We talk all the time here at The Hayride about the concept of weaponized governmental failure, which is defined as the activity, mostly of urban Democrat politicians, of intentionally refusing to do the basics of governance in cities they control for political reasons. Weaponized governmental failure can be seen in pretty much every city Democrats control, and Baton Rouge is absolutely no different.

Usually weaponized governmental failure works because it drives middle-class and upper middle-class voters out of a city and into the suburbs where they can no longer vote in the city’s elections, and therefore it produces an electorate which will never vote the practitioners of weaponized governmental failure out of office. That’s how Democrats can utterly destroy a Jackson, Mississippi or Detroit or St. Louis and nonetheless get elected to term after term of ruination.

And of course they’ve done this in Baton Rouge for going on 20 years now. It’s accelerating under the current mayor-president Sharon Weston Broome, but there’s a problem: a big chunk of the parish decided to stand and fight rather than just vacate the jurisdiction.

Our regular readers are familiar with the history and current status of the city of St. George, which is the brand-new municipality which was brought into being back in November of 2019 by a vote of the people living in the then-unincorporated area on the south side of East Baton Rouge Parish. For more than four years the Powers That Be in city-parish government fought the St. George incorporation in court, until the Louisiana Supreme Court finally put a stop to that with a 5-4 decision ordering the St. George incorporation.

Here’s the thing: as a city, St. George is the rightful receptacle, under state law, of sales tax revenues collected by the city. There is an election set in December to certify that for St. George – it’s a tax election, but it doesn’t actually raise taxes; it moves a two percent local sales tax away from the city-parish government and deposits the revenue into St. George’s coffers.

But given that the city is incorporated, St. George is owed that money already. And they’re asking for sales tax revenues due them just since June. The fact of the matter is that St. George is owed almost five years of sales tax revenue – nobody challenged the legality of the election that produced the new city; what was argued in the lawsuits brought by mayor-president Sharon Weston Broome and others was that the incorporation wasn’t “reasonable” under state law.

They never escrowed the money, though. So when they lost that lawsuit, the city-parish should have been on the hook for all of those funds. It still probably is.

Reasonable people would look at this problem and opt to become very friendly with the people who run the St. George transition team, in hopes that some deal could be cut that won’t drop a fiscal bomb on the city-parish.

Nope. That’s not what we’re seeing. Instead, it’s a whole lot of “talk to the hand” being given to the St. George people, and they’re coming around to the idea that maybe the way to protect themselves is to launch a bloody war against the city-parish of East Baton Rouge.

The St. George Transition District members decided to move forward with legal action against East Baton Rouge Parish to settle their dispute over the transfer of a 2% sales tax revenue during their meeting Wednesday afternoon.

The money comes from the portion of sales tax collected by city-parish businesses within the city of St. George. It amounts to a projected $55 million. They’ve been requesting the money since June.

“There’s no reason the tax dollars haven’t been transferred to the city of St. George Transition District at the this time. The law says it should be ours,” Chairman of St. George Transition District Andrew Murrell said.

They also approved filing a suit to prevent the city-parish from stopping any parish services or adding new ones.

Murrell says the dispute doesn’t only affect St. George, it harms the entire parish.

“Their refusal to recognize that we’re incorporated as the city of St. George is going to end up costing all of us time, money, resources, that should’ve been utilized to move forward. Instead we’re going to have to move it to a courtroom,” he said.

Mayor-President Sharon Weston-Broome’s office released a statement saying it would be irresponsible to transfer parish tax revenues without intergovernmental agreement and it’s disappointing to see the district take this route.

Broome’s statement is the height of weaponized governmental failure.

She’s saying it’s irresponsible to move that money unless there’s “intergovernmental agreement,” and yet it’s her side refusing to seek that. They won’t even sit down with the St. George people and agree to continue the current agreement on privatized animal control in the city-parish, for example. The St. George folks have already said they’re willing to kick in their share of those fees. Broome’s team won’t even discuss that issue in a constructive fashion.

What they’re doing is kicking this can of money owed to St. George down the road as far as they can, in the full knowledge that this dithering ultimately creates larger and more ruinous costs at the end. It looks like idiocy, but it isn’t: if they run up a bill of $200-300 million before it gets to a point that the reckoning can’t be delayed any longer, then that’s actually a good thing.

Why? Because they’ll just plead poverty. And they’ll demand a bailout from the feds or the state, or more to the point from St. George.

Knowing that historically they’ll get it.

Broome is intentionally failing to do her job of remitting the sales tax collections to the new city, which is forcing St. George to begin operations by running up debts, knowing that the consequences of doing so will be long in the future by the time the courts finally dispose of all this. Because she and her handlers know that eventually they’ll wear down the St. George people and they’ll get a better deal from them than the law would give them.

And if St. George is hamstrung in its development as a city which puts Baton Rouge to shame, something that everyone involved in this controversy knows will eventually be the case, that’s not a bad thing either.

Except Murrell and the other folks on the St. George transition team are a bit more spirited than the usual suburbanite victims.

It’s weaponized governmental failure, for sure. What we don’t know is whether it’ll work this time. It’s looking like St. George isn’t going to take this abuse lying down.