Mayor Broome takes on her toughest job yet...

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Fortunately, the Capital Region economy is in pretty good shape, and the prospects for growth are reasonably encouraging. Broome’s transition team, several dozen strong, was broad, diverse and peppered with prominent business leaders, and the new mayor hopes to build a similar coalition over the next four years.

“I believe that there are more areas of agreement than there are disagreement,” says Broome, who served in the Louisiana Senate for eight years before becoming mayor. “I can’t move this city forward without partnerships. We can’t live in silos.”

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Lane Grigsby, founder of Cajun Industries and a prominent political activist and donor, describes Broome as an “ineffective” state legislator who was “just happy to be there.” Grigsby hopes Broome can alleviate racial tension in the parish, but he doesn’t think removing Baton Rouge Police Chief Carl Dabadie Jr., as she has pledged to do, will help.

“Don’t expect very much from Sharon Weston Broome,” Grigsby says. “She has a wonderful heart. She is a wonderfully nice lady. But we’re not going to solve any problems being nice.”

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While Broome mostly has avoided controversy, her campaign promise to replace the police chief when the murder rate is falling is divisive even among her supporters. But Broome argues a change at the top would build trust between the department and the population.

“Our community, especially after the Alton Sterling shooting, the trust in the police department really diminished,” she says. “I don’t have a statistic on it, but I can tell you it probably went to an all-time low.”

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Under former President Barack Obama, the U.S. Department of Justice launched an investigation into Sterling’s death. There is widespread concern about how the police department’s critics will react if the officers are exonerated.

Broome says she’s already meeting with community leaders to prepare for whatever happens. While she is wary of outsiders, she doesn’t anticipate violence from locals.

“I am certainly going to be front and center and visible and speaking to the citizens of our community,” she says, while “making sure justice is the standard here in our community, to the extent that we can control that.”

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Norman Browning, who co-chaired the last incorporation effort, says via a text that no decisions have been made. A source with knowledge of the movement says organizers are considering revising the borders of the proposed city to reflect where support was strongest last time, with an eye toward a possible second effort.

Last time around, arguments about St. George often devolved into personal insults, and often pitted liberal versus conservative, city versus suburb and black versus white. It’s just one more wound waiting to be reopened in a parish still sore from a painful summer.

“We have a lot of healing to take place in our community,” Broome says. “I believe that folks recognize that, no matter what community they’re from.”

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