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BY Jessica L. Beyer Earl, Maher, and Pan's recent article (2022), "The Digital Repression of Social Movements, Protest, and Activism: a synthetic review," captures digital repression across states and presents invaluable conceptualizations of difficult concepts and clear typologies. The article … Continue reading →

By Seda Yucekurt. Why was the 1918 Influenza pandemic largely "forgotten"? The conceptualization of the pandemic as a catastrophic event is multifaceted, involving socio-historical and cultural dimensions. The potential answer lies in the observation, that it coincided with the final stages of the First World War, allowing for socio-historical interpretations based on this contextualization. Apart from the overshadowing effect of the First World War, as several resources indicate, the experiences of the 1918 pandemic may have faded from collective memory due to inadequate documentation and reporting. Does this oblivion or silence prevail in Turkish literature?

By David Malitz. Following its first public conceptualization in 2007, the "Indo-Pacific" has been adopted as the geopolitical framework for strategic policies by numerous governments. This global adoption of the "Indo-Pacific", with differing geographic definitions, has led to the emergence of a sizable literature on the region and the different strategies, visions, and outlooks formulated for it. In this literature, it is customary to refer to the German scholar Karl Haushofer (1869–1946) as first geopolitical thinker to use the term "Indo-Pacific" in the 1920s and therefore to claim or imply an influence of Haushofer's thought on 21st century policy.

In April, most Bossier City residents will be solicited
to slap upon themselves again a large amount of property taxes, and to a
smaller degree parish residents outside of municipalities face the same. As a
result, chances are good that at least some portion of current taxes will be
rejected.

All of Bossier City, Bossier Parish, and the
majority part of both encapsulated in the Cypress Black Bayou Recreation and
Water Conservation District have cued up property tax renewals on the Apr. 27
ballot. The State Bond Commission last week approved
for the date a pair of city levies for 8.32 and 2.71 mils for public safety,
the parish levy 7.43 mils for the library system, and the district levy of 1.54
for general operations and capital outlay.

The four are for ten years, although the district's starts
in 2025 while the other two wouldn't renew until 2026. If all were approved,
city property owners with a $225,000 primary residential property within the
district boundaries would reestablish onto themselves $350.88 annually in property
taxes; those not in the boundaries would add back $327.78; and outside a
municipality in the district would sign on again to $134.55, and those only in
the parish would re-up to $111.45. (Parish Administrator Butch Ford's shack,
which permits
him to evade legal prohibition against his employment, is valued so low,
below the homestead exemption, that his taxes paid won't change regardless of
the outcome of the parish and district votes.)

Citizens within and among these various
jurisdictions have reason for skepticism in renewing these taxes. In the case
of Bossier City, it would be general profligate spending, in part on luxuries
that serve few citizens such as maintaining
tennis courts for a private sector operator that hardly any city residents use;
high-dollar
recreation facilities residents are discouraged, if not prohibited, from using;
and huge capital outlay projects that have low overall value such as the duplicative
Walter O. Bigby Carriageway.

This has put the city into a debt bind. At the end
of 2022,
it had $434.5 million in debt, with this declining slowly over the past couple
of years. With an estimated mid-2022 population of 62,971,
that left it at $6,900 per capita, or in terms of government activities
(excluding enterprise activities, in this instance the city-run water and
sewerage system) $3,400 per capita. These are the highest levels of any
major city in Louisiana, which in part explains why the two major investment
services rank the quality of its debt as only in the third-highest and
fourth-highest categories (high quality with low credit risk, but with some
susceptibility to long-term risks).

Having frittered away dollars on nonessential, if
not questionable, items has had consequences such as government activities long-term
debt interest of about $9 million paid out (its business activities also cost
another $5 million in interest) in 2022 that just a portion of which if freed could
back things like firefighter
pensions or pay raises for city employees, particularly in public safety. Ironically,
adequate funding of public safety is the issue that probably won't lead to a citizens'
revolt at the ballot box on city millages because those address public safety,
as city fathers decades ago clearly must have envisioned since they cleverly tied
these levies explicitly to the most important function local government can
have.

That fact will discourage citizens from voting
down the items in order to teach a lesson to the likes of City Council
graybeards Republicans David
Montgomery and Jeff Free, Democrat
Bubba
Williams, and no party Jeff Darby
who oversaw the fiscal mismanagement over recent decades. After all, even as graybeard
actions have precluded better pay for public safety, removing the millages would
mean no pay and no job for many first responders.

