BR Business Report: Stormwater-gate spells end for Mayor Broome

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Sharon Weston Broome is done as mayor of Baton Rouge.

This is the stark reality after the October massacre that was her double-secret, truth-avoiding, flawed-fee mockery of a stormwater management plan, writes Business Report Associate Publisher JR Ball in his new opinion piece.

Not since the deep tunneling sewer system debacle of 2004, triggering the ousting of one-termer Bobby Simpson, has a Baton Rouge mayor so incompetently fumbled something so important to the future of this parish.

Baton Rouge simply has too many challenges—and, frankly, promising opportunities—to waste six more years on an insular administration devoid of tact, vision, accountability and basic leadership skills, Ball goes on to write.

Broome’s disapproval rating in a late October Daily Report poll was an eye-popping 82.2%. It wasn’t a scientific survey, but that fact can’t be enough to dismiss a 9% approval rating, Ball points out.

How do you come back from that?

You can’t.

The level of feckless leadership is reason enough to sweep Broome out the door.

Broome was in a series of meetings—including the now infamous Aug. 30 confab—with officials from the EPA and state DEQ. Did she hear anyone from the federal government utter anything about a cone of silence? Ball asks. Did the letters N, D or A flow from a single EPA lip?

As concerns were escalating from the council and the public, did she contact any federal officials—from the EPA or elsewhere—to ask what’s the deal with the need for secrecy? Did she even for an iota consider it odd that a plan of such magnitude needed to be shielded from the very public that will pay the freight?

Did she ever declare, “Hey, that’s not how democracy works!”

What did Broome do and when did she do it?

Answer: She did nothing.

Except point fingers at everyone but herself.

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