PRENTISS SMITH

Contributing Columnist

Fighting crime, putting out fires and picking up the trash in a timely manner are arguably the most important services that a city provides to its citizenry. When those services are not provided well, the city suffers. The city of Shreveport has a lot of money at its disposal right now with money from the coronavirus rescue plan and from tax receipts that are at record highs. It is time to use that money to improve all of these services.

To that end, Councilman Grayson Boucher, who has been one of the more thoughtful politicians in city government, has offered an amendment to use reserve funds to purchase new fire trucks and police cruisers, which are badly needed. There appears to be a lot of support from his colleagues to get this done, and it is way past time to do it.

The fire department is operating vehicles that are a quarter of a century old or older. Police cruisers have hundreds of thousands of miles on them and need to be replaced. There are also the problems of training and staffing these departments, which provide vital services to residents of the city.

The headlines in the paper and the lead story on the evening news are that the city of Shreveport does not have enough fire trucks to do the job of protecting the citizens of Shreveport. Let that sit in for a minute, and then think about it. That is unacceptable for any city, but especially for a city the size of Shreveport, which is home to almost 200,000 residents. Public safety is job one for any city.

The most important part of a city’s responsibility is the public safety of its citizens and to provide those services when needed, which is all the time. Emergencies are a daily occurrence. Fires happen. Crime happens. Trash builds up. These are the basic services that are the most challenging for any city, and there should be no question that they are readily available to the residents who pay for them.

The quality of those services enhances the city and improves the quality of life for those citizens who use those services on a daily basis. Cities are like corporations that are beholden to its shareholders, and in the case of a city, the shareholders are the citizens of the city.

Currently, the citizens of Shreveport are not being well served when the public safety of its citizens is compromised by the city’s inability to provide the services needed to keep them safe. There is no way that a city the size of Shreveport should have to borrow equipment from another municipality to meet its public safety needs, but that is precisely what the city of Shreveport is having to do, and it is unacceptable and embarrassing on so many levels.

The question is, what is the reserve fund for? Why is there a reserve fund if it is not going to be used it to improve and enhance the services needed to make the city run well? The time is now to use the money in the reserve fund to make sure that fires can be extinguished when they occur, crimes can be addressed when they explode like they are currently, and the trash can be picked up in a timely manner, which has not been happening.

Spend the money now, and worry about building the fund back up later. It is the old adage: Pay me now or pay me later, when the bill will be much more expensive. And that’s the way I see it. smithpren@aol.com