As Mayor Sharon Weston Broome tries to sell a new 5-mill property tax for transportation projects that’s similar to last year’s failed Green Light Plan ll proposal, Business Report Publisher Rolfe McCollister says the details of where the money would be spent will be most important to voters and Metro Council members—who must approve putting it on the November ballot.
“But success the second time around may not depend on how many TV commercials or ads run, paid for by engineers and contractors, that will tell citizens how voting ‘yes’ will make all the traffic go away,” McCollister writes in his latest column. “Many are predicting other factors could spell trouble for the tax.”
First, McCollister says, the public is angry at the lack of performance of government in general—from Baton Rouge to Washington, D.C.—and most feel they pay enough taxes. Second, he asks, how do we know this plan will fix our traffic woes?
“The city-parish government has let politics—and dimwits—screw up our master plan and street grid for decades, while offering little more than excuses,” he writes. “Now they want us to pay for their mistakes and misdeeds.”
He is critical of Transportation and Drainage Director Fred Raiford for his comments on traffic signal synchronization to The Advocate, where he said, “I don’t know why we didn’t do this sooner.” McCollister points out that Raiford was in city-parish government for decades and headed DPW—and now he is back in charge to fix the problem.
McCollister also believes there will be some factors affecting the vote that have nothing to do with traffic woes.
“Voters often make a decision based on emotions, and emotions are running high. Matters that loom large include the EBR Council on Aging fiasco, where many taxpayers feel they got screwed after passing a new $8 million property tax—and the mayor and seven members of the Metro Council did nothing to fix it,” he says, adding the recent retirement of Police Chief Carl Dabadie may also have an impact.
Also in his new column, McCollister notes that with Baton Rouge’s growth over the past 10 to 15 years has come the need for more roads and services—but it also generated more tax dollars.
“I looked back at city-parish budget totals and found the total budget in 2003 was $529 million versus a 2017 total of $887 million—a 67.7% increase over 14 years,” he writes. “But what about inflation? Well, the inflation calculator says $529 million would be $703 million today, and that would assume every city-parish employee got a raise annually to keep up with inflation and every product and service bought increased as well.”
Regardless McCollister says, even at $703 million, that equals a net increase of $184 million a year spent by government.
“On what? That’s a 26.2% increase over inflation. Did we grow that much in size? Well, U.S. Census data says the parish population was 411,473 in 2003 and 446,753 in 2015 (35,000 more people, or an 8.6% increase),” he writes. “So our actual increase in city-parish spending (adjusted for inflation) was 26.2% for a population increase of only 8.6%. You do the math. Did I miss something?”
Read the full column, in which McCollister also comments on the one-year anniversary of last August’s devastating floods and the upcoming Capital City Restaurant Week on August 14-20. Send your comments to editors@businessreport.com.
