Thanks to our buddy Robert Burns from Sound Off, Louisiana!, who actually enjoys going to the Baton Rouge Press Club every Monday and covering the happenings there, we’ve got lots of video from yesterday’s appearance by two of the lead organizers of the St. George movement presenting the case for the incorporation of the new city in the southern part of East Baton Rouge Parish.

The presentation was made by Chris Rials, who works for ExxonMobil, and local attorney Drew Murrell. It opened with a 25-minute video presentation the St. George committee put on its Facebook page in two parts that we can show you…

The presentation is pretty thorough and makes a heck of a good case for the East Baton Rouge city-parish government as a sewer of inefficiency and corruption waiting to be flushed into bankruptcy. The analysis of the Library Control Board’s finances alone is enough to indict the city-parish as a massive waster of taxpayer dollars. It’s fairly obvious St. George doesn’t have a high bar to clear with respect to running a more efficient operation where it comes to city services.

But after the presentation, the questions came. Perhaps that presentation was too long for the attention spans of some of the reporters present. Burns clipped some of the highlights, which are headache-inducing. For example, here was the Advocate’s Rebekah Allen haranguing Rials and Murrell about tax increases for schools, which she says are inevitable…

Of course, a new school district in St. George is years and years away. The petition has to be turned in with the requisite 13,000-odd signatures, then the inevitable dilatory lawsuits have to be disposed of, then the incorporation has to be passed at the ballot box, then a bill must be brought at the Legislature creating the school district and hooking it up to the state’s Minimum Foundation Program, and then a school board must be created and a management team hired. It’s going to take a long while to get all of that done.

Murrell was asked about the signatures, and about who’s funding St. George (it was The Advocate’s Andrea Gallo who asked that one), and you can see his answer here…

Murrell also had little love to share for the city of Baton Rouge with respect to the treatment its political and business leaders have shown the residents of the St. George area…

And here, when Rials started talking about Sandy Springs, the suburban Atlanta city which is the model the St. George organizers want to use, he caught one of the dumbest questions imaginable – as in, what do the organizers think of the possibility somebody might want to “break away” from St. George once it’s incorporated…

It was a pretty impressive showing, and it’s clear St. George is much further along than it was three years ago when the first incorporation effort took off. What’s also clear, though, is for a lot of the local media represented at the Press Club, this stuff is way, way over their heads.