JOHN PERKINS
Mr. Larry English’s Shreveport Economic Recovery Task Force (SERT) Plan is the talk of Zoom meetings all over Shreveport.
English lives in New York City, but stepped up to fill a huge leadership vacuum in Shreveport, formerly known as, “a city on the grow.” SERT took some time to talk with neighborhood leaders, which informs their report. Well done.
I was relieved to find that Mr. English only mentioned his pet project, the one known here as the Billion Dollar Boondoggle, three times in the first seven pages of the document. Nice.
I like the idea of improving Shreveport’s digital infrastructure.
Many here are jealous of Lafayette’s municipal broadband infrastructure, which is basically set up like a utility, providing broadband for all. Chattanooga, Tenn., did it first, and it is a great idea that could bring broadband into the poorest of neighborhoods.
But, after Lafayette went online and won a lawsuit brought by digital giants, Louisiana legislators sided with those digital giants and wrote a law against that sort of municipal ownership of broadband. For now, Lafayette is the only city in the state where this is possible.
I support and will work with SERT to move our legislature forward on that issue next year. The legislature works for us after all, right?
Now for the gold-pooping unicorn.
SERT misses the problem that is holding Shreveport at the bottom of every list of the top 300 cities in the nation. Currently, we rank 302 on one list and look up to cities like Jackson, Miss., and Flint, Mich.
Our problem here is that our past leaders were suckers who bought every bad idea peddled by a “developer” from out of town. For decades we relied on silver bullet projects that asked us to take on a huge debt to match federal dollars, or perhaps to attract private investors, that once completed would “put us on the map.”
No one looked to see if those silver bullets were actually a good idea, or if the “developer” had ever accomplished anything. We built a lot of bad ideas, and a bad idea is a bad idea. It is not right or left, white or black, it is just a bad idea.
Too many times we fell for government money match schemes.
The feds will send us a million dollars for crepe myrtles to doll up the side of the interstate (that we can’t afford to keep repaired or even mowed) if we’ll match it with a million of our own dollars. When you see two scraggily crepe myrtles standing along I-20, they were once part of million-dollar beautification project.
We keep making these same megaproject mistakes. When does it stop?
Next week, a look at the SERT document and talk about projects we all can agree would make Shreveport better, not bigger.
Without having to find that goldpooping unicorn down in the basement of old city hall, or was it left out at the baseball stadium?
THIS ARTICLE WAS PUBLISHED IN THE August 14 ISSUE OF FOCUS SB - THE INQUITITOR.