Council Recap: I was wrong, yay!

For the record, please note that my precognitive skills are not infallible. But that’s a good thing when my fallibility means the Council deals with a long-standing issue rather than kick it down the road and the vote seems to cross the aisle in a positive way. Yesterday, the main issue before the Metro Council was whether to dedicate funds (tagged at $6,000,000) to buy the homes of several residents who live in close proximity to the North Wastewater Treatment Plant (Wastewater is a gentler term for sewage). These residents have complained for a VERY long time about noxious smells emanating from the plant and have had a lawsuit in place for over a decade. While a recent court case went against the residents, the previous Council requested the City-Parish put together a plan to purchase the homes and build a buffer zone. An agreement was reached last year, but the residents backed out of it when they learned that they would have to agree to the deal before appraisals could be conducted on the houses. The issue came before the Council again last night and was decided in an 8-4 vote in favor of pursuing the plan of buying the properties. Those voting against the plan were Scott Wilson, Joel Boe, Ryan Heck, and John Delgado. The Advocate does a good job of covering the story here.

I’ll be honest, I thought there would be a few more votes in opposition to the plan and the measure would fail 6-6, but I’m kind of glad to be proven wrong. While the court decision essentially released the City-Parish from the obligation to compensate these residents for the reduction in their quality of life, I’m of the opinion that there is a larger issue at play here than the strictly legal one. When a government does something that it knows or suspects is going to reduce the quality of life of its citizens, I feel there is an obligation (moral, not necessarily legal) that it do what it can to mitigate and correct that issue, particularly when the group suffering is one with limited political power. Seriously, if someone were to suggest building a Southeast Wastewater Treatment Plant next to the Country Club of Louisiana, you know that is never going to happen. But apparently Scotlandville and Gardere are perfectly acceptable locations (until someone decides that the area is primed for redevelopment, at which point another impoverished location needs to be found to move the plant).

I actually dug into the issue a little bit using the East Baton Rouge Parish Library’s Online Database to see if I could find articles dating from when this issue was initially considered. There were quite a few spanning the past two decades. One article I located specifically dealing with this plant featured then –Councilman (Future Mayor) Tom Ed McHugh indicating that the Council’s options were limited and the eventual decision was likely to be detrimental to the quality of life of the nearby residents. That was in 1986. For a collection of other articles from the Advocate (or her predecessors), I uploaded a single PDF document of them over here. That’s a long history of anecdotal evidence that residents in the Parish are suffering due to the needs of our Parish and the actions of our government. I’m glad the Council decided to address the issue face-on. While I wouldn’t be surprised if the resulting estimates and property valuations may result in further lawsuits, I think you would see that in any expropriation-like activity and is, for lack of a better term, a Parish growing pain.

In other news, the Council also inexplicably decided to cease holding committee meetings. Prior to this decision, items on the agenda were introduced and then sent to committee for discussion before being voted on before the full Council. The Council has previously eliminated committee meetings for short periods of time before bringing them back once they realized that they couldn’t conclude all of their business at regular Council meetings due to time constraints. Typically, the detailed and nuanced issues were worked out in committee before going to the full Council to avoid long, technical discussions during full Council meetings. Since the Council is supposed to conduct deliberative activity before the public, I find the proposed setup a little odd. Since issues will no longer be heard in committee, the first time the public can provide in-person comment on a topic is also the day it will likely be decided (by which time, most Council members will probably have made up their minds). I guess we’ll have to see how this works out in the long run.

P.S. I want to give a quick shout-out to the East Baton Rouge Parish Library and their amazing collection of online resources. It’s basically like having microfilm/fiche available at any computer with internet access. The regional newspaper archives go as far back as 1837 and you can get Baton Rouge newspapers from as far back as 1854. Seriously, that’s awesome. Love your library and get a library card today.