Business Report’s recent cover story “Blight Rouge” would be funny if it weren’t so sad, says Publisher Rolfe McCollister in his latest column.
“Some might say there are bigger issues than trash in our parish, but I would argue, if you can’t even clean up your town, what chance do you really have of solving bigger issues?” McCollister says. “And why are some folks such slobs—and why do we mostly tolerate it? Do we not notice—or is it we just don’t care?”
This isn’t the first time McCollister has addressed Baton Rouge’s ongoing problem with blight and trash. He points to a column in the summer of 2009 about the city’s trash and abandoned signs littering roadsides.
At the time, he wrote, “The mayor’s [Kip Holden] ‘war on litter and trash’ must include rusting and abandoned signs in our city. If a business is going to have a sign in front of it, the sign should be maintained. If the business leaves or closes, the landlord should cover the sign or remove it.”
This is about responsibility, McCollister says. “It may be on your property, but everyone else has to look at it—and the community must have standards for all to abide by,” he wrote in 2009. “If you chose to have a sign, use it or lose it. The rest of us don’t want to look at your trash.”
Mayor Sharon Weston Broome says she wants to clean up blight and has a task force working on the issue, McCollister notes in his latest column. As detailed in “Blight Rouge,” Broome and the committee have indicated the city-parish could start with removing abandoned signs from nine years ago—most of which are still here and illegally placed.
“I am happy to say something finally has been done in regards to the temporary signs we wrote about,” McCollister writes. “The Metro Council on Feb. 28 unanimously passed an ordinance, co-sponsored by councilmen Matt Watson and Dwight Hudson, raising fines to $200 to $1,000 dollars—or six months in jail.”
Under the new law, no one has to catch you in the act. If you print it, you’re responsible for it, McCollister says. That’s something Councilman Buddy Amoroso has said the city should have done a long time ago.
“Damn right. Royal Furniture is having its ‘going out of business sale’ for the next two months and has littered the city’s roadsides with signs,” McCollister writes. “If the city would pick-up 50 of these illegal signs at the new $200 per sign fine, they could collect $10,000 for the city-parish budget. That’s real money. Just do it.”
Read the full column, in which McCollister also explains why he opposes the expansion of Louisiana’s gaming industry. Send your comments to editor@businessreport.com.
