If the headline above comes off as clickbait-y, good. That’s what it’s designed to be. This ought to grab your attention if you live in Louisiana’s capital city, because municipal bankruptcy is a real possibility for Baton Rouge’s future if Sharon Broome manages to win re-election on Saturday.

How do we arrive at this conclusion? Very simple. The city-parish cannot pay the tab it has run up to the city of St. George, and in the almost certain event that the new city’s politicians take the running dispute to court and win, the government that Broome now runs will have to find about a quarter of its current revenues to pay off that debt.

If Broome’s own protestations have merit, the city-parish has no ability to make that sacrifice. Therefore, municipal bankruptcy is the only possibility that remains.

St. George voted to incorporate itself back in November of 2019 after a hard-won electoral fight that Broome threw everything she had into preventing. When she lost in a landslide as the people of the St. George area expressed their will for a city governed differently than what she offers, Broome and her cronies, like the recently-deceased leftist icon Mary Olive Pierson, rushed into court with a lawsuit the Louisiana Supreme Court earlier this year found meritless.

All of this you know, and even at the time none of it was a surprise. That Broome and her pals would continue to fight the incorporation and function of St. George was eminently predictable.

During the legal arguments surrounding that lawsuit, it became incontrovertibly clear that the taxpayers of St. George were being made fiscal pack mules, if not involuntary servants, of the city of Baton Rouge. St. George tax dollars were being redirected to the downtown area and to North Baton Rouge where Broome’s core constituents live, and it was argued that without this redistribution the city-parish would descend into chaos.

That’s a political question. It turns out it isn’t much of a legal argument, at least once you get to the Louisiana Supreme Court. Because this arrangement only works so long as the folks in St. George are willing to shoulder that inequity, and the incorporation vote showed that they weren’t, in fact, willing to continue as fiscal pack mules for Baton Rouge proper.

And Broome’s most grievous sin was that when she and her pals filed that lawsuit, which was aimed at keeping the cash pipeline flowing into the city, she acted as though the lawsuit would prevail.

The sales tax dollars collected in St. George have never been put into escrow. It’s been five years that they’ve accumulated, and the tab is now sitting at something on the order of $248 million.

Just since June, when the Supreme Court and the governor acted to make the St. George incorporation go live, it’s more than $20 million. On Saturday there’s a tax election in St. George that would forcibly end the confiscation of those sales tax dollars, something that should never even have been necessary but for Broome’s insistence on stealing the tax revenues from the new city.

If you’re Dustin Yates, the mayor of St. George, and Sharon Broome wins re-election on Saturday, what kind of bargaining position do you think you’ll take with her?

I’ll tell you what mine would be. If I’m Yates, I’m putting on my combat helmet and I’m going to go George Patton on her. I go to court and I settle for nothing less than that $250 million or more. I will put Sharon Broome and the city-parish government into municipal bankruptcy, and I won’t apologize for any of it.

After five years of theft and disrespect and under-the-table efforts to undermine the integrity of St. George, why wouldn’t he?

The interesting aspect of this is that St. George’s success is really the only thing potentially saving East Baton Rouge Parish from descending into status as a failed city like Jackson, Mississippi or Detroit or Newark. St. George is the only place with a real chance of developing into a growing boomtown that the parish has. It has the available land for development, the road connections, the commercial base already in place and the population and demographics to generate a rapid growth. So if some of that success comes from predatory tactics feeding off the corpse of Baton Rouge, you could argue it’s a necessary evil.

Or maybe social justice.

Broome inevitably loses that fight, because she’s in the wrong. St. George’s incorporation dates back to the election which created it. That’s clear in Louisiana law. And she has stolen their money for five years. Eventually that bill comes due.

Yes, some district court judge might well find that to give St. George the whole quarter billion would do too much harm. At the appellate level such a ruling isn’t likely to hold up and it certainly won’t at the Supreme Court level.

Who do you think can make a better deal with Dustin Yates? Sharon Broome or Sid Edwards?

At the mayoral debate a couple of weeks back, Edwards soft-played the issue of the St. George debt. It was a play-it-safe answer, one which Edwards probably needed to give at the time, but I don’t think he should continue talking about it that way.

Instead, Edwards ought to say that if Baton Rouge is to avoid municipal bankruptcy, it had better elect him mayor-president, because only Sid Edwards can negotiate an amicable settlement with the St. George people and create something which diffuses this existential threat to the city-parish. That Sharon Broome has screwed those people in St. George relentlessly for the past five years on the part of a corrupt and venal elite, and no discounts will be afforded to her when the bill finally comes due. And that this is the issue on which the mayoral election should turn.

Broome doesn’t have an argument here. The Louisiana Supreme Court took away all of her arguments. She’s talking as though there’s a negotiation to be had on the current debt the city-parish owes to St. George; that being the money she continues to steal in the aftermath of the governor appointing the mayor and city council in St. George, much less the five years’ worth of misappropriation of St. George tax revenues.

The only immediately available remedy for this is that she lose the election on Saturday. If she doesn’t, there is zero reason Yates and the St. George pols shouldn’t take everything they can get from her, regardless of who gets hurt.