Mayor Says Shreveport Is Making Progress

Shreveport Mayor Adrian Perkins brought his state of the city message to what could have been a hostile room earlier this week. He spoke to the lunch crowd of Caddo Parish Republicans.

Perkins told the audience

We Inherited a horrible budget. We had a negative 1.2 million dollar operating budget. We had to tighten the belt in the first year and get the city back on solid footing and we did that.

Mayor Perkins says the city now has an operating reserve of 24.5 million. He did acknowledge that much of the money comes from Cares Act funding. And Perkins says Shreveport is set to receive 48 million dollars from the feds in the rescue plan and he is putting together a plan to invest in our community. He is expected to present a list of projects to City Councilwoman LeVette Fuller who chairs the infrastructure committee.

Perkins also told the crowd the winter storm pointed out some serious problems our city is facing. "We are not prepared to take a hit from a storm like that. Our employees worked around the clock." But he says we need to make sure our infrastructure is more resilient in the future.

He also talked about crime and the effort to recruit more police officers. He says Shreveport has lost more than 90 police officers and we need to do a better job of finding more officers and retaining them. He also has plans to visit Baton Rouge and New Orleans with the Police Chief to tour their real time crime centers to see if we can bring some of those ideas to Shreveport to tackle our growing crime problem.