Secession crisis

If the St. George separatists get their way this fall, things are going to get very bad for Baton Rouge very quickly.

A new study claims the city-parish stands to lose approximately $48.3 million annually should the proposed city of St. George successfully incorporate in southeast East Baton Rouge Parish.

The study, prepared by Richard CPAs at the request of the city-parish's Finance Department, also claims every city-parish department and agency would need to cut its budget by a minimum of 18 percent across the board should the incorporation occur.

Currently only residents within the limits of the proposed St. George will be allowed to vote on the separation question. There's a bill in the legislature right now that would expand the vote to the parish as a whole giving a voice to the people who would be hurt the most by it.  It's scheduled for a committee hearing tomorrow. 

Breakaway Republicans

The St. George petition has apparently succeeded.

Now we get to hear Bodi White and Woody Jenkins tell us how extremely not racist any of this is.  Looking forward to that.

Lost causers

The St. George separatist movement is back.

Supporters who want to create a city of St. George in East Baton Rouge Parish announced Friday that they're launching a renewed petition drive.

In a video posted to the group's Facebook page, the group says it's ready to "reignite their efforts to make East Baton Rouge Parish a better place to live and raise a family for everyone."

Mayor President Sharon Weston Broome has opposed the movement, which seeks not only to create a new city in the unincorporated southern portion of the parish but also to create a new school district independent of the parish school system. A 21-month petition drive fell just short of getting on the ballot in 2015.

Broome has had kind of a rocky first year in office. The St. Georgers might be trying to capitalize on that a bit.  It won't work (probably.) But they're nothing if not persistent.  

How do you embolden secessionists?

You beat them in an election, of course. That's just politics 101.

Just days after her weekend runoff win over Bodi White, who had been a key player in the failed breakaway St. George movement before backing away from it during the campaign, proponents of carving out a new city were back on the case. Newspaper editor and veteran politician Woody Jenkins, one of the movement's chief proponents, went so far as to say he's 99 percent sure of success next time.

"The Union must and shall be preserved"

The dream of Wanklandia is now Jeff Arnold's lost cause.

Algiers' push to break away from New Orleans was halted by a Louisiana Senate committee Thursday (June 4). House Bills 235 and 744 were deferred by the Committee on Local and Municipal Affairs

Amusingly, that is exactly how he is treating it.

As the longest-serving House member, he scored the support of his colleagues the second time around in the 2015 session. But on Thursday (June 4), a Senate committee blocked the framework for the West Bank community to incorporate, dealing a fatal blow to the dean of the House in his final term.

"The fact of the matter is we are viewed differently by the general electorate. We have to do things to draw attention to Algiers,'' Arnold said after the vote. "We are not the French Quarter. We are not the lakefront.

"We are a bedroom community, with small businesses, a few medium ones, that wants what everybody else has. We don't garner the attention of the city as the other communities do.''

I wouldn't necessarily disagree with the suggestion that the not-so-heavily touristed corners of town get neglected. But it's hard to see how Algiers is any special case in this regard compared to, say, East New Orleans. Heck, even Lakeview feels like they don't get enough attention. They're wrong about that, of course, but at least they don't want to run off and be their own redundant city-within-a-city over some potholes.

Meanwhile. in Baton Rouge.

The anti-St. George group Better Together said Thursday it believes the Registrar of Voters Office was off by as many as 239 signatures in validating the initial 18,000 signatures submitted on a petition to create a new city.

St. George organizers, hoping to secure a vote, turned in their first round of signatures on a petition with the goal of collecting support from 25 percent of registered voters in the proposed city.

The Registrar’s Office announced at the end of March that it had finished validating the more than 18,000 names that were turned in and found that only 15,156 were valid — creating a shortfall of about 2,700 names.

Better Together is suggesting the gap should be larger, closer to 2,900 names, based on its own review of the registrar’s work so far.

What.. is that still going on? St. George is likely to fail just like the City of Algiers did. But it's hard to escape the general atmosphere of devolution all of this evokes. Why not just go the whole nine and scrap the State of Louisiana in favor of 4 million independent sovereign citizens?  Maybe that will allow each of to accept our own Medicaid expansion .

Secession

Florida is the latest in a recent string of states to consider not being those states anymore.

Secession talk had notably bubbled up in far northern California and in northeast Colorado last year, with the latter state actually holding a vote on a 51st state initiative in 11 counties. Five of those 11 Colorado counties voted in favor of seceding from the state by strong margins.

In both those states, secession advocates cited a lack of representation in a state government controlled by Democrats as motivation for breaking away. But Harris suggested a major motivating factor behind his proposal was the Republican-controlled state government's failure to address the effects of climate change on south Florida, where sea levels are rising at a rate that may put Miami underwater by the end of the century.

If only it were that easy in Louisiana.  The part of our state most vulnerable to the effects of climate change is also the part most militant about not doing anything about it.

Besides, in this state we only petition to secede about important local issues.  Such as not wanting to share a school district with the black parts of town. 

