Water bill surcharge pulled from budget

Mayor Tom Arceneaux celebrated in style Oct. 8 with a party for his birthday and to announce his plans to run for a second term as Shreveport mayor. Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson was among those in attendance to honor Arceneaux for his birthday and his campaign announcement.

“We have amassed a significant war chest, and we are ready to go,” the mayor said. The mayor said his administration has made significant progress in this term, and he wants to see that progress come to completion in a second term.

“We have fulfilled all of the campaign commitments we made when I was running in 2022,” Arceneaux said. “We haven’t fulfilled all of them in full, but we have made substantial progress on everything we said we would do. In addition to that, we passed a $256.1 million bond issue, and I want to have the opportunity to see those projects through. Hopefully, they all will be completed in my second term.”

The mayor also highlighted the progress made in combating blight in Shreveport and reducing crime in the city.

“We have invested a lot into technology for the police department, which is having a positive impact,” he said. “Some of that is happenstance, but some of that is good police work and funding police at the best level we can fund them. We’d love to have more officers, but they are hard to come by.

We finished last year with six more than we started with, reversing a 10-year trend.

“We believe we have an excellent track record to run on, and a very good future for the city of Shreveport. So we are asking for people’s votes for re-election.”

Budget battle over blight

Arceneaux submitted his budget for next year to the city council earlier this month. One proposal to attack blighted properties in the city drew enough scrutiny that Arceneaux later chose to pull it from the budget.

“The thing that caught the most attention was the 2 percent surcharge on the water bill,” Arceneaux said.

The proposed surcharge would have raised money to help the city pay to tear down blighted buildings, the mayor said.

“What people don’t understand is that we can’t force somebody to tear their building down at their expense,” he said. “We can do the work and then attempt to collect. But what happens is, most of these buildings are owned by a limited liability company or a corporation, and they don’t have any personal liability. And they usually don’t have any other assets but the property that we are demolishing. So we are typically behind a mortgage. We will have a piece of paper that says we have a lien. That lien is probably worthless as a practical matter.”

That leaves the city without much choice.

“Under Louisiana law, we have exhausted all of our options to try and make these owners do what they are supposed to do,” Arceneaux said. “Our choice right now is to leave the buildings the way they are, where we are having repeated fires and squatters and those kinds of things, because they also are not providing security for those buildings. So they are a public health and safety problem.”

The mayor sought the surcharge because he sees it as a means to fulfill the city’s responsibility to its citizens.

“That is one of the things government does. We protect people from bad actors,” he said. “If we seek to do something about it, what it will cost us to demolish the buildings is far more than our total annual budget for demolition. So the only way we can do that and be financially responsible is to have additional revenues.”

Ideas for AI

Arceneaux recently attended a conference in Denver, Colo., where he learned how some cities are using artificial intelligence-based applications to streamline some municipal services.

“It wasn’t how to use ChatGPT,” he said. “It was ‘here’s some of the applications we are using, a lot of them in Colorado.’ It was really very interesting.”

One of the applications that intrigued the mayor streamlines the process for some building permits.

“There is software that makes it possible to get an instant building permit by having AI review the plans,” he said. “They don’t use it for all building permits, but for many permits. The way it works is you pay an extra fee, which is typically $50. It’s kind of like going to the private driver’s license people. You pay an extra fee, but you get the convenience of doing it more quickly.”

Another application Arceneaux is interested in collects the information that police officers typically get when they are on a call and delivers it to the officers’ cell phones instead of the computers in their patrol vehicles.

“Those are two things we are going to follow up on from that conference. It’s interesting what people are doing with the software that results from AI.”