> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.redeyebr.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # 14 cents - URL: https://www.redeyebr.com/14-cents/ - Published: 2026-07-22T03:20:42.000Z - Updated: 2026-07-22T03:20:42.000Z - Description: How 75 years of decisions left the city-parish government broken and financially paralyzed. - Author: JR Ball - Tags: Analysis 📝 Note: **RedEye's* JR Ball spoke at Baton Rouge Rotary about decisions that led to parish government's financial troubles. The presentation is below, as is a based on it. **The entirety of East Baton Rouge Parish government** spends $2.33 billion a year—the Metro Council and Mayor Sid Edwards control 14 cents of every dollar generated. **Why it matters:** The city-parish's fiscal challenge isn't a St. George story, a spending story or a tax story—it's a design story 75 years in the making. **Structural flaw:** East Baton Rouge set out to build one thing—a government of the greater good—but instead built another—a byzantine system of what's in it for me. - EBR's consolidated model began in 1947 with a baked-in problem: public schools and BREC were not part of it. - The state didn't impose those structures. Parish residents lobbied for them, not trusting the government they were creating. - The library system, CATS and mosquito abatement came later, each carved out of the consolidated framework and given independent boards and dedicated funding streams. - Voters have for generations fenced-off whatever they valued most with a dedicated tax. Each time the general fund got weaker, less flexible and less trustworthy, making the next dedicated tax seem more necessary. - Baker and Zachary—already incorporated cities—each eventually secured their own school districts through the Legislature. Then Central incorporated specifically to get one, keeping its sales tax revenue local and outside the consolidated general fund. **Change of plan:** Mayor Sid Edwards, with city-parish government facing a financial strain when he entered office in 2025, tried to redirect some dedicated dollars from the library, mosquito abatement and the Council on Aging. - His plan, ThrivEBR, faced numerous hurdles, including a horrific rollout and bad messaging, but what matters is voters said no, reinforcing the underlying problem. **Race matters:** Another flaw the designers of 1947 failed to factor in: EBR's well-established racial divide and how that would play out once the population numbers balanced and power had to be shared. - A "better together" ideal requires a community willing to be together. - That has never been a given in this parish. **Monumental decision:** Federal Judge John Parker's May 1, 1981, desegregation ruling for East Baton Rouge Parish schools didn't cause the fragmentation—but it accelerated it in ways the city-parish government was never designed to absorb. - Families moved. Subdivisions exploded in the unincorporated southeast. A parish organized around one dominant city suddenly had a second center of gravity. - Those same suburban areas pushed for a 1982 Plan of Government update, creating the Metro Council—combining the separate City and Parish councils into a single governing body—and the 2% sales tax sharing mechanism now at the center of the St. George dispute. - Baton Rouge's tax base, in other words, built out the suburbs that would eventually leave. **Math problem:** Of the $2.33 billion flowing through parishwide government annually, $1.17 billion belongs to entities over which the Metro Council and mayor-president have zero say—the school system, BREC, CATS and the sewerage authority. - The remaining $1.16 billion city-parish budget includes $736 million locked in voter-approved dedicated funds—MovEBR, Green Light, solid waste, sewerage operations, infrastructure debt. - The library's $79 million and mosquito abatement's $13 million sit inside that locked pile. What remains as the general fund—the part elected leadership actually controls—is $332 million. Fourteen cents on the dollar. **Hits keep coming:** Police and fire consume roughly $150 million of that $332 million before a single other decision gets made. - Constitutional offices—the DA, courts, coroner, public defender—take the next layer. - What remains for roads, drainage, permits and administration is roughly $160 million out of $2.33 billion. - The city-parish's own 2024 compensation study found that for every $100 spent on salaries, an additional $75 goes to benefits—nearly double the 30-38% national average—the product of retirement systems launched with the same actuarial flaw as Louisiana's state systems. - Once mandatory spending runs its course, that 14-cent number drops to 7 cents. **Who pays:** The DA, courts, coroner and public defender are mandated by the Louisiana Constitution to serve every parish resident regardless of which city they live in—but not everyone contributes to funding them. - Just over $20 million annually flows from the city-parish general fund to those offices. Exactly zero comes from Baker, Central, St. George or Zachary. - St. George, Baker and Central recently agreed to contribute a combined $400,000 to the public defender's office. Zachary opted out. - The mayors of the suburban cities, a source says, are meeting to put together a funding proposal. **The straw:** St. George didn't create this problem. St. George revealed it—86,000 residents and one-fifth of the parish sales tax base gone, a departure large enough that the fracture everyone had been ignoring became impossible to deny. **The bottom line:** Baton Rouge and the parish created a flawed government from the start and have spent the past 75 years making it worse—with every incorporation, every independent taxing agency, every dedicated tax and every clearly visible warning sign ignored along the way.