If viewers learned anything from a Shreveport mayoral forum doubleheader broadcast earlier this week on different television stations sponsored by the Greater Shreveport Chamber of Commerce, it’s that the huge fundraising lead that Republican incumbent Tom Arceneaux has extends also to his knowledge of city affairs and to his program going forward in comparison to his opponents.

The pair of events started with one concentrating on economic development and then moving on the next night to the other’s focus on infrastructure. It quickly became clear that his challengers had particular mantras to which they would stick adding little else, no matter how vacuous or even fact-impaired these might be. The participants chosen likely are the only ones that have a chance to break into double-digit percentages of the vote.

The simplest candidate of all was Democrat Caddo Parish Commissioner Stormy Gage-Watts. Navigating through her word salad proved challenging. Over and over again she asserted that hiring a city planner and creating an online “dashboard” – which as Arceneaux pointed out the city had already, at least for capital projects – to track city spending were the big answers to what ails the city. She charged that certain neighborhoods were neglected compared to others, such as in street lighting, and that all seven Council districts needed equal treatment – interesting statements considering she apparently lives outside the city, not at the domicile inside the city accepted in her qualification.

In terms of financial management, about the only thing else she added was she would not cut youth and senior programs and would develop the economic development quicksand of Shreveport known as the riverfront. Otherwise, she pointed to her service on the Commission and asked voters to trust her on the basis of the parish not going into fiscal crisis – even as it wants voters to give it permission to throw away $60 million on a boondoggle imitative sports complex.

Despite serving in the state House of Representatives, Democrat Tammy Phelps didn’t show much more knowledge or sophistication than her fellow partisan. She leaned on that state government familiarity as an asset and stumped for cooperation between levels of government, not quite understanding that a Republican-led state government would be less forthcoming in shipping state taxpayer dollars to a Democrat-led Shreveport whose policies it may consider suspect.

She alleged she could do a better job of utility fee collection, which somehow would back her plans to spend more on public safety and streets as well as the supposed increase helping to wrangle with the consent decree over water and sewerage. As opposed to Arceneaux’s Block by Block program that she called a failure, her idea was to go begging to the state for revitalization bucks.

At least GOP Caddo Parish Commissioner John-Paul Young provided some more specific ideas than did the Democrats, including the best of both nights when he argued for privatization of city utilities, to supplement his constant chant of safer streets and cleaner water. The problem was typically his offerings had little substance if not were based on erroneous premises. He claimed existence of significant fraud in an overstaffed water department that would be cured by an audit. However, as Arceneaux noted the city, like the parish, has to supply an audit annually to the state, that includes enterprise activities with the latest noting a number of problems but nothing like fraud in the water provision.

Concerning the consent decree, he said Arceneaux had a double-secret plan to raise rates, even as he hinted that to make all the infrastructure improvement that he claimed the city needed would require tax increases and/or spending cuts – and apparently eschewed using debt as a means to achieve this by saying the city relied too much on bonding despite the huge scale of the decree. At the same time, he also vowed to cut unspecified “unnecessary” spending. Young as a candidate appeared to grab and spit out sound bites without really having done the work to make them appear to have credible substance.

That shortcoming Arceneaux didn’t have. His answers to numerous queries were significantly more detailed and knowledgeable (which should be expected of an incumbent mayor). He had left room for criticism with his promising city pay raises based on a creaky budget, unabashed support of data center siting in the city, and cost overruns on the consent decree he inherited from predecessors who ignored or did little to deal with the problems that blossomed.

Yet he handled these about as well as possible. He asserted that increased spending could be compensated for first by data center permits revenues then with the tax base that these would expand. He said on what matters the city could regulate there were sufficient safeguards surrounding data centers, which his challengers could not dispute specifically (Gage-Watts stuck with her support of them, Young said in the case of the parish he approved them but had been duped and now was far more critical of them with the claim of double-secret deals made, and Phelps said as a state official she had made no decision). He revealed a negotiation strategy to extend the decree to stretch out costs and avoid penalties, which may or may not work but his challengers had no better plan.

In all, whether his forecasts will pan out, Arceneaux at least showed he did have an agenda that addressed concerns with detailed and realistic substance, as opposed to his challengers’ lack of depth and overreliance on tag lines. That projection of more competence may be enough to peel off for him as a white Republican enough votes from the city’s black and Democrat voter majorities to stay in the job.