If you’re anywhere near Louisiana’s capital city you probably heard a little bit about this development over the past couple of days…

An additional special grand jury in East Baton Rouge Parish has indicted Courtney Monique Scott and Veronica D. Mathis on multiple felony charges.

According to the indictment returned Wednesday, Scott and Mathis are accused of committing several crimes between Feb. 1, 2021, and Feb. 28, 2024.

Scott is the former Assistant Chief Administrative Officer to Mayor Sharon Weston Broome.

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The charges include:

• Conspiracy to commit theft over $25,000
• Felony theft over $25,000
• Conspiracy to commit public bribery
• Bribery
• Conspiracy to commit money laundering
• Money laundering
• Public contract fraud
• Illegal splitting of fees
• Malfeasance in office

The indictment alleges the two conspired to commit theft and bribery, engaged in fraudulent practices and misrepresentations, and participated in financial transactions involving proceeds tied to the alleged offenses.

Scott is further accused of committing malfeasance in office.

No further details were provided in the indictment.

“This is a serious matter involving a significant amount of money and the public’s trust. Our investigation is ongoing,” said Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill.

First there was Cleve Dunn and now it’s Courtney Scott and Veronica Mathis.

And there are likely going to be more.

We have a theory, which we’re pretty sure is correct though it’s a little off the wall, that the cosmos is beginning to work in Baton Rouge’s favor.

Last year, mayor-president Sid Edwards put his Thrive EBR tax plan in front of the voters which would have allowed the city-parish to maintain much of its current structure by simply redirecting dedicated money from the library system and a few other honey pots, and the voters rejected it.

Some conservatives in the parish voted against it because they wanted to force a big trimdown in the city-parish’s bloated budget; they’d address bloated spending on the libraries when their own millage came up later. But the Left in East Baton Rouge Parish voted against Thrive EBR mostly because Edwards is a Republican and they’re mad he’s in office.

Then Edwards, forced to look around for solutions, asked the Legislative Auditor’s office to come in and help him scrub the budget.

This, at a time when there was already a fairly intensive investigation into what was happening.

And now, the people who’ve been feeding at the city-parish’s trough for a long time are running scared – because the corruption in East Baton Rouge Parish is anything but well-hidden. And it has to be squeezed out because there’s no money to waste on it.

And why? St. George.

The crooks at City Hall had been gorging on the people in the then-unincorporated areas of South Baton Rouge for quite some time, which is one reason they blew every gasket they had over the idea that the victims of the vampires might finally make an effort to dislodge those teeth from their necks.

Then when it happened, the city-parish’s fiscal fantasies came crashing down.

Sharon Weston Broome and her crowd essentially ran a smash-and-grab operation on behalf of a small cabal of white-collar crooks for eight years. It was something of a continuation of some lower-profile graft her predecessor Kip Holden had supervised for the 12 years prior to that, but Holden’s corruption was largely manageable.

He just slowed things down. She put them in reverse.

Political corruption, and the governmental failure it carries with it, make a place impossible to invest in. And Baton Rouge has stagnated since.

These arrests, and the necessary reorientation of city-parish government they will bring on, gives Louisiana’s capital city a chance to heal. St. George as a new entity not yet tainted with corruption, also offers an opportunity to move past the destruction of the last two decades.

We hate to see people having to go to prison, but this is a great and necessary week for Baton Rouge. Assumedly those investigations will yield even more high-profile prizes, and that will be great and necessary, too.