A bit more vulnerable is the parish levy, not only
because library operations aren't nearly as central to parish citizens' lives –
likely the majority of them, aside from early voting, never have set foot in or
connected to the Internet sites of Bossier Parish Libraries – but also as the
parish's Police Jury has engaged in a series of legally
questionable, if not outright illegal, acts in regards to the library. In
particular:

It has had jurors serve on the Library Board of
Control since 2016. State law is somewhat ambiguous about the legality of
this practice – in fact, Bossier is the only parish for which information is readily
available on the web that does this – but an attorney general's opinion on that
question soon will be released.At one point, it appointed Ford as head of libraries
on an interim basis for several months, which unambiguously broke the law as he
did not under state statute have the proper qualifications.Most
recently, it appointed all 12 jurors to the Board. Even as it appears they
will meet in a kind of rotation fashion, that violates state statute that
limits membership to as many as seven parish residents.And, even as some jurors allege they needed to take
over the Board because of problems they refuse to specify were endemic to the
library system that only they could solve – which rings entirely hollow since
jurors were board members for many years before making the board an all-juror
affair – if one of those problems was unsupervised availability of graphic
materials to children, the problem
continues.







These kinds of shenanigans might induce the
electorate to pull the plug on library funding, which would still leave around
100 mils of taxation for the parish that could be reallocated for library
purposes if so desired. Still, the magnitude of the money that would disappear,
as well as arguments that the library does serve school children and others,
likely will save the day for this renewal.

None of that applies to the district levy. Few
parish residents use the park (and have to pay to get in) yet most get taxed
for it, and many of the few hundred property owners to which it is highly
relevant since it foists land use controls upon them who pay hundreds or even
thousands of dollars a year to it depending upon the activities in which they
engage are nonplussed at it. The latter especially have had to endure years of
evasive and opaque management accentuated by a series of questionable decisions
by its Board
of Commissioners and its recently-departed member and (illegally
employed) executive director Robert Berry, from favoritism
to elected officials who appoint them to resisting
accountability to wasting tens
of thousands of dollars in fruitless legal expenses and more on grandiose,
unrealistic plans (which the renewal still advocates, as it in part would
be dedicated to operating a zoo the conceptualization and intentions of which have
been thoroughly botched).

That and the size of the millage and the election
date conspire to put this renewal in real jeopardy. Already asked to approve about
20 mils, voters might think they can afford to drop 7.5 percent of it that they
would see the 1.54 mils as not being missed, even as that comprises over half
of park revenues for 2022.
And while the election date helps the other levies' chances of renewal, because
as very likely these four items will complete the ballot's entirety which will
disproportionately attract to the polls the beneficiaries and families and friends
of most of the items (i.e., Bossier City public safety employees and Bossier
Parish library employees) in favor of these, with close to zero direct
beneficiaries of the district more than offset by a number of disgruntled
landowners, this hurts the chances of that millage passing (although it could get another shot
later in the year if this failed).

Commissioners seem to recognize this and have been
trying to engage landowners in a public relations campaign to improve their
image. They may need to extend that to the public, who will see their ballots
asking for taxes for something most never have heard of, and of those who have
many will have heard negative things, that would seem easy for government to do
without. Of course, a large PR campaign will cost money of which the district
has none, being in the hole $92,650 which would have been nearly three times as
much at the end of 2022 if not for an unspecified one-time insurance payout
that year.

While each of the three entities smartly asked for
renewing at the current millages being paid rather that at the higher amounts
that the measures originally authorized, that may not save the District's
request from tax-fatigued voters. Rejection of that would send a signal to the District at present as
well as to Bossier City and the Parish for the future that voters will take
only so much misrule before they start casting retribution. 

A new revelation from Bossier City's contracted
city engineer relating to a state grant and a water deal between the city and Port of
Caddo-Bossier may explain why a City Council majority passed the deal despite
numerous red flags at least one of its members seemed to miss, as part of campaign
pursued by the Port, contractor Manchac Consulting Group, and the Republican
Mayor Tommy Chandler Administration.

It's frustrating to me, and perhaps repetitive if
not boring to readers, to have to go through this again, because the facts
outlined below have been discussed time
and time
and time
and time
and time
again,
and well in advance of the Apr. 4 meeting that approved the deal. But it all necessarily
deserves another look as a consequence of statements made at the last, Apr. 18,
Council meeting shedding light on the possibility that a strategy of ambiguity
engaged in by several parties with a vested interest in seeing the deal go
through sought to steer, and seemingly successfully did, skeptical councilors
away from a true and full understanding of the deal's implications.

