Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: What's up, dog?
See, I tried it again. I tried to vary. Tried to vary the introduction again.
That one felt too flat, though. It felt too. Felt too. Felt too, like, forced.
[00:00:13] Speaker B: That might have been your worst one yet.
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Oh, man. All right, so that what's up, dog? Is. But I used to say that whenever I was in, like, high school and college. Did you not say, what's up, dog?
[00:00:22] Speaker B: No, we said that. We said that a lot. Yeah, that was 10.
[00:00:25] Speaker A: What was wrong with what I just
[00:00:26] Speaker B: did 15 years ago?
[00:00:28] Speaker A: I mean, are you saying it's outdated?
[00:00:30] Speaker B: It's outdated. It's outdated.
[00:00:32] Speaker A: But stuff comes back cyclically, you know? Like, maybe that's coming back cyclically right now. Maybe now people are gonna start saying, what's up, dog? Because I started it. I brought it back.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: Hey, maybe we could bring. We should bring in some of our young interns and see what they say these days and use that.
[00:00:46] Speaker A: Oh, that's a great idea. We should do that. What do they say on the Riz. That was a thing for a while. People still say that.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: I don't know. I don't know. I don't teach anymore. I don't teach middle schoolers and high schoolers anymore. I'm not.
[00:01:00] Speaker A: You're not Cap. No, Cap was a thing for a little while. I wonder if that's still a thing. That was trendy.
[00:01:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:06] Speaker A: That means lie. No, Cap means I'm not lying.
I knew that.
I'm 41.
[00:01:13] Speaker B: Well, anyway, give us money if.
If you want to.
[00:01:18] Speaker A: You want more content like this?
[00:01:21] Speaker B: Support the.
[00:01:22] Speaker A: Support the Parish circuit@the PairCircuit.com.
[00:01:25] Speaker B: all right.
[00:01:25] Speaker A: Fun thing. Speaking of money, David, I think you'll find this odd with 3D.
All right, so Appaloosa's downtown development. Here's the skin district.
[00:01:39] Speaker B: You forgot the third.
[00:01:39] Speaker A: Oh, I'm sorry. It's 3D. Appaloosa's downtown development district.
Call sign odd. With 3Ds.
They got some stuff going on. So one of the things. A while back, the new stadium got built. Donald Garter Stadium got built in the city of Appaloosas partly with money provided by the Appaloosas downtown development district. Here's the caveat. That money is only supposed to be used to develop downtown.
And the stadium is way out of the downtown development district. Like, way out.
[00:02:12] Speaker B: Okay, but you could just call it, like, a stone's throw.
[00:02:14] Speaker A: It's a big throw.
It's like city blocks level outside of it. Anyway, so Appaloosa's downtown development, they launched this stadium project they get in all kinds of hot water about it still happens, it's still funded, it's done. I don't know what's going to wound up going down with all those things on the other side of it anyway. But now there's this most recent talk where Opelous is the District.
The way that they fund themselves is they have certain areas of the city in which they leverage additional sales tax.
It's like a $0.01 sales tax. And there's the district around downtown. I think there's also the district around Creswell.
And then there's another district around, I think, where Lowe's and Walmart is potentially. I'm not sure exactly, but it's an additional. I think it's like 1 cent.
[00:03:04] Speaker B: Is the, is it 1 cent or 1%?
[00:03:07] Speaker A: Well, I'm sorry, 1 cent on the dollar.
1%. Yeah. Excuse me.
So now what's happening now is that apparently they are looking to raise that tax.
Okay. They're looking to increase that tax cost, buy another, I think, cent.
[00:03:25] Speaker B: Right. I think it's another 1%.
[00:03:26] Speaker A: Yeah. Now here's, here's the deal. Here's the deal. Avalusas in certain areas, depending on where you're shopping, already has the highest sales tax rate of anywhere around here.
Considerably higher. Okay. Like 12% in some places. It's so high, in fact, that I know people who will not shop here. And they live here.
[00:03:50] Speaker B: Right.
[00:03:50] Speaker A: They live here and they drive to other cities to buy because sales tax is so high.
[00:03:56] Speaker B: Right. Now, as a clarification, is this a new tax or is it an expansion of the district?
So, like, I know one, one point that an article made was that it would expand the boundaries of this 1% sales tax to Creswell Lane.
So I think that's part of what.
[00:04:13] Speaker A: Oh, that's part of the confusion.
