Mayor, city council seek the best choices for Shreveport

Shreveport Mayor Tom Arceneaux expects to wrap up the city’s 2026 budget this week. It’s a process that involves a lot of give-and-take.

He said that, like any budget with limited resources, decisions can come down not to what is right or wrong, but to which good choice is best. As negotiations with the City Council and the administration neared completion, Arceneaux compared the process to a household budget.

“We have a choice,” he said. “We can renovate the kitchen, or we can buy a new car, but we can’t do both of those things, to put it in a household perspective. Neither of those things is a bad thing. They are both desirable things. But we can’t do both of them. That is where I am trying to go with the budget, and I suspect we will get there.”

Arceneaux said he and the council are working through potential budget amendments in the final stages of negotiations. Much of the discussion centers on salaries.

“We will have some amendments dealing with the pay proposal for police, fire and other city employees,” he said.

Arceneaux said that police and fire employees get a 2 percent pay increase automatically each year. His proposal for next year is to provide an additional 3 percent raise as of April 1, 2026.

“The reason is it’s only part of the year,” he said. “We believe that our revenue will be sufficient in 2026 to be able to budget those for a full year in 2027.”

The mayor’s proposal includes a 3 percent increase for other city employees. He anticipates amendments from the council to stipulate how that 3 percent is disbursed.

“I think they will stay within that number, but they may modify how that 3 percent is doled out,” he said. “Perhaps more in favor of the lower end of our employees and less to the upper end of our compensated employees.”

Arceneaux said the salary issue is a good illustration of some of the complexities of the city budget.

“In every instance where we did that, we found an identifiable source of revenue, or we moved money from something else,” he said of the proposed raises. “That’s the approach. The council has a tendency to deal with the expenditure side and not to deal with the revenue side.

Our job is to deal with both.

“Whenever we are looking at pay raises, we don’t just raise it for a year. We raise it for a year, and then next year, and then next year.”

Arceneaux said he is confident a budget can be created that funds what is best for the city while maintaining his top priority — an 8 percent operating reserve.

“I am flexible until we get to the 8 percent operating reserve,” he said. “When we dip below 8 percent, I am no longer flexible. That 8 percent is sacrosanct in terms of responsible budgeting for the city of Shreveport and the long-term cost to the citizens of Shreveport.”

Looking ahead

As 2025 comes to a close, Arceneaux is looking forward to three major priorities for the city of Shreveport in 2026.

“One is to move forward with the projects that the voters passed,” he said. “We are finishing the projects the voters passed in 2021, with the three substations and the police headquarters.

“We will go to bid on Dec. 11 for the police headquarters. We anticipate entering into a contract and issuing an order to proceed in the first quarter of 2026. That’ll take into 2027 to do. It’s a $28 million project, so it will take a while to do.”

Those are not the only projects Arceneaux is looking forward to.

“We are moving forward with projects that were passed in the 2024 bond issue,” he said. “Hopefully, we will issue the second set of bonds that were authorized, the second third, about $88 million to $90 million worth of bonds, in 2026 and begin funding additional projects there.”

The mayor said his second priority for 2026 is negotiating the sewer consent decree, which he had hoped to complete in 2025.

“The government shutdown kept us from being able to continue our negotiations,” he said. “I think that’s something that will happen in 2026. It pretty much has to happen because that’s our deadline under the existing consent decree. I am pretty sure we will finish that one.”

He also aims to advance one of his top priorities of 2025 in the new year.

“The third thing will be the next phase of Block by Block and what we do to try to not just clean up neighborhoods but to reinvest in them,” he said. “We have two targeted areas — one in Mooretown and one in Highland — and we are going to be putting together proposals to do some significant reinvestment to encourage people to infill and develop those areas. We will learn from those two and scale that to a larger number of communities for the next phase.”