A lesson in accountability

As Emil Faber, the fictional founder of Faber College tells us: "Knowledge is good."

Why it matters: The Animal House classic quote is right, and the more East Baton Rouge residents know about the inner workings of city-parish government and its various parishwide taxing agencies, the easier it is to hold leadership accountable.

The challenge: Ask 10 Baton Rouge residents who's responsible for a pothole, a property tax assessment, an abandoned house or cleaning a drainage canal, and you'll get 10 different answers—city-parish, the assessor's office, BREC, the DDD, take your pick.

• That confusion isn't an accident. It's what happens when the government is this fragmented and there's no one to explain how the pieces fit together.
• East Baton Rouge Parish, over the past 70 years, has created a byzantine government: city-parish government, an independent public school system, BREC, a library system, mosquito abatement, CATS, four city governments splitting responsibility with the city-parish and, yes, state-mandated constitutional offices, like the sheriff, DA, coroner and public defender.
• Residents who can't trace responsibility or navigate this crazy maze default to blaming "government" broadly—or worse, disengaging entirely, deepening an already fragile trust in local institutions.

A solution: Baton Rouge should explore Chelsea, Massachusetts, and its free, 11-week Civic Leadership Academy.

• The program walks residents through how its local government actually functions—budgeting, human resources, road repaving decisions, property assessments.
• It's not an original idea. Amherst, Watertown, Lexington, Danvers and Barnstable all run versions of the same program.

The details: We get the government we deserve, and better government requires an investment of time.

• Sessions typically run weekly for two to three hours across eight to eleven weeks.
• A different department leads each week—finance, planning, public works—often with a facility tour attached.
• City staff teach it directly. No outside consultants required.

The real payoff: Officials running these programs are candid that education is only half the goal.

• Graduates are the pipeline for board and commission volunteers, and eventually, candidates for office.
• Alumni also become informal correctors of misinformation in neighborhood Facebook groups—residents trust neighbors more than press releases.

The bottom line: A resident academy that maps how local governing power is divided would cost little and could do more for civic trust than a canvass trip or study ever will. To quote Dean Vernon Wormer, "Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son."