(The Center Square) — The Shreveport City Council met this week to advance the search for new police headquarters and execute a community development block grant agreement.
An important issue in Shreveport lately is the construction of a new police headquarters and substations.
As The Center Square has reported previously, the city has been planning and building three new substations, and one in particular, originally on North Market street, has caused some fuss with the lease agreement.
Tuesday, the city council authorized the mayor to engage in four separate lease agreements in different locations in order to find the best spot for the new substation.
That includes property owned by the BioMedical Research Foundation and the Caddo Parish School Board. District D councilmember Grayson Boucher thanked the Mayor and his office for jumping through hoops in order to find the best locations quickly.
All such ordinances were passed unanimously, giving the mayor full leeway on executing the best leasing agreement.
Another agreement that showed up in a resolution during Tuesday’s meeting was a community development block grant agreement between the city and Galilee City Affordable Housing.
Galilee owns a 76-unit affordable housing development located at 1600 Park Avenue. This resolution essentially ratifies a series of construction and rehabilitation projects for the apartments by transferring ownership of the property to a body than can afford to do so.
That resolution passed unanimously.
An ordinance that similarly has to do with location and zoning also involves the improvement of lives.
This zoning amendment would rezone the property located on the southeast corner of Line Avenue and Jordan Street from an urban corridor zoning district to an institutional campus zoning district.
Representatives of the Cedar Health Group are looking to build a new rehab facility there to help patients transition to sobriety, which The Center Square has also reported on in the past.
That ordinance also passed unanimously.
The budget has been discussed for quite some time, but finally it had to be passed in this meeting ahead of the Dec. 15 deadline.
The highlight of the budget is that Shreveport invested in cleaning up streets and improving blight in a city that desperately needs it. Because of a declining population and lack of sales tax, this means the budget also wasn’t able to finance public safety and water and sewer systems like the mayor would’ve hoped.
This is featured in Mayor Tom Arceneaux’s budget message.
