re: Together Baton Rouge initiative - What say you, OT?

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Is is one policy aim of their which I agree with

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I actually agree with it as well. I'm simply pointing out that while they're trying to gain more autonomy over their own area, they're also spending a lot of time, money, and energy to prevent St. George from doing the same.

Black box from rental car that hit Amoroso was not analyzed; may or may not have been found at scene.

"Rental" firearm (loaded) of unkown/undisclosed type found in rental car.

May or may not have been 3 people in rental car.

Surveillance footage from Angola not reviewed for occupants (or who was actually driving) upon entry or exit of facility.

Per suspect, choices were (at 35 mph) to swerve into oncoming vehicle or swerve to hit Amoroso and biking partner, suspiciously not to include hard braking and staying in lane to avoid all hazards.

Suspect was convicted of crime of least possible severity and sentenced to 12 days in jail.

Just doesn't add up.

The reason Louisiana is so poor is because large businesses don’t want to do business here.

1. National and International businesses don’t like out tax structure, our shitty schools, our litigious environment and our general 49thness in all rankings.

2. So some people came along and tried to overcome that hurdle and keep those companies here with tax breaks instead of addressing the real problems. It really just kicked the can down the road.

Now new leaders say that the tax breaks need to be revoked so we can collect more. They aren’t wrong in a vacuum.

But they aren’t in a vacuum. They want to reverse point 2 without dealing with point 1. They think ExxonMobil is bluffing.

Good luck with that.

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1. National and International businesses don’t like out tax structure, our shitty schools, our litigious environment and our general 49thness in all rankings.

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and its only going to get worse. There is a promise to fix the roads and traffic congestion but that's about it. There is nothing out there to fix the education system. Families are leaving. These families are the educated ones with good jobs leaving for better opportunities and improve quality of life.

Its staggering that Louisiana was only one of states to lose residents. Puerto Rico was one because of the hurricane, NY is another, several states lost around 1K in total but Louisiana lost 10K from 2017-2018. About 1,000 of that total came from East Baton Rouge Parish. Louisiana lost residents in 2016 as well but many contributed that to the flood. Will be interesting to see if Louisiana can stop the bleeding and keep its residents.

Together BR is the best pro business group that Texas has.

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Who was the judge in that case? Jackson? White?

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West Feliciana Judge. Not Jackson or White. I haven’t seen the judges name in any article I’ve read.

ITEP is a disaster of a program. However, we would not need it if we had a decent tax structure, workforce, education, etc.

The TBR types want to get rid of ITEP (which I understand) but don't have any ideas on how to fix all the other problems that caused the need for ITEP in the first place.

It's been well documented that we pay toward the lower end of state and local taxes as a percentage of revenue. So, maybe some new money is part of the answer. But it's surely not the whole answer. We need to do a lot better job with the money we have.

If Together BR really wanted to get people on their side, they should...

1) Call for the closing of Southern, as it is no longer needed in 2019.

2) Call for the money saved by closing Southern to be invested into area community colleges and K-12 education.

3) Call for the EBR School Board to be reformatted into a board of seven at-large positions.

4) Give St George plenty of good reasons to not incorporate, but stop trying to block them from doing so

The problem in Louisiana isn't the poor. There are poor people and poor neighborhoods everywhere. LA's problem is that we have a rapidly shrinking middle class. The families that send their kids to Catholic and St Joseph's and Episcopal will be fine. Many of the kids in the worst public schools will always be problems.

But we don't have a way for poor people to move up to middle class. That's where our education system - both K-12 and higher ed - is a massive failure.

We need to start giving options to those in our public school system to better themselves and give them a chance. The ones that want to screw around? Let them, but don't let them bring down the ones that want to succeed.

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Give St George plenty of good reasons to not incorporate, but stop trying to block them from doing so

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St. George wants to incorporate so they can have a good school system like Zachary

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Louisiana is undervalued. Just needs proper management.

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Correct. And when people do attempt to manage things in this state "properly" they get attacked by Broderick Bagert and his group of ministers he wrangled into his Alinsky-like plan.

OP - go look into what Eva Moskowitz, founder of Success Academy, ran into (and still deals with) in NYC. All she wanted to do was improve the opportunities for the poor kids in NYC with terrible schools and fought off hundreds of attempts to squander her idea by the teacher's unions.

The short summary is those unions and their affiliated organizations cared more about themselves, and nothing about the students.

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Right. And if Together BR could get the school system in EBR to be as good as Zachary, that would not be needed.

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TBR fought BRAC's plan to break up the current EBRPSS into four, smaller school districts.