Tonight on 3rd Floor Theatre: Fisticuffs! – Get the Metro Council agenda from Slater McKay

My more serious partners in the media have done a pretty good job of covering the legion of major items on tonight’s Metro Council agenda. With that said, I figured it would be nice to have a convenient, easily referenced post to consolidate it all. So, here you go!

First off, here’s a copy of the main agenda. This iteration of the Council is finally getting into some pretty substantial issues. It will be interesting to see how they handle it, particularly considering there are some pretty polarizing items on the agenda. It will be interesting to see what order the items are taken in as I could easily see the debate from one of the items generating protest votes on totally unrelated items. More on that below…

Parish Auto Usage Policy: Deferred from the previous meeting. The issue appears to be one which would largely impact law enforcement entities in the Parish. Carl Dabadie, Jr, the interim Baton Rouge Chief of Police was not too hot on the idea. As I mentioned last time, the current policy seems reasonable and I doubt there is much support on the Council for the issue.

IBM Deal: This is the big economic development project that is going to see IBM move into a new building downtown. Business Report publisher Rolfe McCollister described it as a “tremendous victory for our city and state” in one of his recent editorials. Part of the deal is that the Parish will provide a relatively small sum ($4.5M over three years) of incentive funding. While everyone seems to agree that this will be great for Baton Rouge, everyone also seems to agree (and economic studies appear to back up) that Bayou Country Superfest is a good thing for Baton Rouge. That didn’t stop the Council from defunding the City-Parish portion of the incentive back in 2011. While no firm objections have appeared, some on the Council have brought up the question of taxpayer money subsidizing private business.

Fair Share Policy Discussion: Anyone who has watched Council meetings for a scintilla of time has heard of the Fair Share Policy. The Fair Share Policy was implemented back in 2009 and the goal was to increase the participation of Disadvantaged Business Enterprises in the City-Parish contracting system. There are a lot of definitions involved in the Fair Share Policy, suffice to say that the policy is aimed at increasing the participation of small, largely minority-owned, companies who otherwise would not be able to effectively compete with larger, more established businesses. The Council paid lip-service to the deal, but the implementation doesn’t appear to have occurred.

Gas Utility District Commissioner Removal: This will be the actual hearing involving the removal of certain Gas Utility District No. 1 Commissioners for neglect of duty/misconduct of office. I have no idea when the Council formally removed people from a Commission under their control, so it is kind of exciting simply for the novelty. Unfortunately, this is likely to be discussed in executive session, so we probably won’t get the gory details.

Community Center Defunding: I pretty much went in order on the agenda except for this item. I like to save the best for last (by “best,” I mean most contentious, of course). The Advocate put together a good overview on the subject yesterday. Give it a read. It’s got it all: racial politics, control of money, implicit allusions to patronage and the spoils system. In my opinion, the current and past setup where the Mayor’s Office or individual Council Members oversee the operations of these centers is horribly flawed due to the potential for abuse. It would likely be better to either create a Board that would oversee the operations of all of these centers or RFP the service out to a non-profit. In either case, it would provide the full Council with decision-making authority over the process as well as creating something of a buffer to keep them out of micromanaging operations. This item should be good for arguments and hurt feelings.

The Council Meeting starts at 4 p.m. today. You can catch it live on the third floor of City Hall in downtown Baton Rouge (222 St. Louis Street), you can watch it from the comfort of your own home on Metro 21 through Cox Communication, or you might be able to catch it streaming here, although I have had a lot of reports that the streaming feed has been garbage lately.