What Bossier City gave to taxpayers with one hand in 2024 the Republican Mayor Tommy Chandler Administration lobbies to take with the other in 2025, creating an election-year problem for graybeard city councilors.
Lost in all the excitement last week over the eventually-thwarted term limits power play instigated by those graybeards – Republican David Montgomery and Jeff Free plus Democrat Bubba Williams and independent Jeff Darby – with their rookie lackey Republican Vince Maggio was the budget workshop presented by the Council, hearing from city Chief Administrative Officer Amanda Nottingham about what the 2025 budget will look like that the Council will have to grapple with over the next two months, starting next week. It ended up as an object lesson as to the wages of the profligacy practiced by the graybeards over the past decade and more.
Nottingham painted a discouraging picture. Under current assumptions, she foresaw a $3 million deficit because expenses would increase faster than revenues. The main culprit she fingered was escalating insurance costs although the lingering problem of the state trying to shore up underfunded retirement systems, by passing costs onto local governments, also contributed.
And, this figure depended upon the city bidding out its general liability insurance business. That directly challenges Montgomery, who wasn’t present and famously has declared that, referring to professional services, “We don’t shop this.” If Montgomery, who in leveraging his elected office has made at least approaching $3.2 million from selling no-bid insurance to local governments with a foothold in Bossier Parish, were to eschew reelection that would place him in prime position to write hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of policies to the city as out of office he would become eligible to do this.
The budget also promoted extra spending as a result of a compensation study recently completed for the city, with its results summarized prior to her addressing the workshop. That led to the administration to plan for equity raises for some city employees, parity pay raises for police, and one-time bonuses for fire personnel up to a minimum of five percent increase, in the hopes for this to become permanent in 2026.
These would cost about $3 million, of which about two-thirds Nottingham said could come from the Parkway Capital Projects Fund, which backs capital projects from a sales tax although also with excesses above debt service can shovel that towards public safety operations, but $1.1 million is predicated coming from increased property tax rates. And while Nottingham said the administration planned to drain reserves to the tune of $2 million to cover everything else and assuming lower insurance costs through bidding, it would prefer to roll forward in 2025 all four property taxes the city levies to meet the increased salaries.
This collides with election year prospects for both Chandler and councilors. To great fanfare, last month the city rolled back property tax rates to hold the line on the aggregate of property tax collections for property not improved and continuously held since the last reassessment for 2024, with Montgomery in debate emphasizing that as elections loom. Now, the budget will dispense with that but leaving a dodge for Chandler and councilors: the actual vote to roll forward could occur after elections as it can occur as late as prior to year’s end, allowing officials to claim they haven’t raised taxes even though they budgeted to do so and then their following through only after safely back in office. If so, the roll back last month will turn out to be nothing more than a crass diversionary tactic to serve electoral ambitions.
One graybeard suggested this wouldn’t be enough. Darby stumped for a new property tax in the future just to fund public safety salaries, even though one now set at 5.84 mills exists, so he would appear to favor going to voters to raise that beyond its 6.19 authorized maximum.
Worse, property owners and renters also will be hit up with a $12 monthly fee increase, a 50 percent hike for typical homeowners, for sanitation, about which Nottingham said present rates only cover trash collection, not other items like street sweeping, grass cutting, and general beautification which has caused a draining of reserves to offset the collection contract’s escalator clause tied to inflation. And although not requested in this budget, Nottingham kept the door open for water and sewerage rate increases as well as the state requires adequate rates for participation in grant programs. It will be interesting to see if the Council doesn’t delay the rate increase until midyear, after elections.
In his pitch for increased property taxation, Darby said “nobody likes taxes” but claimed these needed to maintain “our quality of living.” In response, Nottingham observed that would not be maintained unless employees were there to do it, and raising salaries though diverting revenues from capital outlay for that, as is provided in the Parkway Fund, would accomplish this.
Which is a roundabout way of getting to the heart of the matter. The reason why the city is running short on operating funds is because it has so much tied up in debt. The 2023 Comprehensive Annual Finance Report reveals the city has $191 million in government debt and $201 million in enterprise debt. Throwing in interest, bond premiums, and refunding deferrals will cost $558 million over the next 20 years, which works out to each of the city’s 62,971 residents as of the end of last year on the hook for over $8,800, while interest alone on government debt will cost $80 million. For both 2024 and 2025 that debt will cost over $8 million each year.
The city over the past quarter-century has a sordid history of wasting well over $100 million on building expensive monumental public works with little demonstrated need and/or to satisfy outside interests (in the breach, it turned out for one), with the Walter O. Bigby Carriageway as the latest example. Just opened (complete with a roundabout fashioned with an idol representing politicians past and present costing hundreds of thousands of dollars), the 2023 CAFR pegged its final cost to be over $84 million that originally was set at $60 million and supposed to provide a true alternative limited-access route north from the Arthur Ray Teague Parkway’s terminus at Traffic Street and East Texas Street to Interstate 220 or thereabouts.
Instead, it actually started a way up East Texas at Old Benton Road, then travels northeast past the Hamilton Road intersection until it hits a sliver of Shed Road (that part now eviscerated from points east because the city’s contracted engineering firm Manchac Consulting botched the process to keep Shed Road whole), then heads north to terminate on Benton Road well south of the interstate highway (in fact, just north of the side street to Montgomery’s insurance agency). For travelers from the Red River with a destination on the northern reaches of Benton Road it does avoid a couple of railway crossings and a big intersection at East Texas and Benton, but generally it’s just not going to save much time for many people, making such a huge expense for relatively low return questionable (except perhaps for some landowners who found their tracts in the path of the road suddenly much more valuable and city councilors wanting a quicker way to head southwest from their offices).
Using available bond issue data, the interest alone on the Carriageway dollars spent would cover the proposed salary increases for the next dozen years, and the principal that would have been available matches that. Think of the additional public safety personnel and higher wages that could be offered that instead must divert to debt service.
Or, of the lower taxes and obviated tax increases that would have resulted. Instead, present Council graybeards, the past colleagues, and the previous couple of mayors mismanaged city governance, too busy building monuments to their rule rather than taking care of employees and public safety needs, and now want taxpayers and ratepayers to pick up the tab for their mistakes.
It will be interesting to see Montgomery, Free, and Darby try to explain all of this away at the next Council meeting during budget discussions and thereafter (and Williams as well, although he has said he doesn’t plan to run for reelection while the others haven’t ruled it out). The graybeards broke it, they own it, and voters need to hold them accountable for it.