Baton Rouge is embracing a life of self-absorption and isolationism, declares Business Report Executive Editor JR Ball in his latest column, “Call it the #MeOnly movement.”
This phenomenon sweeping the city-parish was reinforced while reading Metro Councilman Matt Watson’s comments in Business Report’s current cover story on the rising popularity of neighborhood crime prevention districts.
Told the city-parish could raise nearly $19 million for police raises if every property owner paid the average annual crime district fee of $100, Watson—who last year floated a dedicated property tax to raise $14 million for raises—essentially said it’s not gonna happen.
“Why?” Ball asks. “Because, as Watson explains, people will pay taxes that directly benefit them but aren’t so keen on ponying up for the benefit of others. He’s right.”
Special taxing districts and independent taxing authorities are so popular in East Baton Rouge Parish because small groups of people get together on off-date elections to make sure the stuff they care about gets incredibly well funded.
“As for the other stuff, like a functioning street grid … or a highly paid police force? Those are someone else’s problems,” he writes. “There’s exactly zero evidence these crime prevention districts do anything to actually reduce crime, but residents in 27 districts spread across the parish are willing to self-tax themselves as much as $500 per year just to feel safer than the rest of us.”
Ball isn’t suggesting the “me first” doctrine is unique to Baton Rouge. He says it’s a mindset sprawling across the country.
“What we’ve got here is a roux of isolation,” Ball says. “Combining our centuries-old racial divide with the school desegregation white flight of the 1970s and ’80s, an exorbitant fear of crime and an East Baton Rouge Parish population that’s essentially 50-50 black-white, according to the Census Bureau. Pour that over a parish torn between conservatism and liberalism as well as an African-American population loudly demanding to be heard and the result is a very spicy gumbo of division, isolation and self-interest.”
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