On Saturday, voters in the suburbs of Baton Rouge voted to secede from their surrounding local government by a 54-46 margin in order to create the new city of St. George, which will become the fifth-largest city in Louisiana.
The campaign, while successful, has been beset by controversy. St. George's 86,000 residents are overwhelmingly white, but Baton Rouge, the city that anchors East Baton Rouge Parish, is more than half black. Secession supporters say they were driven by a desire to form their own school district, but opponents, which include much of Baton Rouge's political and business establishment, have accused backers of seeking to segregate St. George's white students from the predominantly black East Baton Rouge Parish school system.
The St. George area is also more affluent than the rest of Baton Rouge, so its departure could undermine parish schools and government financially: One analysis concluded that St. George's secession could lead to an 18% budget cut unless the rest of the parish raises taxes.
Baton Rouge, which is the state’s capital, has a troubled history when it comes to integrating schools. The city only began implementing court-ordered desegregation in 1981, a generation after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Integration quickly sparked a backlash among white parents, many of whom withdrew their children from public schools and sent them to private schools that critics derided as "segregation academies."
This latest move by St. George voters represents a continuation of that backlash decades later and is part of a national trend of “white flight” suburbs seceding to form their own segregated school districts. According to one nonprofit, 73 similar efforts have succeeded in the last two decades, and with St. George’s high-profile success, more are likely to come.
St. George will still remain part of East Baton Rouge Parish, which is led by Democratic Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome, but it will be run by a local mayor in addition to her parish government. A few smaller cities in East Baton Rouge Parish operate this way, while the government of the city of Baton Rouge is consolidated with the government of East Baton Rouge Parish. This means, in effect, that St. George will go from having one local government to two. Broome had opposed the referendum, while secession leaders had attacked her administration in order to make their case that St. George needed a separate level of local government.
There will be a 30-day window between Saturday’s election and the incorporation of St. George, and it’s possible that a legal challenge could further slow things down. The main campaign opposing the breakaway said on election night that they would accept the results of the referendum, though Broome said it was “too early” to talk about potential litigation.
The governor will need to appoint the city’s first mayor and five-member council, but it’s not clear when this has to happen. The leadership of the St. George’s campaign says they want the city government to be set up by Jan. 1, which would fall in the final weeks of Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards’ current term. (Republican Eddie Rispone, who is Edwards’ opponent in the Nov. 16 runoff, was an early supporter of the St. George movement.) The city’s first municipal elections would happen in the autumn of 2020, when Broome is also up for re-election.
