In his latest column, Business Report Publisher Rolfe McCollister characterizes the rehiring of former Baton Rouge DPW Director Fred Raiford as a “step backward and in the wrong direction,” and questions whether the mayor’s choice for director of transportation and drainage—who left his previous job over an unspecified personnel matter—was properly vetted.
McCollister recalls a 2013 column he wrote about the city-parish’s traffic issues titled “Reaping what we sow” that noted, ‘We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.’ If we are ever to come to grips with our traffic problem in Baton Rouge, we need new thinking and a resolve to make the tough decisions to turn this thing around.”
Flash forward about four years later, and McCollister says it appears Mayor Sharon Weston Broome and her administration seem to have reverted to the “same thinking” by hiring as director of transportation and drainage the very person who helped create the city-parish’s traffic problems: Raiford.
“That is a step backward and in the wrong direction,” he writes. “Raiford was the ‘king of potholes’ and loved to take calls on the radio and then personally go out onsite to see them fixed. Folks loved that, and Raiford did, too—as our real problems worsened. I am convinced he thought adding a right-turn lane could solve any problem. (Wrong.) He never met a dogleg he didn’t like, which just created more traffic but solved the politics.”
In short, McCollister says he’s disappointed.
“As I wrote in my column four years ago, ‘We have always been behind the curve and playing catch-up due to lack of courage and political will,’” he says.
McCollister also questions whether Raiford was property vetted or allowed to slip through the cracks like Troy Bell, Broome’s former chief administrative officer who resigned one week into the job after it was reported he apparently lied on his résumé. Eight years ago, Raiford went to work as a top administrator for the City of Walker until his sudden recent resignation that apparently involved an unspecified personnel matter.
“I wonder if anyone at City Hall checked with Walker Mayor Jimmy Watson about why Raiford resigned so abruptly as the city’s chief of staff?” writes McCollister, who posed the question to Watson himself. Watson, who complimented Raiford on his job, said, “This was a personnel matter we couldn’t resolve. … This is all I have been advised to say.”
McCollister concludes that Raiford likely is not capable of the kind of thinking needed to solve Baton Rouge’s traffic woes. “Let’s refocus on the traffic mess we are in every morning and afternoon—and the water that floods our streets—and ask, like Einstein, ‘Can we solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them?’ Does our new head of traffic and drainage, Raiford, think any different now? I think not.”
Also in his column, McCollister says he’s working with legislators to get a legislative bill passed this session to clean up the embattled East Baton Rouge Council on Aging. The bill would restructure COA board appointments instead of allowing the current board to appoint its own membership—accountable to no one.
“There are some talented people on the EBRCOA board,” McCollister writes, “but the system is not working and needs a reset—and strong accountability to the public and taxpayers.”
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