By now, details of the water deal are familiar:
the Port would issue bonds to pay for a water facility for distribution and
treatment that Bossier City would run, which would commit itself to a long-term
liability equal to the total cost of the bond issue for the right to run it and
keep all revenues past costs once that amount had been reached. While the deal
would last 40 years, the obligation to rebate (legally necessary because of city
ordinances that don't let the city treat customers in the same
water/sewerage class differentially in rates charged) would begin only if and
when the city drew a single drop of water from the plant, which could be years
into it.

The financial information attached to it made its
acceptance on the city's part at best a risky gamble. The Port's executive
director Eric England quoted figures that suggested the entire cost of the deal
(two separate bond issues, one of 20 and the other of 30 years' duration) would
come in around $62 million. Further, given the city's recent history of an 11
percent margin on utility sales and those revenues generated, to reach the
point where enough could be made to keep all revenues would require that the
Port's tenants boost sales by 92 percent or, given typical city daily production,
11 million gallons of water a day from day one of the deal's kicking off (and
would be higher the longer it takes for the deal to begin) – a dubious scenario
(alternatively, the new business could be as little as 5.5 MGD, the level at
which the city could meets its obligation but not keep any revenues, as the
deal states it otherwise keeps half beyond costs up to the amount of bond
payments compiled every quarter while rebating the other half, but past that coupon
it keeps all).

In other words, unless the city sold to the Port a
volume of water so high for so long as to be very unlikely to occur, it would
have to hit up utility reserve funds, if not ratepayers, to fulfill its
obligation. Yet as has become evident since the Council backed deal, with the
full support of the Chandler Administration, at least one councilor, and quite
likely others, didn't see it that way. The clearest articulation of that has
come from the only councilor in support who has appeared willing to address and
has spoken in detail about the deal and his reasons for support, Republican Chris Smith.

In essence, Smith has said he doesn't see the deal
as a cumulative payoff to the Port. In his conceptualization of it, once the
deal starts the city gathers revenues and issues rebates, but once the Port's
bonds are extinguished, the city can leave the deal at any time without full
reimbursement. Thus, the perception of risk to ratepayers would diminish substantially.

The problem with this view – let's call it the noncumulative
– is it runs very much counter not only to the actual wording of the cooperative
endeavor agreement, but also to the public rhetoric of England's. And, as
it turns out, was a view that the Chandler Administration didn't discourage councilors
from adopting, possibly for a reason revealed at the last City Council meeting,
the one after deal approval.

Understanding this requires review of the CEA
sections operative to this task. They are worded as follows (emphases added):

SECTION 1.04: Term. The provisions of this
Agreement shall remain binding upon the respective parties hereto and their
successors in office and shall be in effect for a period of Forty (40) years
commencing on the ___ day of ____ , 2023, and ending on the __ day of _____ ,
2063.

SECTION 3.02: Receipt of Sewerage. Within the
limits and subject to the provisions of Article Ill, Sewer Service of the Code
of Ordinances of the City of Bossier City and this Agreement, Bossier City
shall accept for treatment such wastewater as may be generated by the
Commission and its users. Bossier City will treat all sewerage collected
through the sewerage improvements financed with the proceed of the Bonds discussed
in Section 1.02 above until such time as the Bonds described in Section 1.02 have been
fully repaid, except as otherwise provided in this Agreement.

SECTION 3.05: Invoicing…. Bossier City shall remit
to the Commission no later than the fifteenth (15th) day after the closing of
each quarter an amount equal to the lessor of: an amount equal to fifty percent
(50%) of all collections of revenue by or through the delivery of water and sewer services to the Commission and its users,
less documented treatment expenses of Bossier City; and (ii) an amount equal to
the pro rata amount of the next ensuing scheduled payment of principal and/or
interest (if any interest due) on the Bonds described in Section 1.02 above. In no event shall Bossier City be responsible
for remitting such payments described hereinabove, until such a time as water
is being delivered and consumed by the Commission and its users.

SECTION 3.05.1: Prepayment. In no event shall the total payments by Bossier
City to the Commission exceed the principal and interest payments made or to be
made by the Commission on the Bonds described in Section 1.02, unless it is
agreed by and between Bossier City and the Commission that early payment or
payments should be made on the Bonds. Notwithstanding the foregoing,
the total payments by Bossier City to the Commission shall not be less than the
principal and interest payments made or to be made by
the Commission on the Bonds described in Section 1.02.