The Fuck You Vote

"City of St. George" separatists are still short of the necessary 18,000 signatures they need for their breakaway from Baton Rouge ballot initiative.  What's interesting is the reason they believe they came very close to their goal.

Lionel Rainey, St. George spokesman, said Tuesday morning that the group would not be submitting its petition by Wednesday, which is the deadline to have the November election.

Last week, the group announced they had 17,076 signatures. It was the first time they had disclosed their signature counts since December.

He said he didn’t have an updated signature count but estimated that at least 200 more signatures had been collected in the past week.

“It was a really good week,” he said, attributing some of the past week’s momentum to a PBS “Frontline” documentary that aired last week on the effort that he says unfairly depicted the movement as racially motivated.

“Absolutely it was positive for us, these people are not prejudice,” he said. “There is no racial or class motive around this, they just want better for their children. And rightfully so, that frustrates them.”

This is a phenomenon the late Greg Peters once described as "the Fuck You vote." In essence, signatories are saying, sure, this might be a stupid, revanchist, and racist initiative.  But "Fuck You" for telling us not to sign it.

City Upon A Hill

The City of St. George separatist movement takes on a religious dimension.

Proponents of incorporating a new city of St. George provided a church, a pulpit and a traveling minister to make their pitch to area residents Thursday night. From the pulpit at Woodlawn Baptist Church, Rev. C.L. Bryant—a conservative backer of the tea party movement from Shreveport—delivered a passionate message about how the people of southeast East Baton Rouge Parish had to form a city to protect themselves from "the titans—the people who run the show" in Baton Rouge and to thwart the "totalitarian tyrannical hand coming down on this country."

Signing the incorporation petition and then voting in favor of a new city will "send a message" to "the titans," he said. Amid outcries from the audience of, "That's right!" and "Yes!" and outbursts of applause, Bryant said the choice of how one is governed is "the essence of American liberty," adding, "This is a uniquely American thing you are doing." In one of several references to the founding of the republic, Bryant noted that "it is they who are using your tax dollars while you are being under-served by them." He urged residents to "stand up for God and country" by signing the petition.

So the obvious temptation is to draw comparison with Jonathan Winthrop's famous "Model of Christian Charity" sermon.  As every fourth grader should know, the sermon  from which we get the following,

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.

has, in later centuries, become a touchstone of the rhetoric of American Exceptionalism.  It's also sometimes used as a shorthand dogwhistle code for fundamentalists concerned with putting God back in the Gubmint.

But there are problems with this sort of appropriation. 

The residents of the Breakaway Republic Of St. George are rushing  to secede from Baton Rouge not so much out of a desire to demonstrate their Christian Charity but instead to ensure that they don't have to pay for other people's children to go to school anymore. 

If the St. Georgians had hired (curious about Bryant's speaker's fee, btw) Winthrop to speak to their meeting, one wonders what they would have made of this.

Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.

The Baton Rouge Civil War

Getting more and more ridiculous by the day.

A Baton Rouge Metro Councilman concerned the proposed city of St. George would result in higher taxes and diminished services, said he will sponsor an ordinance to annex “each and every property owner in the unincorporated area of the parish that requests to become part of the city of Baton Rouge.”

Only those properties directly adjacent to the city of Baton Rouge are eligible for annexation by ordinance of the Metro Council.

One envisions a scenario where the newly created City of St. George slowly erodes away at the edges (just like the Louisiana coastline!) as each property owner abutting Baton Rouge compares tax rates. 

Or maybe someone will notice that the St. George secession campaign is being organized by a for-profit LLC and so is probably an invalid petition already. 

In my mind this raises the specter of a legally disputed secession. What happens then?  Do the BRPD have to arrest the insurrectionists?  Do the wealthier neighborhoods of St. George organize their private security patrols into a makeshift militia?  What chaos ensues then? 

Okay none of that is going to happen.  Everyone knows the traffic makes just driving from one side of Baton Rouge to the other highly impractical, let alone trying to invade. 

Baton Rouge also has a "Faubourg Stacy"

Half the town just going Galt, as they say.

St. George supporters announced last week that they have about half of the 18,000 signatures needed to let voters decide whether the unincorporated area south of Baton Rouge’s city limits should become its own municipality. There’s no timeline to get the required signatures, which represent about 25 percent of the registered voters in the proposed city.

The St. George effort began as a push for a new school district, but it snowballed into the effort to create a new city after the state Legislature repeatedly brushed off the school proposal. The Legislature this year approved the new district but didn’t fund it, effectively killing the effort again. The school district boundaries approved by the Legislature don’t match the proposed new city’s limits, but organizers say they will ask lawmakers to redraw the lines if they are successful in incorporating St. George.

With 107,000 residents at stake, the St. George effort is the state’s largest municipal breakaway attempt in recent history. Central, which set off as its own city in East Baton Rouge in 2005, was about a quarter of the size of St. George and had a much, much smaller retail base.

Just imagine if New Orleans neighborhoods behaved this way.  What kind of a balkanized mess would we have on our hands if we just carved ourselves up into semi-autonomous quasi-private tourism, "economic development,"  police, and school districts.  What would that look like?