Quick vote: In a meeting that lasted about three minutes, the East Baton Rouge Parish Metro Council on Tuesday unanimously approved with a 9-0 vote the $880 million 2016 budget proposed by Mayor Kip Holden. The budget includes funding upgrades to several public safety agencies, including the district attorney and coroner’s offices, and a $10 million increase in the capital projects fund from the 2015 budget. The approval came after council members met several times to sift through and discuss the 544-page budget. After the council approved the budget, Holden thanked members for working with him and putting aside some differences to push the budget through. Council members Ronnie Edwards, Chauna Banks-Daniel and Ryan Heck were absent from the meeting. The budget goes into effect on Jan. 1
Milestone: Raising Cane’s will celebrate the opening of its 250th restaurant Thursday with simultaneous openings in Lake Jackson, Texas, and Midwest City, Oklahoma. Those new restaurants—in addition to 37 other stores in California, Arkansas and Kuwait that opened in 2015—will push the Baton Rouge-based company across the 250-locations mark ahead of its 20th anniversary in 2016, Raising Cane’s announced in a news release. “We are so excited to reach this milestone and continue to fulfill our vision to grow restaurants around the world,” Raising Cane’s founder and CEO Todd Graves says in a prepared statement. “It seems like just yesterday that we were working 20-hour days at the original Cane’s on Highland and I couldn’t be more appreciative of our crew, our customers and our communities.”
Prioritizing safety: Gov.-elect John Bel Edwards on Tuesday told Interior Secretary Sally Jewell in a letter that he vigorously opposes the “one-size-fits-all” safety requirements proposed by the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. Edwards says the proposed rule could threaten drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and that it “would also hamper innovation, therefore delaying implementation of new technologies that could further improve safety.” Edwards touted how he worked, while a state representative, to end the drilling moratorium after the 2010 BP Oil Spill, and cautioned that the new safety regulations could implement a “de facto drilling moratorium.” Many in the oil and gas industry feared prior to the election that an Edwards victory would further weaken the industry after several oil and gas groups endorsed U.S. Sen. David Vitter in the race.
