Term limits or term nitwits?

It was with expectations for fresh ideas and a new direction in January that we declared our 10 new Metro Council members “People to Watch,” agents of change with the power to bring better days to Baton Rouge.

Many took office, after all, thanks to term limits, this community’s way of demanding long-overdue change from our local leaders. In the honeymoon glow of their election victories, they stepped up to their first, golden opportunity to deliver on that promise: appointing people to boards and commissions.

They failed not once, but twice.

As we pointed out in February when we awarded the Metro Council a “Shame,” they blew it on a pair of appointments to the BREC board that oversees our community’s public parks. The Council reappointed one member and recycled another from the past, both of them retirees.

For their next test—filling an opening on the all-important Planning and Zoning Commission—they quickly deadlocked in a tie vote, mostly along racial lines.

It caused a shudder: Surely this new group would not fall into the same pattern of prior councils. The vote at hand involved a current member of the Planning and Zoning Commission who was term limited—the very concept that put four of our new Council members in office.

Things didn’t go any better when they took up the appointment a second time. They had two choices: a newcomer versus a member whose term had expired on yet another of her terms as a public appointee. Surely, we thought, our new Metro Council would choose change—especially given that it would take no fewer than nine votes to override the established term limit to keep this appointee any longer.

Trae Welch, a Democrat from the northern end of the parish, represented the term-limited member. Welch’s argument: There was no one from his area on the Planning and Zoning Commission, and since the woman had ably served as his area’s only appointee to BREC, she made a fine choice.

Are Welch and the rest of the Council telling us the only person in the northern part of East Baton Rouge Parish willing and qualified to serve on these two commissions happens to be the current, term-limited member? Please.

It’s stunning how quickly politics change people when they take office.

And now, rather than drawing strength from their still-fresh election by voters hungry for change, our new class of Metro Council members has promptly jumped for cover into the same foxhole where so many previous Council members have cowered and failed to find the guts to make the tough decisions this community needs from its leaders.