[00:04:14] Speaker B: What ODD is trying to do.
[00:04:16] Speaker A: Yeah, they're trying to loop in another
[00:04:18] Speaker B: area tax base into Creswell Lane.
[00:04:21] Speaker A: Okay, got it.
[00:04:22] Speaker B: Which would basically generate, you know, so
[00:04:23] Speaker A: they're not, they're not increasing revenue, the total top tax, they're increasing the areas that it would affect. Right, got it.
[00:04:30] Speaker B: But, but, yeah, but what you're saying though is like, so people are already not going to the stuff on Creswell Lane because the taxes are already very high compared to other local, you know, districts or municipalities.
[00:04:44] Speaker A: So my anecdotal evidence is that they just said, I don't shop in Appaloosas because sales tax is too high here.
[00:04:49] Speaker B: Right.
[00:04:50] Speaker A: I drive to Lafayette specifically as well.
[00:04:52] Speaker B: Like we go to the Walmart on Creswell.
And so it's already more expensive because of the high sales tax.
And now it could theoretically become even more.
[00:05:03] Speaker A: I think that Walmart is already included in the odd. Yeah. I think they're talking about where the McAllisters is.
I think they mean that area.
[00:05:11] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:05:12] Speaker A: Okay. Okay, Interesting. So there's all these new things, wonderful, fun things going on.
The question marks are who decides? Is this something that the people vote on or not?
And why? To what end is this going to happen? Like, what are we raising taxes for?
[00:05:33] Speaker B: Right.
[00:05:33] Speaker A: I haven't heard either of those questions.
[00:05:35] Speaker B: Yeah, that was a question that wasn't really answered. And connected to this was apparently they have a $9 million reservoir of money as it is.
So people are asking the question, how odd.
Odd.
So people are asking, what's this for?
[00:05:58] Speaker A: What are we doing with this money?
[00:05:59] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:06:00] Speaker A: Why do we need more of it? And what is it going to do?
[00:06:03] Speaker B: Yep. Now what does the ODD do?
[00:06:11] Speaker A: Well, if you're asking what their name is, it's downtown development.
[00:06:15] Speaker B: Right.
[00:06:15] Speaker A: And they build stadiums, David, that are
[00:06:19] Speaker B: not located in downtown.
[00:06:21] Speaker A: Yeah. So.
[00:06:22] Speaker B: But they give money to other. They theoretically give money to businesses or to people that are trying to fix up or invest in.
[00:06:31] Speaker A: Yeah. And they award that pretty regularly in downtown. Yeah, we've seen that happen. So I think most recently on an article that we saw, they funded 10 or 11 businesses inside of the downtown district to like, redo their front, like their front of their buildings or something like that. That was on the street. That's happened before.
I know businesses that have received that money in the past. I don't know who's receiving it this time. In fact, there's a little drama over that. Apparently somebody was asking for a list of businesses that received the. That would receive that, and nobody was providing it. I don't know if it's been updated or not yet, but that was an article that we ran on the Paris circuit not too long ago because Citizens for New Louisiana broke that story. Apparently there's a little bit of drama associated around it, so we'll have to figure out what happens with that in the future. But it's supposed to be money that helps the downtown corridor to keep business and commerce going here. Things like sidewalk repairs, which has happened.
Things like new street lights, which has happened.
I'm citing things that I know, projects that I know that they've completed, but they've still got a lot of money in the bank, and for some reason it's not being spent on the projects that they have and they want to increase tax revenue. What's going on? That's the question. What's happening?
What are we doing?
[00:07:46] Speaker B: Absolutely. And I think we would say, and we've already kind of referenced how high taxes are in Opelousis and it's even driving business out of Opelousis.
[00:07:59] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:07:59] Speaker B: As a result. And we would say that the answer to developing downtown is not more.
[00:08:08] Speaker A: It's not more taxes.
[00:08:09] Speaker B: Right. Which is.
[00:08:10] Speaker A: Yeah, it seems.
[00:08:11] Speaker B: It seems obvious.
[00:08:13] Speaker A: But incentivize businesses to come here.
[00:08:15] Speaker B: It's not.
[00:08:16] Speaker A: Yeah. You want to know why SpaceX is coming here?
Because they're getting tax incentives to come here.
They're getting incentivized to bring their business here. And as a result, they're coming.
That's amazing.
