Following Tuesday’s Bossier City Council and Shreveport City Council meetings, Wednesday’s news headlines were a study in contrasts.

Shreveport council members are looking to provide over a thousand city employees with a one-time $1,000 payment just before Christmas; Bossier City council members are struggling to prevent notifying over 100 city employees that they won’t have a job after Christmas.

Shreveport has the advantage of already having had a tough budget year (200 jobs remain unfilled), and several million in Haynesville Shale proceeds is apparently a gift worth sharing.  Bossier, on the other hand must confront its continuing gap between revenues and expenditures.

That, of course, was the focus of Tuesday’s council agenda meeting.  While the council chamber was packed with concerned citizens, fewer than expected took the podium.  Those who did speak were adamantly opposed to any personnel reductions in the city’s fire and police departments, their sentiments endorsed by the applause of those who otherwise didn’t speak.

Interestingly the cuts to city personnel are roughly proposed to be one-third in the Police Department, one-third in the Fire Department, and one-third in other city departments.

Said one speaker, “We want to be safe; we want our money spent on fire and police.”

No one, however, spoke on behalf of the folks in those other city departments.

And that’s part of the problem here, because while public safety protection is a critical element of service provided by any local government, it’s not the only important service provided.  Anyone care whether or not the department that employees the folks who provide our herbicide and mosquito control suffers a 50 percent personnel cut?

That didn’t come up Tuesday, and frankly council members still seem a little shell-shocked by what is most certainly should not, to them, come as a surprising general fund budget deficit.  

What wasn’t heard Tuesday were Council generated ideas to trim the current budget enough to move forward in coming years to bring the general fund’s expenditures in line with its receipts.  While Council member Jeff Darby will offer a resolution at next week’s regular council meeting to compel monthly council budget/finance updates in the future (helpful to keep council members in the loop), that doesn’t do anything to resolve this year’s budget dilemma.  

Nor does side-stepping an honest response to the question of “how we got here,” which the council did with some finesse.  

While there were a few suggestions about how to cut areas other than salaries, such as studying every line item, and cutting department heads’ pay (while increasing their duties), there’s been a dearth of ideas coming off the council regarding a current general fund budget deficit that’s built largely on the history of the last several years of general fund budget deficits.      

There was heavy suggestion, however, that this is the “Mayor’s budget,” which is partially true – but factually, it is the Mayor’s proposed budget –  which the council can and has in the past often changed and on which the council votes.  The Mayor does not have a vote.

But perhaps the strongest contrast on Wednesday morning is the difference between a decisive and forward thinking/moving council of only a couple of weeks ago, and the indecisive and defensive council of Tuesday.  Now might be a good time to suggest that while the deadline to adopt the general fund budget is December 1, such is written not in stone, but on paper.  While it’s a rarity, the council has on occasion gone beyond the deadline to get it right.  

And, humbly and respectfully submitted, getting it right just might involve resurrecting a council budget committee to really hash out the details of this not unexpected “crisis.”

The blame-game and hand-wringing are a damned poor excuses for stepping up and working the problem to a reasonable resolution.

Marty Carlson is a columnist for the Bossier Press-Tribune and has been covering local issues for more than 10 years. She may be reached via email at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

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