SECTION 3.06: Termination of Service. Bossier City
may discontinue water service under this Agreement to the Commission or any of
its users for failure to pay monthly bills rendered by Bossier City in
accordance with Bossier City Ordinances.

Here, four words (those in bold) in 3.05.01 make
all the difference. The second sentence of 3.05.01 makes clear that the cumulative
view – that once the deal starts the city owes to the Port the entire estimated
$62 million, one way or the other by, it would appear, April, 2063 – is the one
in effect. And this reflects as well England's rhetoric, who through appearances
to the Council – its regular meetings and the first workshop of two – several
times proclaimed publicly that the Port would have to be "made whole" in any
deal.

Yet by the second workshop, England dropped that
phrasing, perhaps because the cumulative liability to the city was pointed out
in this space and elsewhere, and who instead began saying that questions about
this part of the CEA would have to be referred to the Port's counsel – who,
conveniently enough, never made a public appearance to have to take these kinds
of questions. Still, not once in public did England ever waver from the assertion
that any deal would have to have the Port "made whole" – unmistakably meaning whatever
the Port spent on bonds the city would have to cover and that this was the view
of the Port on the CEA.

In an appearance on a Bossier Watch narrowcast,
Smith tried to discount that ascribed meaning as being reflected in that
section, saying it applied only to the possibility of prepayment. This is
mistaken in triplicate, beginning with the three words "notwithstanding the
foregoing" that negates the interpretation that the rest of the sentence
applies only to 3.05.01 while in fact applying to all of Section 3 addressing
payments.

It's also mistaken in understanding why 3.05.01 is
there. It means that the Port can't force the city to pay more than principal
plus interest due in a period unless the city volunteers. And this leads to the
fourth important word, which entirely invalidates the noncumulative thesis: "prepayment."

"Prepayment" as a concept can't exist unless a total
payment amount already is set in place. If the noncumulative view held, or that
the city paid as it went without any further liability, a prepayment clause would
be irrelevant, for there would be no final amount on which to calculate what
constitutes prepayment, or the excess over the scheduled payment. The very fact
that the CEA has such a clause – much like, for example, a mortgage document may
have such a clause allowing a borrower to prepay in order to save on interest
expenses down the road on the set principal amount – presupposes a fixed
liability the payer can't avoid, validating the cumulative view.

The question now becomes how, and most importantly
why, Smith and perhaps others were led astray from understanding this. Here,
England contributed by alleging that the city could "walk away" from the deal
after extinguishment.

However, in only one place in the CEA is deal termination
discussed, Section 3.06, where if the Port tenants stop paying, the city stops
acting as their utility (even here, it's ambiguous whether the city has pay off
the full $62 million in this instance). Nowhere else does the issue of early
termination arise.

What England appeared to be referring to as "walk
away" is Section 3.02, which states after extinguishment the city can quit
treating sewage, and may have led to Smith's and perhaps others' misunderstanding
that the deal was noncumulative. But that section doesn't address the overall
liability in any way, with it just saying the obligation to treat ends, not the
obligation to pay. The second sentence of 3.05.01 – referred to in 3.02 as "except
as otherwise provided in this Agreement" – confirms that.

That mistaken inference was reiterated by City
Attorney Charles Jacobs, who (after England began refusing to answer questions about
financial obligations) parroted the notion that extinguishment meant deal off.
Still, nothing in the document allows the city unilaterally to terminate the
agreement – which includes paying to the Port an amount of money equivalent to
the "principal and interest payments made or to be made by the Commission on
the Bonds" – except by Port tenant non-payment.

But why would Jacobs do that or, in a larger sense,
not be more diligent in making clearer the actual intent of the CEA insofar as
the city's obligations went? It would have been so easy to ask that, for
example, the second sentence of 3.05.01 be removed, or that additional language
go in that would specify clearly that the city could terminate the deal after
extinguishment without owing anything else – and was something that councilors
could have directed be done had any realized what was going on and had been of
a mind to do that. Yet Jacobs raised no alarms and made no suggestions that
would pivot the document from the cumulative to noncumulative view.

The motives of some who backed the deal were quite
clear. The ordinance's sponsor, Republican Councilor David Montgomery,
since 2008 has made over $600,000 doing business with the Port, on whose governing
Commission sits some of his political allies. The city's contractor for utilities
Manchac Consulting worked both sides of the street, as months prior to deal approval
it had been contracted by the Port to draw up plans for the facility and its
ancillaries, and can be expected to play a major role and rake in millions of
dollars in commissions in the coming buildout.

