Goodbye rancid 2025, hello new site in 2026

A big change is coming to this blog. After just on 21 years almost exclusively on what now is Google’s Blogger, starting Jan. 2 it will be cross-posted on Substack.

Some readers already have experienced this. Those of you who also subscribe to my Bossier Views blog on Substack know this. Since mid-2022 any post that has relevance to politics within Bossier Parish has been posted here and there.

I’m doing this because the Substack formatting is easier for viewers to access, search, and likely to read. I suspect it’s also easier for indexing and subscribing, even as the audience for Bossier politics is much smaller theoretically than for Louisiana politics, it has collected almost as many subscribers as there are followers on my Twitter feed, which posts links to each entry here as they are published. In the future, it will post links to entries at the Substack site (see the bottom of this post).

Landry, LA score first with Trump grant reforms

While it was the Republican Gov. Jeff Landry Administration that won the footrace in rolling out high-speed Internet access in all of Louisiana, give the Republican Pres. Donald Trump Administration an assist.

Regarding the Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment program intended to bring this connectivity across the country stuffed into one of the many spending bills forced through Congress by Trump’s Democrat predecessor, in November Louisiana announced it was the first state to receive approval of its plan. At the time, the Trump Administration attributed this milestone to the “state broadband office’s efforts to rein in excessive costs, use diverse technologies, and collaborate effectively with the private sector demonstrate the Benefit of the Bargain reforms in action.”

Key to that alacrity was the referenced reforms. The original program, the intent of which already was becoming stale because about 99 percent of households had high-speed access by 2021, featured stipulations created by Democrats that made it more of a handout on the basis of politicized considerations, with rules giving liberal special interests and states run by those ideologues the ability to direct the money to favored groups, to subsidize favored delivery systems, and to increase the ability to regulate the Internet.

Back to basics can resolve BR constable crunch

The controversy over funding for the Baton Rouge city constable’s office provides yet another example of how this kind of office can suffer bloat that uses public dollars inefficiently while straying from its intended functions.

Recently, the Metropolitan Council passed the city-parish’s 2026 budget that bit the bullet. In the wake of the failure of amendments to the consolidated government’s plan of government that reconfigured revenue streams to ease a cash crunch. Republican Mayor-President Sid Edwards declared there must be cuts across the board except for public safety, chopping 11 percent from most although he more than doubled that for his own office. Caught up in those cuts was over $400,000 to the city constable’s office, of which about two-thirds funded by the city-parish’s general fund that foots salaries for 48 deputy constables and with the remainder from a small state pay contribution and self-generated revenues as specified in law, which leaves the total revenues budgeted for the year at about $3.4 million.

Democrat Constable Terrica Williams – the plan sets up this as a separately-elected office – complained about that, requesting that nearly $500,000 be added back to fund the six positions she has to provide security for court proceedings. Under statute, constables provide that for their appropriate associated courts, in this instance Baton Rouge City Court. For the last few years, the city reimbursed for that. However, short on funds Edwards and the Council turned that down. This has left Williams scrambling to fulfill that function in 2026, and presently her office and the city are trying to work something out.

Rate hikes to compel Monroe to more efficiency

The day of reckoning has come for Monroe water, sewerage, and waste customers, with hopefully the delay induced by a penny-wise, pound-foolish City Council majority won’t end up costing ratepayers over time more than the amount of money they were able to retain over the past year.

At its last meeting of the year, councilors sent out a warning that customers of city water, sewerage, and water services could expect to see a rate hike by May. Democrat Chairman Rodney McFarland likened the increase to halt a “kicking the can down the road” on rates and said he would vote for whatever the independent Mayor Friday Ellis Administration determined was necessary. While it’s good practice to ensure these services pay for themselves and leave a healthy balance in reserve for future needs, practically speaking the fund can’t go too low because of stipulations attached to bonds issued for capital items, and as well as the lower the reserve, the higher interest rates on bonds issued will be. Indeed, existing debt was dropped two notches in quality by one of the big ratings firms because of this repeal.

It was a remarkable turnaround for McFarland, who along with fellow Democrats Verbon Muhammad and Juanita Woods blew up the mechanism that would increase rates in line with inflation. Previously, the city had an ordinance with that escalator clause to back the bonds but not long after McFarland and Muhammad joined the Council, they repealed that, saying they should look at this on a periodic basis and not forced into anything. Early this year they did take a gander and kicked the can down the road by denying an Ellis request to move rates higher by 2.7 percent.

Christmas, 2025

This column publishes every Sunday through Thursday around noon U.S. Central Time (maybe even after sundown on busy days, or maybe before noon if things work out, or even sometimes on the weekend if there's big news) except whenever a significant national holiday falls on the Monday through Friday associated with the otherwise-usual publication on the previous day (unless it is Easter, Thanksgiving Day, Independence Day, Christmas, or New Year's Day when it is the day on which the holiday is observed by the U.S. government). In my opinion, in addition to these are also Memorial Day and Veterans' Day.

