Catching Up With the Joneses – We’ve got quite a full docket for this week’s Metro Council meeting…

We’ve got quite a full docket for this week’s Metro Council meeting, with not a small number of significant items having been deferred from previous meetings. While I still maintain that the recently-abolished committee meetings would have helped keep deferrals to a minimum, I’m not going to belabor that point here. There’s plenty of other stuff to cover; the Public Hearings section features 29 entries and the Agenda Items section features 22 entries. We can all hope that the Council catches up tomorrow.

To get you oriented, here’s a copy of the current agenda. As of 10 p.m. the evening prior to the Council meeting, the Administrative Matters agenda had not been published to the City-Parish website, so there may be other items of note that are not listed below. When/If that agenda is updated, it can be found here.

Community Center Lease & Reallocating Community Center Funding: Deferred from April and May. From what I gather, the lease item would allow leasing of government owned property to a non-profit organization for the purpose of operating a Social Services Center. It makes complete sense to locate such an endeavor in a Community Center. With that said, why wouldn’t we standardize this concept across all of the Community Centers? Personally, I’m still not a fan of having each of the Community Centers answering to the Councilmember in whose district it falls. Additional items on the agenda deal with designating self-generated revenues from the Centers to fund programs. Having each Center’s available services impacted by its ability to self-generate funds seems like an odd setup for a social welfare program focused on improving access to necessary services for needy residents. In the end, I would suspect that the best way to run these Centers might involve a centralization of fiscal control within the Mayor’s Office with operational control provided by a committee consisting of those Councilmembers who currently oversee the Centers to provide uniform benefits without regard to which district the Center resides.

Dog Tethering: Deferred from May. Pretty straight forward, it would make tethering a dog for any period longer than an hour to be a crime of animal cruelty. When originally discussed, there were concerns about whether this could be enforced. Hell, considering how many laws we have on the books that are apparently unenforceable based on clearly observable outcomes and behavior (speeding, littering, texting while driving, etc), I don’t really see what the problem of having one more would be. Seriously, “See Something, Say Something” folks.

Constable’s Office Study: Deferred from March. Honestly, this proposal kind of boils down to a “Why Do You Exist?” agenda item. It’s kind of amazing how few people know what the Contsable’s Office does considering the Constable himself is an elected official. If you live in the city limits, there’s a good change you voted in the Constable’s election if you voted in the last Mayoral election. Granted, the appearance of duplicative services between the Constable’s Office, Baton Rouge Police Department, and East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office contributes to its problem of anonymity, so the agenda item does have a good rationale. By the way, if you want to know what the Constable’s Office is about, check out their page at the City-Parish website.

Approving the Harveston Waste Water Treatment District Deferred from May. Harveston is a new development from Mike Wampold in southeast East Baton Rouge Parish in the vicinity of the new L’Auberge Casino. The main issue is that Harveston will create its own waste treatment system not connected to the main City-Parish system. There are financial concerns from some councilmembers as the fiscally exploding sewer bond program based its estimates on new developments like Harveston being included in future revenue projections, but I also have general concerns. I’ll admit that I’m not really up on the science of wastewater treatment, but I’d like to be, especially if this is a workable, environmentally respectful program. To date, however, the information related to the science behind the approach hasn’t really been discussed.

Supplemental Budget On an annual basis, the Mayor’s Office usually puts together a supplemental budget to fund additional projects if more revenue has come in than estimated (kind of the opposite of what the State does). It’s usually non-contentious since it is a combination of things the Mayor’s Office wants and pet projects of individual councilmembers. The media has covered this one pretty well, but I did want to point out my favorite item (H/T to Mukul Verma for spotting this one): $5,000 for the horribly, insensitively named Clean Sweep program that will pay for a bus ticket to return homeless people to their relatives (or, as I imagine, anywhere with an end destination that isn’t Baton Rouge). “Clean Sweep” really?

The Council Meeting starts at 4 p.m. today. You can catch it live on the 3rd floor of City Hall in downtown Baton Rouge (222 St. Louis St.), 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. As a bonus, if you miss the proceedings, the City-Parish has started a new archiving program, but I’ll leave that one for next week.