Also, more from G-Unit Studios

Shreveport Mayor Tom Arceneuax pledged to make it easier to do business in and with Shreveport, especially for small businesses. One key component of that campaign promise is entering a key phase.

Last year, Arceneaux formed a Small Business Task Force. At the time, his charge to the committee, led by Dr. Tim Magner, president of the Greater Shreveport Chamber of Commerce, was “to determine ways to improve doing business with and in the city of Shreveport, with particular emphasis on permitting and development, including land use entitlement (zoning).”

The task force recently held four roundtable discussions where business owners and others shared their thoughts and experiences with various aspects of doing business with and in the city, from zoning to permits, inspections and more.

“We had about 15 or so people at each of those,” Arceneaux said. “They had good perspectives and told their stories.”

With the roundtables concluded, the Institute for Justice will compile the information from all of those discussions and issue a report.

“We will probably have a draft of that report around the first of October,” Arceneaux said. “I will review it, and we will fine tune it. Then we will work on implementation of their recommendations.”

The Institute for Justice is a nonprofit, public interest law firm. Its mission, according to the website, “is to end widespread abuses of government power and secure the constitutional rights that allow all Americans to pursue their dreams.”

IJ has done a similar project for city of Fort Worth in Texas.

“All of their consulting work on this task force is free of charge,” Arceneaux said. “I am very excited about that. I have expertise, and it doesn’t cost us anything. That’s a real positive.”

It will be an even greater positive, Arceneaux said, when the collected ideas are put into action.

“What we hope to come out of this is making it easier for people both to do business with and to do business in the city of Shreveport,” he said.

Another G-Unity deal in the works

With the Humor & Harmony Festival in everyone’s rear-view mirror, the Arceneaux administration is working with Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson and G-Unit Studios on a lease agreement for the Stageworks building on Clyde Fant Parkway in downtown Shreveport.

During Humor & Harmony, the Stageworks building was used to host a celebrity basketball tournament.

The former soundstage has been under renovations since 2022. The project, which was budgeted at $4 million, was expected to be completed in 2023.

Earlier this year, the Shreveport City Council introduced an ordinance regarding leasing a portion of the building to Jackson. The council postponed action on that ordinance in May.

“Because of Humor and Harmony and all of the resources it was sucking up in terms of people, that had been put on a back burner,” Arceneaux said.

In other news

The Arceneaux administration has heard several good ideas from people providing input on a proposed ordinance regarding vacant property in downtown Shreveport.

‘We had some really good suggestions there,” Arceneaux said. “Those were conceptual suggestions. What I hope to do is to meet with some of those people to turn conceptual recommendation into text. That’s usually a little more challenging, so we’re going to work on that in the next couple of weeks.”

And while it was not a city issue, the mayor kept an eye on developments at the Regions Bank buildings downtown, where SWEPCO had given the owners notice it would cut power to the building over unpaid bills.

“I was prepared to add persuasion to give the tenants time to find a solution,” the mayor said. “Somebody found at least a temporary solution.”

He said the issues at the Regions Bank buildings are significantly different from recent issues over water bills at some area apartment complexes.

“Most of the people who were occupying the apartments did not have the legal right to be there,” he said. “They actually were getting free water. Nobody was paying for it.

That’s why we had to clear that out.

“It’s a much different situation when you are dealing with significant tenant who, if the building were shut down, they have servers and other things that would dramatically impair their business. I had the feeling, giving the occupancy and the value, there would end up being a solution.”