Still up for a challenge? – Editorial

It’s official: East Baton Rouge Parish voters aren’t interested in funding essential services like public safety, traffic improvement and drainage if it means consenting to support someone’s bold, expensive vision—in this case, Mayor Kip Holden’s dream of a signature riverfront destination.

That recipe has now twice gone down to defeat. As a result, the mayor begins 2010 with the challenge of yet again pursuing a crucial bond issue, the third time in as many years, in order to provide desperately needed new jail space and a police headquarters that’s not literally collapsing on cops’ heads.

Voters in 2008 defeated a similar bond issue by a much narrower margin, an election that enjoyed a robust turnout due to the presidential election. A month prior, Holden enjoyed his own lopsided re-election victory, which he interpreted—along with what seems like a gnawing, growing hunger for progress among younger voters—as enough momentum to try his bond issue a year later.

But how quickly the political landscape can change.

Wall Street’s meltdown and gaudy corporate bailouts sowed fury among voters, not to mention honest-to-goodness fear about job security and families’ financial futures.

And this time there would be no Obama on the ballot to energize and turnout voters, particularly minority voters who overwhelmingly supported the bond issue.

Holden certainly didn’t help himself with voters increasingly distrustful of government: he and his administration were not forthcoming enough on the land issues swirling around the riverfront attraction Alive.

The mayor is a veteran politician, he took a calculated risk and he lost. On one hand, Holden may have been too stubborn by pinning hopes on Alive, a $225 million dream that feel flat in the suburbs where anti-downtown sentiment is not uncommon.

The price of Holden’s gamble is the police and sheriff’s departments will have to wait at least another year for urgent improvements and upgrades to begin, as will motorists stuck in traffic and homeowners in flood-prone parts of the parish.

The struggle for a better future, however, is not over.

We challenge Baton Rouge’s young voters and progressive-minded residents not to be discouraged. Progress is not a battle, it’s a war. It requires continued, informed engagement, as well as a fresh supply of new ideas and energy.

Our mayor suffered his worst political defeat yet. Now he must cobble together a bond package to pay for our community’s most urgent needs, but without strings attached to Alive—and possibly even without it.

The mayor went all-in in championing the bond proposal on his own terms, and he managed to pick up widespread support from the business community and political leaders.

We still think basic infrastructure is needed, but settling for nothing more is a surrender to mediocrity. And we still believe Baton Rouge is better than that.

Once again there are murmurs about our city-parish form of government, and the temptation to separate those wanting progress from those who prefer the status quo.

How quickly the landscape can change.

We anxiously away the mayor’s next move.