Check out Caddo Commission clerk candidate resumes

The anonysphere of web comments suggested good-ole-boyism played a role in the Caddo Commission choosing Fleet Services manager Todd Hopkins as its new clerk.

And Commissioner Stephanie Lynch quickly noted that a black, male commissioner joined the board's six white men with a yes vote.

So I figured I would let you readers weigh in yourselves. Here are resumes for each of the four finalists:

• Todd Hopkins

• Veta Samuels, Caddo Commission's deputy clerk

• Deborah Sewell, recording secretary for the Ouachita Police Jury

• Mark Terry, former director of Horizon Bay senior retirement center in Bossier City

Here's a little noise, and a break

If you missed this story from Thursday, Caddo and Bossier residents can sound off on noise in early August at a joint meeting between the two parishes' governments.

The Commission and Police Jury will consider ordinances aimed at setting allowable levels of loudness.

"Excessive noise can mean one thing to you and another thing to me," Caddo Parish Attorney Charles Grubb said. "What this proposal does is it puts some objectivity into what is excessive."

Read the prop for yourself here.

And on another note, dear readers, I'll be taking a blogging break for a short while. I've got vacation next week followed by the Asian American Journalists Association convention. There I'll be an editor/mentor for college students producing a multimedia project that includes a newspaper, website and Internet video broadcasts. Follow me on Twitter if you'd like to see more about that.


Watch the City Council and Commission for me while I'm out. You never know when they might try to pull a fast one.

Caddo Commission considers The Times as official journal

About this time last year I blogged about Shreveport picking its official journal, or the publication where announcements, requests for proposals, minutes, etc... are printed.

Well, the annual event has come around for the Caddo Commission, and there was some interesting action at today's meeting. For the past several years, the commission has gone with a partnership between The Caddo Citizen and Shreveport Sun.

But today, because of two absent commissioners, there was a 5-5 tie between the papers. So commissioners decided to put off (or continue, in government terms) the vote until June 17.

My boss, Times Publisher Pete Zanmiller, made his pitch today.

"Really, the issue is transparency and getting out to as many people as possible," Zanmiller said.

No, he did not ask me to write this. But I have to agree. Besides saving a few cents per line, there's no real public advantage in going with the other two papers. No disrespect intended. But when publications are weekly and go out to 4,000-5,000 people versus 40,000-plus most days and 50,000 or more on Sundays, there's no question. Sometimes the commission has to hold off on votes because of the timeframe it has to wait to notify the public because of a weekly's deadline.

So does the commission really want the public to be aware of what it's doing? We'll see how members show up and vote on the 17th.

Caddo commissioner planning run for Shreveport mayor

Here's another name to add to the hat for the Shreveport mayor's race.

Caddo Commissioner David Cox, who represents District 10 (much of southwest Shreveport including Southern Hills and nearby unincorporated areas in the parish), told me today that he will formally announce in the next week or so that he will make a run.

Money management, he said, will be his main focus in the campaign. Talking with folks over the last six months pushed him toward the decision.

"They need somebody who they can talk to, depend on and know that they come from the same side of the tracks they do: a working man," Cox said about his hopeful voters. He plans to change his registration from Republican to independent.

So that makes five contenders: Cox, Mayor Cedric Glover, City Councilman Bryan Wooley, State Rep. Roy Burrell and Shreveporter Parker Ward. They still all have to qualify.

Burrell's staff recently scheduled an sit-down interview with me, by the way. I'll keep y'all posted.