Pockets of Prosperity in Struggling City-Parish

For years, there have been well-justified complaining that too much of our state budget is tied up in so-called dedicated funds. This is money locked up by the Louisiana Constitution or state statutes, which can only be used for certain specified purposes — not necessarily for what the greatest needs in the state may be.

Of course, dedicated funds don’t happen by accident. Legislators in one four-year term want to protect certain money from the whims of future legislators. So they pass a law.

Dedicated funds can be good or bad but they have one thing in common. A judgment is made in the present on how money will be spent in the future.

Why doesn’t the legislature simply undedicate all these funds? Well, that, my friend, is easy to say and very difficult to do!
The same political forces that got the funds dedicated emerge anytime a reform is proposed. Those who want to “reform” the system almost always lose and often quite justifiably. One example is dedicated funds for law enforcement supplemental pay. A legislator may talk big about repealing it and even offer a bill to do so. But when 400 of your local policemen and sheriff’s deputies show up at the Capitol for the committee hearing on the bill, even the author is likely to vote against his own bill — just to show how sincerely he regrets such a grave error!

However, the problem of dedicated funds is not confined to state government. It is just as bad, maybe worse, at the local level here in East Baton Rouge Parish.

The City-Parish doesn’t do much well and it does many things poorly but one thing it is good at is squandering money. You would think we would see something from the money they squander but in fact we see little.

Where is the money that should be spent on cleaning up the city of Baton Rouge which is overwhelmed by litter and blighted houses? Where is the money to tear down houses that were flooded and never repaired, which now sit empty and rotting?

Most people agree we need more roads, bridges, and drainage. South of Florida Boulevard, it’s impossible to go anywhere during much of the day because our roads are jammed beyond capacity. We see rural bridges closed because they are unsafe. Then we watch those bridges stay closed for months awaiting money to repair them.

We saw historic flooding last August, and we see “ordinary” flooding quite often. Sometimes it is because the money was never spent to build projects that were and continue to be desperately needed.

So we have a City-Parish government with a huge annual budget. Yet, much of the money is wasted. So the City-Parish is always short on money.

However, on the other side of the coin, local government in this parish has “pockets of prosperity.” These are governmental agencies that seem to defy the law of gravity.

The City-Parish government may be struggling and unable to fund even the basics. Yet, these entities always seem to have plenty of money. They are flush with cash and have huge fund balances. Their employees are well paid, have top benefits, and get plenty of time off. Moreover, these entities are always building and adding more and more and more. They are indeed “pockets of prosperity” in a sea of hurt.

Two of these entities are BREC and the Library Board.

Sometimes their arrogance gets away from them, such as when the Library Board decided to tear down a perfectly good library downtown and build another in its place.

Or BREC, which proposed tearing down the Baton Rouge Zoo, located in North Baton Rouge, and moving it somewhere close to the extreme southern border of the parish at the Iberville Parish line.
BREC has more than $100 million in surplus. Yet, its funds, like those of the Library Board, are never subjected to the City-Parish budget process. They are their own fiefdoms.

Some of our City-Parish Council members and state legislators should sit down and come up with a plan to require those two boards to come to their senses and pay part of their largess to the City-Parish as their share of the roads, bridges, and drainage which serve these entities.

While making these plans, let’s add CATS and the Council on Aging to our list of “pockets of prosperity” that need to share in paying for roads, bridges, and drainage.