Baton Rouge voters will head to the polls on Saturday to decide one key issue: how to make up for a steep budget shortfall.
East Baton Rouge Parish is facing a $21 million deficit after the breakaway of the city of St. George and the end of COVID-era funding. To fill it, officials are looking to three East Baton Rouge agencies: the East Baton Rouge Public Library, the East Baton Rouge Council on Aging and the East Baton Rouge Mosquito and Rodent Abatement.
Under Mayor-President Sid Edwards’ Thrive plan, the three agencies would rededicate a part of their millage — or a tax that equals about a dollar for every $1,000 a piece of property is worth — to the city-parish to deal with the deficit.
The plan would also take one-time portions of the library’s and mosquito abatement's operating budget to mostly go towards paying down debt.
Mason Batts, the executive director at the mayor-president’s office, said paying down the debt will free up more money in the general fund to further make up for the deficit.
“ That pays off all of the debt in the general fund. Not some, not part, but all,” he said. “And that's not to say we'll be debt-free.”
Voters will decide on the fate of each agency’s millage separately in three propositions: the first for the library, the second for mosquito abatement and the third for the Council on Aging.
Both the mosquito abatement and the Council on Aging believe the change will not affect them.
Thrive is not targeting the mosquito abatement's main millage, but instead what is essentially the department’s emergency funds.
“ It is not gonna affect us at all,” Kenny Ricard, a pest control inspector at mosquito abatement, said. “We'll be able to continue our day-to-day function with everything that we are doing.”
While the plan does target the Council on Aging’s main millage, the same is true for them.
“ [Tasha Clark Amar, the head of the Council on Aging, has] been able to manage all of her programs and services, provide for seniors, have staffing levels that meet the needs of serving seniors with the 2.0 (mills),” said James Gillmore, Jr., with Generations United PAC, the political action committee that advocates for the council. “She's not missing anything.”
The public library, however, is in a different situation than the others.
The library is up for its millage renewal, which happens every 10 years and is put before voters. Organizations have to ask for a maximum they will ever want to collect, even if they don’t intend to collect the full amount.
Currently, the library does not collect the full amount of taxes it could, only collecting just shy of 10 mills of the 11.1 mills it's allocated.
Under Thrive, the library will collect about 8 mills, with the city collecting the difference — about 3 mills.
Mary Stein, the Assistant Library Director, said the library will take a nearly $7.7 million cut if the proposal passes. A hiring freeze on some positions is already in place.
“We've already frozen 72 positions scattered around the parish so that you, as a library user, don't really see the difference,” Stein said. “But we do. We've already made some cuts to the book budget and the database budget.”
The library is very popular in East Baton Rouge, and some of its supporters are against the plan. They want the library to keep their tax money and think voting the plan down could get the library its full millage back.
But Stein said the library relies on the parish, and both would suffer if it can't make up the shortfall.
“If the whole city parish is the body and we're the heart, if the body dies, the heart dies, too,” Stein said.
If the propositions funding mosquito abatement and the Council on Aging fail, they have another year to go back on the ballot before their funding runs out. If the proposition funding the library fails, it won’t have funding immediately, and Stein said it would be much worse for the library.
“ If the tax does not pass, we're gonna have to make much harder decisions, she said. ”It won't be as simple as we won't buy 55 copies of James Patterson's book — we’ll buy just 50. It's gonna be way deeper than that.”
Major cuts to the parish budget will also have to be made if voters don’t pass the Thrive plan. The mayor-president’s office had to present a budget to the metro council that assumes Thrive does not pass, and it features nearly across-the-board cuts of 11% and a 33% cut to staff.