The Manchac employee seconded as city engineer,
Ben Rauschenbach, throughout the process spoke sympathetically of the deal. As
it turns out, that may have been not only because of the prospect that approval
would bring Manchac future business, but also because Rauschenbach and Manchac,
whether with the initial complicity of Chandler and other administration
officials, apparently committed the city to the deal months before Council
approval in order to secure a grant from the state.

At the Apr. 18 meeting, in
conjunction with an ordinance to appropriate funds, Rauschenbach gave details pertaining
to the city having won a long-desired state grant to work on utilities
infrastructure in the city's south. It basically means the city can perform the
work at one-third cost, ponying up $2.5 million to receive $5 million.

It's not the first time Rauschenbach talked about
the project and grant, having brought it up several times over the preceding
few months. In the first round the city applied for it but, he said, according
to the rubric that scored requests had fallen a few points short. He added that
what he thought this time made the difference, even as he noted the project
originated for different reasons, was the port deal which he declared "pushed
it across the goal line" – "the ability to supply water to the Port was
important to getting the five million."

The Water Sector Program grant of which he spoke
comes from a $300 million pot from the American Rescue Plan, the large debt-fueled
package supposedly responding to the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. At its monthly
meetings, the Water Sector Commission comprised of state legislators makes a
decision, which it then passes on to the Legislature's Joint Legislative
Committee on the Budget for final approval (memberships overlap).

His comments seemed to suggest recent approval, because
the Council only had given the green light to the water deal two weeks earlier.
But, in fact, the grant had been submitted back on Aug. 26, 2022, approved
by the Commission on Dec. 12, and days later by the JLCB. Indeed, the
project scored sixth-highest out of dozens approved. This event even was acknowledged
in Ordinance
180 of 2022 passed by the Council on Dec. 20 in that "Manchac Consulting
Group has assisted the City in the successful recommendation of the water
sector programs $5,000,000 grant award."

How could a deal only approved in Apr., 2023 be
part of a grant application approved in Dec., 2022? Only if the city
prematurely had inserted the deal as part of that, with the Port's blessing but
as yet without the Council's. Keep in mind that at its Oct. 17 meeting the Port
had approved its Resolution
19 of 2022 that authorized pursuit of the bonds to build the facility –
even mentioning that the money would go to "purchasing the necessary right-of
way for constructing and installing a water main, valve, hydrants, and other
appurtenances from the southern edge of Bossier City Water System to the Port's
campus which will be used to service residential customers along the route, in
addition to future industrial tenants of the Port" – six months before city
approval ever came.

In other words, the city had to approve the
deal in order to make good its promise to the state that the project the state
had funded would include the deal. And if that meant the Chandler
Administration joining with Manchac and the Port to downplay that the city was
making a hard $62 million commitment in order to cultivate the impression that this
wasn't so as a strategy to convince skeptical councilors, so be it.

So, who was in on it? Obviously Rauschenbach and
Manchac, whose behind-the-scenes maneuvering on this should become a serious
talking point when the firm's contract expires next year. That means at some
point Chandler and the rest of his administration had to have known and given
assent. And as obviously Montgomery, who receives invitations to Port
Commission meetings and when
the measure first came up, perhaps unaware of what he was letting slip, to
the Council delivered an impassioned plea not to delay a matter that "we've
been working on for quite some years."

Clearly not were Montgomery's fellow graybeards no
party Jeff
Darby and Democrat Bubba Williams,
who voted against it. Smith's dogged pursuit of workshops to explore the topic suggests
he wasn't, nor another councilor who like Smith has a short but clear history
of fiscal probity, Republican Brian Hammons,
who seemingly unaware that the grant had gone through despite his voting on
#180 actually asked Rauschenbach at the last meeting whether the Port deal had
contributed to the grant win.

In his Bossier Watch interview, Smith voiced
optimism that the decision had been made in an open and deliberative fashion,
contrary to the reputation the city has had for its elected officials making
backroom deals prior to the election that brought Smith onto the Council. On
this deal, that desire seems entirely misplaced. That Smith and perhaps others apparently
unwittingly supported a fiscally-suspect done deal isn't so much reflective of
a lyric from the rock band The Who, "Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss," but
an inability to achieve what the line previous to that counsels: "We don't get
fooled again."