With Thursday, Dec. 25 being Christmas Day, I invite you to explore this link.

New panel must move faster to ease water concerns

It goes somewhat against the grain of Louisiana’s history of minimal government interference, but it might be time to for the state to adopt a comprehensive water management policy. And it has the means to do it if it gets to it.

Louisiana’s growing success with attracting data centers has introduced concerns about power and water provision. To date, estimates provided by potential locators have indicated no one of them will cause a shortage of power or produce a spike in costs nor cause a water shortage or even significantly deplete any particular source.

But success breeds success, and if the data centers keep coming, trouble will follow unless local governments decide to cut them off, forgoing tremendous economic development opportunities. While the Louisiana Public Service Commission can plan out the power side of things, an equivalent planning process on the water side has yet to surface.

Lewis on course to serve just one PSC term

Having their poster child arrested on suspicion of drunk driving isn’t exactly what Louisiana Democrats wanted as a holiday present, and his continued controversial behavior threatens to wear out his welcome with party elites and voters.

Democrat Davante Lewis famously defeated long-time incumbent Democrat Lambert Boissiere for the District 3 seat on the Louisiana Public Service Commission in 2022, running an insurgency campaign. Despite starting only in the summer and spending about a quarter of Boissiere, Lewis positioned himself as a “progressive” Democrat and attracted huge out-of-state money to topple Boissiere both in overall fundraising and votes in the ordinarily low-stimulus race. In doing so, he became as well the highest-profile black elected official in state politics.

Lewis won while levying criticism against utilities, claiming his opponent and other PSC members were in the pockets of regulated utilities because they accepted contributions from them that contributed to higher rates, and spouting rhetoric against fossil fuel production over the myth of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. However, his 2023 campaign ethics annual report revealed donations from utilities outside of Louisiana and from entities in the renewable energy business (he has, in contravention with state law, yet to file a 2024 report).

Landry to enter Greenland history books?

So, one day in the future when Greenlandic schoolchildren are studying about their state’s independence will they see a picture of Louisiana Republican Gov. Jeff Landry in their textbooks?

Recently, GOP Pres. Donald Trump appointed Landry special envoy to Greenland. Special envoys are presidential picks, who may or may not be career foreign service employees, for temporary purposes to aid in a specific area of policy involving foreign states. Adding Landry to the roster (which may or may not require Senate confirmation) means the U.S. will have a baker’s dozen of these, most appointed this year by Trump.

It's unclear what exactly Landry’s new portfolio will be. Special envoys can have a day job and Landry certainly will keep his, but this may be a tactic by Trump on his quest to create more U.S. influence over the strategic geographic placement and resources that Greenland has. Trump has spoken of greater U.S. control over the area for security reasons, going so far as to say he would like to see it become part of the U.S.

LPSC makes good change, rejects Trojan Horse

A Louisiana Public Service Commission majority improved the state’s competitive position by streamlining its approval process for large power users while batting away a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Last week, the PSC approved a directive sponsored by Republican Commissioner Jean-Paul Coussan that would cut red tape for such users, as defined by it. This permits quicker approval for projects that feature a minimum 15-year electric-service agreement with a new or expanding customer, confirmation from the Department of Economic Development that the project is a priority, and a user pledge that it will supply half of the revenue to cover at least half of its project’s fixed costs, which typically involves increasing transmission capacity.

Heretofore all requests to the PSC went through a usual process that might take up to two years for vetting. This new one, if the PSC agreed it met these criteria, could take only a third of that time. The Commission majority saw a need for this to expedite these, by definition, massive projects that, by definition, would take longer to get up and running and in the face of pressure from other states bargaining for locating these within their boundaries. By and large, this new procedure applies to data centers that collectively will require multiplicative increases in power over the next decade within the U.S.

Shreveport MPC autonomy debate tempest in teapot

In the background of an important decision made by the Shreveport City Council today is whether it needs the extra layer of bureaucracy that put it in this spot in the first place.

At December’s beginning, the Shreveport Metropolitan Planning Commission registered a tie vote (because of one absence) on whether to grant a special land use permit for a data center in the city’s west. This effectively denied the application, to the consternation of some policy-makers and especially Republican Mayor Tom Arceneaux.

Statute defines and empowers the MPC. Its nine members with six-year staggered terms the mayor appoints with Council approval, all Shreveport residents. It concocts a master plan of zoning and development and must approve changes outside of those parameters. Its budget the Council sets, from which it hires a staff that analyzes proposals and makes recommendations – a staff which had recommended center approval. However, dissenting members said visible public opposition at the meeting had swayed them to reject it.