Also, funding approved to restore fire station
Shreveport Mayor Tom Arceneaux has ambitious plans to address blight in the city. It was his focus when he attended the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative. He has also recruited a team to help him with his mission.
Arceneaux appointed a team to spend a week at Harvard, where they began developing plans for the initiative.
“Back in December, we had a group of about 20 to 25 people who got together,” Arceneaux said. “This was a subset of that group. They came back with the beginnings of a plan.
“They’re going to be meeting with members of the city council to go over the ideas they developed in that week at Harvard. Then they will meet with the larger group and maybe some additional people to begin the process of having a collaborative plan that a lot of stakeholders can buy into.”
The mayor said that buy-in will be critical to the project.
“This is a very ambitious topic,” he said.
“It is going to require all aspects of the community to develop it. Without buy-in from everybody, we won’t have the resources that we need to make it happen.”
Arceneaux said the team has the beginnings of a plan that will be a work in progress.
“I believe what we will end up doing is starting small to get some experiences and some success under our belts,” he said. “Instead of making all of the mistakes city-wide and learning from those, we’ll have some smaller aspects of the project that we can say this worked, this didn’t work, this was a good thing we need to continue.”
He added that a common shortcoming of governments is not taking that kind of approach.
“One of the things the government is sometimes bad at doing is experimenting,” Arceneaux said. “Because politically, we don’t like to acknowledge failure. But when you’re doing something of the scale we are talking about, there will be fits and starts. There will be successes and failures. We need to be able to acknowledge that this part worked and this part didn’t work. And to say on the front end that we know that there will be aspects of this that will be successful and there will be parts that won’t work. The goal is to have a program that works long-term, not to do something short-term that’s very broad but not very deep. That’s what we are aiming to do.”
Fire station gets funds for renovation
The Shreveport City Council approved funding for restoring and renovating the Shreveport Fire Department’s Station 20, which is located near the corner of Youree Drive and Flournoy-Lucas Road.
The station was closed for two years after mold was found in the building.
“That station ended up with some really significant problems,” Arceneaux said. “It is stripped down to the exterior walls. We are redoing the entire inside of that station. It had a failed HVAC system. It had mold. It had all kinds of things wrong with it. So we have to start from scratch.”
He said the facility was built in coordination with the Port of Caddo-Bossier. The Port is providing over half of the renovation funds — about $867,000.
“We took bids,” Arceneaux said of the project. “We really thought that was going to be enough. But when the bids came in, they were about $1.4 million. So we’re having to come up with some additional dollars.”
The council voted to take the project cost balance out of the city’s operating reserve.
That was not what Arceneaux would have preferred.
“Our counterproposal was to take it out of the $2.9 million extra we got when we sold the $88 million worth of bonds,” he said. “Because of the interest rate, we actually got a premium of $2.9 million.”
Arceneaux said that taking the funds from the operating reserve will drop that reserve below 8% of the operating budget, a benchmark set by the city’s bond rating agencies and bond insurers.
“They said they do not want it to go below that,” he said. “We are about to go out to the market for another $20-something million in bonds. I really believe using the operating reserve is not the best decision.”
Operation A.S.K. B.L.U.E. gets early answer
Arceneaux said the city has made its first arrest in a campaign to crack down on the squatters.
The city council recently amended city ordinances to make it easier for Shreveport Police to address squatters on vacant properties. After those changes were approved, the police launched Operation A.S.K. B.L.U.E. to address the matter.
“We made an arrest of a fellow in Highland who was living on a piece of property he didn’t have a possessory interest in,” Arceneaux said. “He was actually living in a travel trailer. He wasn’t authorized to be there. It was in very bad condition. It didn’t have plumbing or anything hooked up to it. They did make an arrest. They are working on an operation to deal with it on a larger scale.”
