LSU Associate Law Professor Chris Tyson, in a guest column, writes it’s worthwhile to take a look at some of the underlying anxieties behind the controversy surrounding the city-parish’s BRAVE contracts.
“While Mayor Sharon Weston Broome could have been more proactive in communicating her plans for the remaining BRAVE funds, her internal review is clarifying,” Tyson writes. “According to Broome, the U.S. Department of Justice declined to reauthorize BRAVE because of a history of reporting and compliance deficiencies. In an effort to utilize the remaining grant funds before their Sept. 30 expiration, Broome awarded small contracts for community programming that was originally earmarked under BRAVE but never pursued.”
But, Tyson says, the initial media coverage and public opinion presumed that the BRAVE controversy signaled corruption on the part of the Broome administration.
Most notably, public officials like Councilman Buddy Amoroso—joined by U.S. Sen. John Kennedy and Congressman Garret Graves—called for a legislative audit to determine if Broome was funneling BRAVE funds to her “political friends,” he writes, calling Amoroso’s suspicion “curious.”
East Baton Rouge Parish is 46% black, Tyson says. A 2017 24/7 Wall Street study even notes the city is one of the most segregated in the U.S, and the poverty rate among Baton Rouge’s black community stands at 27%.
“A 2015 J.P. Morgan Chase study found that black businesses have a direct role in stabilizing black communities. This underscores the enormity of the missed opportunities with BRAVE and the severely limited imagination of those who would confine its scope to traditional law enforcement,” Tyson writes. “By employing black community-level businesses to pursue capacity building in vulnerable neighborhoods, we could engage asset-based strategies through equitable economics. … Our claims to want to bridge our racial divide are worthless without a commitment to bolstering minority businesses—specifically their participation in city-parish contracts.”
