In early February, the East Baton Rouge Redevelopment Authority’s Board of Commissioners decided to cancel its bimonthly meeting—not that anyone much noticed, says Business Report Editor Stephanie Riegel in her latest column.
Board chairman John Noland says there was no point in meeting because the agency “didn’t have any business to tend to.” And that’s the way things have been rolling around the offices of the RDA for more than a year now, says Riegel.
“The board doesn’t have anything to vote on because the agency isn’t doing much of anything,” she writes. “It operates on a shoestring budget and has a staff of just two: interim president Gwenn Hamilton and her assistant.”
Essentially, Noland says, the board is holding the RDA’s place in the community until it can figure out how to get the agency back on sound financial footing, and back in the business of trying to eliminate blight and redevelop impoverished areas of Baton Rouge.
“It has been more than 15 months since things started to fall apart at the RDA. In the fall of 2014, then-President and CEO Walter Monsour began sounding the alarm that the agency was running out of money and needed a permanent source of funding,” she writes. “That didn’t at all sit well with Mayor Kip Holden, who questioned what the RDA had to show for the $600,000 in neighborhood stabilization program grants and 110 adjudicated properties the city had given to the organization several years earlier.”
Holden recently said he hasn’t spoken to anyone at the RDA in months and that no one has come to him asking for anything for the agency.
“When asked if he would consider some sort of mid-year appropriation in the supplemental budget, he said he ‘refuses to engage in hypotheticals,’ writes Riegel. “In other words, this administration is done with the RDA, and it will be up to the next mayor to decide whether the agency can serve a useful function and is worth having around.”
In the meantime, SSA Consultants has been working on a business plan for the RDA. The Baton Rouge Area Foundation commissioned its go-to consulting firm in early 2015 to do what Monsour should have done years ago, Riegel says.
“The plan was supposed to be done by July. Then August. Then by year’s end,” she writes. “Now it’s mid-February and there’s still no plan.”
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