(The Center Square) — Despite Shreveport city council members urging an emergency declaration on the police department headquarters, the mayor says he refuses to do so.
The resolution was passed Sept. 24 at a board meeting in which members and community constituents complained about the conditions of the headquarters. This included mold and mildew claims, which prompted citizen Sammy Mears to second the councils concerns.
“I will not allow the police to be working in a nasty, filthy, disgusting place,” Mears said.
Mayor Tom Arceneaux had published a letter before the meeting responding to the growing worries about the police headquarters building. His opinion has not changed since. In it, he said an emergency declaration would not achieve anything for the policeman working there.
“The administration has reviewed applicable statutes to see if a declaration of emergency would make any resources immediately available to the city that are not already available. We have not identified any such resources, and any action we might take to relocate police personnel will have sufficient times for actions that no emergency declaration is warranted,” Arceneaux said in the letter.
The mayor also pointed to a report dated Jan. 21, 2022, in which the consultant concluded that there was no suspect fungal growth in the building.
He says the recent moisture issues have created mildew, not mold.
A council member pushed back against this distinction between mold and mildew at a city council administrative conference meeting Sept. 23.
“If mildew is not bad, then I would just suggest maybe you get a bucket of it and put it in your office, leave it there until the police station is fixed and see what happens,” Councilman James Green told Arceneaux.
Arceneaux’s letter did say he wants to address the issue. He described some possible actions that can be taken to move people out of the building and improve it’s conditions.
First, he believes they need to decentralize the department across various buildings and substations, but the construction on these has not yet begun.
Next is investing considerable sums in repairs at the existing headquarters building to make working there more tolerable.
Finally they’d need to evaluate sites where staff can eventually be relocated when the planned reconstruction of the headquarters building begins.
The mayor feels above all else, a declaration like this requires immediate action which fails to consider the real world implications.
“Please understand that approximately 470 police personnel are housed out of the Gardner Building complex,” Arceneaux said in the letter. “This is nearly 20% of the total employees of the City of Shreveport. Moving that many employees to temporary and permanent alternate locations is a monumental task.”
