As the East Baton Rouge Parish Registrar of Voters office continues the process of verifying a new batch of 4,630 signatures submitted last week by organizers of the St. George incorporation effort, opponents of the movement this week called into question the validity of more than 200 signatures on the original petition submitted by the incorporation group last October.
Officials with Better Together, which is fighting the incorporation, released a report this week claiming 239 signatures previously validated by the registrar’s office are potentially invalid—either because the signatories did not live in the proposed St. George footprint at the time they signed the petition or were not registered to vote.
According to a statement from Better Together, an analysis of signatures on the original petition suggests 88 signatures are potentially invalid. The group is also questioning the validity of an additional 151 signatures because they do not appear on a list of registered voters that was requested by Better Together at the time the petition was submitted.
“This analysis shows that there are some major problems in the registrar’s validation process,” says M.E. Cormier, a leader with the Better Together campaign.
Aimee Pourciau, an assistant in the registrar’s office—which spent more than five months vetting the signatures on the original petition—says the office is unaware of the complaint and has no comment.
St. George spokesman Lionel Rainey is outraged.
“At some point you’ve got to let the Registrar of Voters do their job and stop interfering in the process,” Rainey says. “Better Together has done everything they possibly can to interfere in the electoral process and prevent this from getting on the ballot. At what point does this become interfering with an election?”
In other registrar office-related news this week, former Metro Councilman Ulysses “Bones” Addison hopes to get back into city government—this time as the next East Baton Rouge Parish Registrar of Voters. Addison, who served three terms on the council from 2001-2012, is among 24 hopefuls who have applied for the position, which longtime Registrar Elaine Lamb is vacating as she retires.
Addison is campaigning for the position and says he has received firm commitments of support from at least two council members, whom he declines to identify. But he says it’s too soon to say he has the seven votes necessary to be appointed to the position, which will pay between $85,000 and $117,000, according to the Council Administrator’s office.
“We talked at length about why he wants to be in that position and why he thinks he’s right for the job; all those good standard interview-type questions,” says Metro Councilman Joel Boé.
When asked if Addison is a frontrunner for the job, Boé says: “To say that he’s in the lead, I’m not sure about that, but I would expect he’s got a decent amount of support among the council.”
Here’s a rundown of some of the other leading local stories making headlines in Daily Report this week:
- Creekstone Companies is back in Baton Rouge federal court in another financial dispute over Juban Crossing, the $350 million, 471-acre shopping development off Interstate 12 in Livingston Parish. The case involves a $6.9 million promissory note Creekstone signed to remove a lien Associated Concrete Contractors of Texas placed on the property over unpaid work.
- National homebuilder D.R. Horton has sold 36 undeveloped lots in The Long Farm that it acquired from developer Russell Mosely in 2013. The price of the lots, which were sold in two separate transactions, was not disclosed. Horton sold 26 of the lots to local custom builder Bardwell Homes, which plans to build homes there priced between $300,000 and $500,000. Horton sold the remaining 10 lots to L.F. Investments I LLC, a partnership of Mosely and developer Hardy Swyres. Mosely says L.F Investments will sell its 10 lots to local custom builders.
- With about 100 employees, 250,000 visitors a year and a roughly $5.5 million operating budget, the Baton Rouge Zoo currently has an annual economic impact of $17.67 million on the local economy, according to a new feasibility study. But the study, prepared by Philadelphia-based Schultz & Williams, also lays out an ambitious vision for a new zoo that could attract over 375,000 visitors each year, generate over $10 million annually from its operating programs and have a $24 million economic impact.
- Baton Rouge businessman John Schneider is leading an effort to bring a Louisiana version of the popular South by Southwest to New Orleans later this year. NX, as the event will be called, is a playoff of SXSW, the abbreviation of the popular Austin festival, and will feature three days of keynote speeches, breakout sessions and workshops focusing on entrepreneurship and technology from around the state.
- In the 12 days since BREC’s City Park golf course introduced FootGolf, a new hybrid game of golf and soccer, 130 people have been out to play—representing about 25% of all players on the course over that span. FootGolf hasn’t drawn as many players to J.S. Clark Park, the only other park at which BREC has launched the new game.
- Neighboring Baton Rouge subdivisions Sherwood Forest and Broadmoor are launching a joint effort to ramp up crime prevention efforts through each neighborhood’s crime prevention and neighborhood improvement district. The two neighborhoods off Florida Boulevard, separated by Sharp Road, contain a combined 5,000 houses that are home to about 15,000 voters. Representatives from both neighborhood crime prevention districts are hosting a press conference and community meeting at 10 a.m. on Saturday at Broadmoor United Methodist Church, 10230 Mollylea Dr.
- The Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge announced this week that it has hired Renee M. Chatelain as its new president and CEO. Chatelain will assume her new role later this summer following a transition period that begins immediately, the nonprofit agency says in a news release. For the past five years Chatelain has been executive director of the Manship Theatre at the Shaw Center in downtown Baton Rouge.
- More than 250 researchers and musicians from around the world gathered this week on LSU’s flagship campus in Baton Rouge for an international conference focused on human-computer interaction and how it affects musical performances. The four-day conference is called the New Interfaces for Musical Expression, or NIME, and it attracts musicians, tech professionals and others from the digital-cultural sphere. In recent years, the conference has been held in London and Seoul, South Korea.
- Baton Rouge brothers Danny and Kevin Landry hope recently obtained approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly drones legally for commercial use will help their fledging aerial photography business take off. The Landrys founded LandBros Aerial Photography in 2014, and they say their company is the first in Louisiana to obtain an exemption from the FAA for commercial drone use.
- For the second time in several weeks, state Treasurer John Kennedy wondered aloud this week whether some of the 11 House-passed bills that are expected to raise roughly $615 million annually via tax hikes were approved constitutionally. Speaking to the Press Club of Baton Rouge, Kennedy said the bills that now are before Senate committees have an “excellent chance” of being declared unconstitutional if challenged in court.
—Steve Sanoski
