Myers as mayor: Improve property tax collection

In attending Metro Council meetings the past six months, Steve Myers says he kept waiting for a highly qualified candidate to enter the mayoral race. “But nobody else stepped up,” says Myers, co-founder of Tiger Rag and a real estate broker who last year set out to organize the Baton Rouge Independent Landlords Organization. Just before the deadline late Friday, Myers qualified to run in the mayoral race on the Nov. 6 ballot. He faces incumbent Mayor Kip Holden, term-limited Metro Councilman Mike Walker, and Garden District businessman Gordon Mese, whose campaign slogan is “Mese Against the Machine.” Myers says he believes Walker and Holden will cancel each other out in voters’ minds with their increasingly nasty rhetoric. He also figures that the absence of a campaign presence before Friday may work in his favor, leaving him looking like a fresh alternative. “My goal is to be a good candidate,” Myers says. Besides crime and traffic, Myers says he would focus on eliminating traffic-cameras as mayor. “These things were set up by these companies to rip off the public,” he says. Myers would also overhaul the city-parish Assessor’s Office, which he says lets too many houses go underassessed. He’d also push to increase Metro Council members’ pay to $3,000 a month, noting the long hours. This is Myers’ first run for the mayor’s office. In the 1990s he ran unsuccessfully for state and federal representative seats and for membership on the school board. —Adam Pearson