That's a proper thought of commerce. That's going to some crazy amount of jobs, crazy amount of revenue that's going to travel through the area as a result of a development like that. You incentivize businesses to come into an area you want them to come. You don't levy additional taxes on them. So. So that they can come in. Do you get what I'm saying?
[00:08:50] Speaker B: Yeah. There are local municipalities who are doing very well who don't charge commercial property tax.
Like they've decided, hey, we're gonna go so far to incentivize businesses to come here to benefit our community and grow it, that we will not charge them property taxes.
[00:09:14] Speaker A: The.
And that's that those communities are near to here.
[00:09:17] Speaker B: Yeah. By the way, now, I do recognize that Opelous is. Isn't a difficult situation in that it has a lot of infrastructural problems and things that it, you know, that are behind a bit.
[00:09:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:31] Speaker B: But if, if you want to see growth, especially in the long term, the long run, it's not going to be by increasing taxes.
[00:09:39] Speaker A: No.
[00:09:40] Speaker B: That's only going to drive people out.
[00:09:42] Speaker A: Yeah. It's going to keep businesses away. It's going to make it harder for folks to have jobs here because there's going to be less businesses in town, less businesses that are willing to come and move in and do the work.
We need to find ways to incentivize them. I've had this conversation with elected officials in the past.
They were talking to me about, oh, man, we need to get another millage approved inside of this area so that we can get some more tax revenue to fix some things. And I was like, no, you don't. There's different ways to grow city revenue. You don't have to raise the whole tax just to get more revenue in the door. You could just incentivize people to come here. The same effect would happen. You could keep things exactly where they are. Give somebody the job of bringing in new business into our area. That's their whole job.
And if they don't do that job, they get fired and you put somebody else in the seat. But their whole job is to bring new business in. They've got certain metrics that they have to meet. They've got certain businesses that they're supposed to chase and they just go and get meetings. That's what economic development, one of the things that economic development is supposed to do and that would be enormous for us.
City of Opelousis could just have its own economic development department and fire.
It'd be great. Instead of, let's raise taxes.
[00:10:52] Speaker B: And meanwhile, Opelousis is shrinking in population.
[00:10:57] Speaker A: Shocker.
[00:11:00] Speaker B: And again, the short run of lowering taxes or cutting taxes and things like that or incentivizing businesses to come could mean the budget's going to be tight for a while.
But short term, quick fix solutions like raising taxes to try to, I don't know, put a band aid on something, it's not going to work well in the long run.
[00:11:24] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, I think I just saw the numbers for the city of Appaloosa's budget. Something like $30 million, $31 million for a year's worth of operation costs.
Seems like we're okay.
Seems like we have revenue.
[00:11:40] Speaker B: Yep. Not like, well, we can fix the whole entire water system this year. Revenue. But if we ever want to do that, we got to think long term.
[00:11:49] Speaker A: We got to think long term. If it's going to be a multi generation project, how are we going to get the revenue in and grow it and the people who want to come and live here and grow them to be able to accomplish that goal. It's going to take us thinking differently than we're thinking right now.
And the continuous entertaining of raising and creating new tax opportunities is not going to be to that end. We cannot tax ourselves into prosperity.
Cannot happen.
We could go look at a lot of cities like the ones that you were talking about referencing earlier who have done the opposite of that and they are growing and doing very well.
Find ways to incentivize business to come in, not penalize.
[00:12:29] Speaker B: And if you need convincing that Opelousis is a place of great opportunity, see our previous episodes.
[00:12:35] Speaker A: See previous episodes.
[00:12:36] Speaker B: Our most controversial episodes.
[00:12:37] Speaker A: I know the fact that we're like, we love to live here and people are like, how dare you?
[00:12:42] Speaker B: How dare you.
[00:12:43] Speaker A: Fascinating. Yeah. So anyway, grand scheme of things, grand story short, please, you know, we should not try to tax ourselves into prosperity. That's not going to be an effective way to move forward. Let's instead look for opportunity to try and incentivize businesses, people to come and live here through tax breaks, tax cuts, figure out how to make it happen, and then we can build something, I would say arguably better, that would last for generations.
[00:13:10] Speaker B: Absolutely. Agreed.
[00:13:11] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, guys, thank you all so much for listening to another episode of the Parish Circuit. You go to the parish circuit.com to find more information, articles, resources that we are publishing and we hope to build this media engine with you here in Acadiana. Thank you so much for coming along and we'll see you next time.
