Patron Saint
If approved by voters, St. George, as it would be called, would be Louisiana’s fifth-largest city. Prospective residents hope its existence would provide political momentum for separate schools.
St. George would have about 100,000 residents, or a quarter of the population now governed by the combined city-parish government of Baton Rouge. It also would include much of the area’s retail and commercial development, including the Mall of Louisiana, which has more than 150 shops, among them department stores of Macy’s Inc. and Dillard’s Inc.
The area generates a disproportionate 40 percent of local government’s sales and use tax receipts, according to the LSU report. Removing that might mean the splintering of the unified government that now runs Baton Rouge, the researchers said.
They called the new-city method of creating a school system “costly and imprecise.”