Republican Mayor Tom Arceneaux may helm Shreveport, but its gerrymandered Democrat supermajority City Council keeps spending more money than the city has that puts off a more severe day of reckoning which perhaps cloaks a cynical exercise.
This week, the Council approved the 2024 budget, making several changes to Arceneaux’s plan that had the effect of spending more or putting off debts. In all, for its general operations the city will shell out $283 million, down $11 million budgeted for this year, but overall spending is pegged at $676 million, up $81 million, largely as a result of increased revenue projections for water and sewerage and righting retained risk costs, which in the past couple of years ate into general fund reserves.
But Arceneaux’s plans to begin replenishing general fund reserves, which dove by two-thirds over that period to around $25 million, the Council thwarted by amending away a 20 percent increase in water and sewerage rates, a $3 monthly solid waste charge, and retaining open positions in public safety, with police particularly understaffed, altogether which could have recaptured $25 million. The Council unanimously wanted to keep open proactively the ability to hire into public safety departments, and in the cases of the higher charges felt the public not sufficiently prepared to endure the increases at this time.
Arceneaux and the two Republican councilors acquiesced, but with the Administration warning that revenues attached to bonds in water and sewerage for the past two years didn’t cover those debt costs and without the rate increase that would continue. That imbalance is courtesy of the city’s consent decree over water and sewerage provision for quality violations that must be repaired, even as the cost keeps on growing. Democrat former Mayor Adrian Perkins preferred to raid reserves that now approach the minimum legal level for the general fund and make more difficult paying off revenue bonds in the future.
The mayor knows this and is trying to fix it, but the Council Democrats won’t let him. Forestalling rate increases blocks most of his solution while kicking the can down the road, although while a small portion of that would have come from not filling the public safety vacancies, which at least is money that can be saved if not spent on new hires, which Arceneaux would have handled through supplemental appropriations.
And the reason he’s not allowed to pursue his solution may derive from partisan political opportunism. Council Democrats shy away from being seen as foisting rate hikes, while at the same time by not acting to prevent the crisis from magnifying allows them to blame Arceneaux for it a couple of years down the road when likely he tries for reelection and rate or tax hikes and/or service cuts become more obviously needed from failure to address problems today. Yet they also can claim they were addressing public safety concerns by keeping job slots open, even if hiring is lackluster due to the city’s reputation as a violent crime hotbed and past police foibles. Indeed, at the same meeting the Council called upon Arceneaux to declare a state of emergency over crime, whatever that could accomplish.
Democrat partisans loathe the idea that a white Republican serves as mayor over their black-majority and Democrat-plurality city. Making him appear as a failure in time for the 2028 makes it easier for the more ambitious among them to take his place in what appears to be a golden opportunity for a black Democrat politician. Continually rebuffing his sensible plans to put the city back on more solid footing rather than it careening further towards fiscal crisis may be part of a plan like that.