Top five story/trends of 2024

By Christopher Tidmore
Contributing Writer

At The Louisiana Weekly, our editors tend to look at the top stories of the year through the lens of how they revealed the direction local politics will travel over the coming decade. We have chosen five different stories that give a glimpse at how the politics of the Pelican State has irrevocably changed over this past year.

1. St. George promises more incorporations to come. Residents of the City of St. George had their Christmas early on April 6 when the incorporation of East Baton Rouge Parish’s newest city was confirmed by the courts.

Of the top Louisiana stories of 2024, this one may have the longest enduring impact on our local politics. It might lead to parishes incorporating cities where they did not exist before, and that might even stretch into Orleans Parish eventually. The racial subtext of the establishment of the City of St. George overarched the basic constitutional question. The 1974 Louisiana State Constitution establishes very specific criteria for village, town and city incorporation, essentially having at least 1,500 residents and the majority’s will to do so. St. George began as an effort to create a separate school district, which exists elsewhere in EBR. When that effort was blocked, the organizers began a petition campaign to incorporate as a city.

The optics of a predominantly white, wealthy area wishing to incorporate within an African-American dominant parish led to questions of diversion of tax dollars from the majority. However, organizers, including Woody Jenkins, noted that EBR already had several cities like Central and Denham Springs. The fact that St. George sought the same status should not be considered extraordinary, supporters argued. Nevertheless, the Democratic governor joined with the EBR parish president to oppose the establishment of the small city, leading to a lengthy court case. The desire for the redundants to form the City of St. George was confirmed as legal and binding, after years of litigiousness and voter organizing. St. George will hereafter control roughly 50 percent of its property tax revenue-as well as two pennies on the dollar after a successful vote on December 7. (Turnout was so strong in support of the sales tax that St. George voters also almost single-handedly helped elect the first Republican mayor-president in EBR in 20 years. Voter turnout was anemic in the rest of the parish.)

The long-term impact of the creation of the City of St. George will be felt far beyond the EBR treasury. In theory, what if the city of Algiers asked to be re-created? It existed as part of Orleans Parish until 1959. What if the city of Carrollton wished to be reestablished? Or the city of Lafayette, what is now known as the Garden District? Or something as simple as unincorporated Metairie, wishing to control its tax dollars which now go to the West Bank. The implications of St. George’s birth will be felt on our politics for years to come.

2. Use of schools as a loophole to limit permit-less carry. Sixty-three percent of Louisianans agree a permit should be required to carry a concealed firearm. This did not stop the Legislature, however, from approving “constitutional carry,” allowing anyone to holster a gun out of sight virtually anywhere except a very limited list, including banks and schools. Police argue that donning a concealed weapon in heavily populated areas like the French Quarter multiplies the danger facing both the public and law enforcement personnel as they work to maintain public safety. On July 1, a police station in the French Quarter was designated a vocational technical school. Since state law forbids carrying a concealed weapon within 1,000 feet of a school, the move outlaws firearm possession in the immediate area, which includes a stretch of Bourbon Street.

The very conscious partnership between NOPD and education officials looks to be sparking a trend in cities across the state, encouraging the creation of schools in historic and downtown areas. This could reverse a trend of constructing outlying campuses, and as demographics look to close schools, the need to keep educational institutions in city centers, could possibly both preserve historic campuses and bolster new type two charters in urban centers where they would never been previously considered

Parents may not be going downtown to work anymore, but their children could be.

3. Loss of population brings fears of decline and the elimination of a La. congressional seat. Of the states out of which most American moved in 2024, Louisiana again ranked first, ahead of California, Illinois, South Dakota and New York. The Pelican State’s higher birth rate did put us at .8 percent in overall population loss, ranking third after California and Illinois, but nowhere near most other southern states which are gaining population from in-migration. One of the subtexts in Gov. Jeff Landry’s championing of a second minority-majority congressional district drawn (in large part) to elect Cleo Fields back to Congress was the unfortunate anticipation that Louisiana would lose that seat in the next census. To stop that very scenario, Landry championed the recent income tax cuts.

4. Income tax reductions reverse the legacy of Huey Long. It has been a bipartisan effort to “every man a king’s” strong central state government. Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards’ revenue neutrally dropped the income tax rate from six to 4.25 percent (through the elimination of itemized deductions), and Jeff Landry dropped it to a flat rate of three percent. To pay for the reduction and avoid a fiscal cliff, Landry agreed to bring back Edwards’ 2016 one-penny sales tax hike, though his GOP successor only pledged to reduce it to .475 percent in five years rather than Edwards’ .45. Landry also went farther than his predecessor, cutting corporate income tax to 5.5 percent, an effort that Edwards had vetoed in his final year. Less observed in this tax agenda is that both men have shifted fiscal responsibilities onto parishes, making Louisiana fiscally more like Texas and Florida, where the primary tax raising responsibilities are on the county level. This includes a wide range of subjects from teacher pay to taxing inventory. Huey Long had established that Louisiana was different from its southern peers, wherein the state government was larger and more activist. The bipartisan trend is ending that legacy, with the hope of duplicating our neighbors’ economic success.

5. Racial & Demographic changes in Orleans and Jefferson Parishes promise very different political futures for each. U.S. census reports indicate that Orleans parish now has a Caucasian population mounting almost 33 percent of the total. Match that with the declining African-American population, now below 53 percent by some estimates, and one can see why Helena Moreno believes she has a very good shot of becoming mayor. The racial demographics of the city have changed from pre-Katrina 2004 when 69 percent of the population of Orleans was Black. In that same year, 26 percent of the Jefferson Parish population was African American. Today, it’s only 28 percent, which doesn’t seem very high, except that 50 percent of the population of Jefferson Parish is Caucasian. The remainder are Hispanic and Asian, which has changed the politics of the largest suburban parish in a Democratic direction. It’s not an accident that John Bel Edwards won Jefferson twice.

This article originally published in the December 30, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.