporters of the effort to create a breakaway municipality have been furiously trying to collect the necessary 18,000 signatures to get their secessionist movement on a ballot next year, Baton Rouge’s business leaders and power brokers have been working behind the scenes to map out an opposition strategy.
The week before Thanksgiving, leaders of the business community—including top brass from BRAC, BRAF and the mayor’s office—huddled privately to brainstorm and discuss fundraising for the movement opposing the creation of the city St. George.
In a carefully choreographed move 10 days later, BRAC selectively released to the state’s two major dailies an embargoed copy of an economic impact report it had jointly commissioned with BRAF. The result was that on Dec. 1—when people were still in Thanksgiving mode and had leisure time to curl up by the fire with a thick, Sunday paper (or website)—The Advocate and NOLA.com both ran lengthy stories detailing the economic havoc a city of St. George would wreak on the parish.
The battle to save Baton Rouge is on. What comes next is unclear. Sources familiar with opposition machinations say fundraising is the top priority, as the city’s business elite work to mount an all-out media blitz that will attempt to educate the populace about the potential pitfalls if St. George goes rogue.
But it will take more than money, power and scare tactics to keep Humpty Dumpty together. Indeed, such a strategy may well backfire. Even if everything the opposition says is true in the speeches, news stories and TV ads that are sure to come, the St. George folks—the only ones able to decide this issue—are likely to dig in their heels even deeper when confronted with a campaign funded by the city’s elite that tells them how they should feel.
St. George organizer Norman Browning advised me that he told The Advocate, “These are the … very same people that pulled together and supported CATS, who told us we’d get a loop in Baton Rouge for traffic. … These are the same leaders who keep saying we need better education but haven’t done anything to bring better education to Baton Rouge.”
It’s pretty clear the St. George folks have had enough of the city’s ruling class. They are fed up and feel disenfranchised, passionate and motivated. More importantly, they are tired of being ignored, overlooked and marginalized by what they perceive to be the closed, paternalistic and patronizing good-ole-boys network that determines so much of what happens in Baton Rouge.
And they do not scare easily.
So how do you fashion a campaign message that can reach such a motivated, energized base, particularly one that harbors a serious grudge? How do you make them care about the greater good of a city for which they no longer have any use and that they don’t feel part of?
It is one of the many vexing issues the opposition is dealing with, and there is no easy answer. But for starters, here are my suggestions for those who would save Baton Rouge from decimation: Don’t embark on what is one of the most critical undertakings in the city’s history using a cloak-and-dagger approach. That’s so Baton Rouge. Anyone paying any attention knows who’s involved and who’s calling the shots.
Don’t invite three dozen business leaders to a closed-door strategy session and expect them to stay mum. Don’t insist there is no one behind the curtain and then breathe fire at whoever pulls the curtain back.
Instead, be conciliatory, empathetic and transparent about who is orchestrating the strategy, what motivates them and why. We can handle it. And we’re not blind to what’s at stake.
Such a move could be the first step toward engendering trust among those who have lost faith in the city and see no reason to remain a part of it.
