Last month, Sid Edwards’ 54-46 victory over Sharon Broome was a pretty major exclamation point to Donald Trump’s presidential victory in November. It indicated that the American people hadn’t quite given up on the idea of self-governance as an alternative to servitude to the political elite.

Edwards, after all, had no business winning a mayoral election in a city of over 400,000 people. He was just a high school football coach, after all, and not a trained politician with a paid-for certificate from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government or a law degree. What could he possibly know about running a city?

The people looking down their snoots at Edwards were the ones attempting to push a third term of Sharon Broome down the throats of the public, or else they were backing the execrable former state representative Ted James as a “conservative-friendly” solution to the problem of Broome, despite James having had an even worse voting record in the state legislature than Broome did.

Baton Rouge’s voters said “hell, no” to that and elected Edwards in a near landslide.

And so far, the result is one of the most fascinating, and inspiring, things we’ve seen.

Sid Edwards doesn’t qualify as a policy wonk, and he won’t for a while. He’ll admit openly that he doesn’t have all the answers.

But Edwards’ transition team so far is a great collection of talented people.

As an example, he has Millard Mule, the policy director for Gov. Jeff Landry, working on both the infrastructure and public safety committees on the transition. Mule has been instrumental in getting reforms done in juvenile justice and putting the Louisiana State Police into New Orleans to wrestle down that city’s crime rate, and he’s a proponent of reforms in transportation that Baton Rouge desperately needs.

One in specific terms is the idea to revive the BUMP plan, which is a two-decades-old concept for creating a “northern loop” in Baton Rouge by upgrading the old Huey Long bridge across the Mississippi north of downtown, making its approaches on US 190 on both sides of the river interstate quality roadways, expanding the LA 445 exit at Lobdell on the west side of the river, and creating an elevated expressway on Airline Highway from US 190 to I-12.

The BUMP plan has been forgotten for 20 years because at the time of its proposal there were lots of business owners along Airline Highway who didn’t want the disruption of highway construction in their front yards. Well, now those businesses are mostly defunct and Airline Highway north of Florida Boulevard is a ghost town. Highway construction turning it into an elevated expressway with a service road underneath, much like the Westbank Expressway in the New Orleans area, would actually bring the prospect of economic development to Airline Highway.

Edwards actually brought up the BUMP plan as a means of improving traffic flow in Baton Rouge at the mayoral runoff debate. He didn’t need to be a policy wonk to understand its value; common sense was more than enough. What BUMP does is move semi trucks off I-10 in Baton Rouge, and specifically off the “new” bridge downtown, and route them to a less-congested artery which will connect them with I-12 – the road those drivers really want to use if they’re trucking cargo from, say, Houston to Jacksonville.

And BUMP is less expensive than the idea of a new bridge south of Baton Rouge – which is a fine idea, don’t get us wrong, but given that very few of those trucks are driving to New Orleans and given that there is no highway access from I-10 to I-12 between the I-10/I-12 split in Baton Rouge and I-55 in LaPlace which would then connect to I-12 at Hammond, the new bridge isn’t a useful alternative for those trucks.

It’s simply a closer-in version of the Sunshine Bridge in Donaldsonville. Certainly it would be good to have, but the most important traffic problem in Baton Rouge is the need to move the trucks out of the core of the city. Mule, should he hold sway on the transition team, could be instrumental in getting things rolling.

We also love the appointment of Charlie Davis, an old friend to The Hayride and a conservative mover and shaker for a long time in Baton Rouge and Louisiana politics as well as one of the city’s more prolific small business entrepreneurs, as Chief Administrative Officer. Davis, who understands business and management from an entrepreneurial perspective – something the bloated, incompetent and stultified bureaucrats at City Hall have zero knowledge of. He’ll be a major breath of fresh air and a conduit for new ideas and better management.

So naturally, Davis has been smeared in the local press because there have been lawsuits involving businesses he’s been involved in. As though anyone in business in Louisiana for more than a couple of years hasn’t been involved in lawsuits.

But mostly, it’s Edwards providing inspirational leadership in this town. The thing about making a great coach into a political leader is that you’re getting the mentoring, motivational and visionary skills that a coach has to have to be successful, and those skills translate. The policy stuff you can get from advisers, and from Edwards himself as he’s briefed on that.

Here’s a good example of what we mean. This was Edwards’ address to the incoming class of the Baton Rouge Police Academy. It’s only 12 members – out of 13 initially enrolled.

The Baton Rouge Police Department is not a winning organization. It’s plagued with internal politics, attrition, low morale and lots of other things. Most of that has flowed from decades of neglect and incompetence, if not hostility, coming from City Hall. Along comes Edwards, who can speak the language of the folks who would apply to the Police Academy, and you can almost hear the buzz in that room. They know the mayor means it when he speaks of having their backs.

The next class at that police academy will be a lot bigger than 12 people, and it will have some well-credentialed cadets – because Baton Rouge now begins to look like a place where the leadership cares about having great cops with great resources. Watch what that does for morale.

And watch what that status quo mob, the ones who tried to tell Edwards’ voters they had to surrender to Ted James in order that Baton Rouge might decline more slowly, does over the next few months as they attempt to co-opt or at least cope with the new mayor. We can’t predict just yet how that’s going to go. What we can say is this all of a sudden becomes a very interesting place with the potential for a bright future, and that hasn’t been true of Baton Rouge in a very long time.