BATON ROUGE (AP) — Talk about a rough introduction into office.
In the six months since he took over Louisiana's top job, Gov. John Bel Edwards has been faced with one crisis after another: floods across north Louisiana, the worst financial troubles the state has seen in 30 years and, most recently, a police shooting that has brought to the surface the racial divides of Baton Rouge and rocked the capital city with protests.
"I was saying the other day, six months ago when I came into the office, I inherited a desk. Nowhere in that desk is there a field manual or instruction manual telling me how to deal with these sorts of things," Edwards, in office since January, said last week as he talked about his response to the shooting death of Alton Sterling and the subsequent protests.
Sterling, 37, was shot and killed July 5 as two white officers pinned him to the pavement outside a convenience store where he sold CDs. The killing, captured on cellphone video, sparked widespread demonstrations.
The Democratic governor has been a more prominent and public figure after the Sterling shooting than Baton Rouge's mayor, Kip Holden.
Edwards quickly asked the U.S. Justice Department to open a civil rights investigation and to act as the lead agency in reviewing the police officers' actions, answering calls from black community leaders who wanted an independent investigation.
He met with Sterling's family to offer condolences, repeatedly called for peaceful protests by demonstrators and talked of the need to "do better" in the interactions between law enforcement and the black community.
"There should be no doubt in anybody's mind that this incident is going to be investigated impartially, professionally and thoroughly," Edwards said the day after the shooting. "And hopefully, when the community understands that, the tensions will ease."
The tension that emerged after Sterling's shooting was the latest crisis Edwards found himself handling in his brief tenure as governor.
In March, storms and flooding devastated homes and parishes, with more than 30 parishes given a federal disaster declaration and millions of dollars in damages to property, roads, bridges, and farmland.
The Governor's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness estimated more than 20,000 people were forced to evacuate during the flooding, with 12,000 homes damaged by the storms and their aftermath. At one point, more than 1,300 people were in shelters.
At the time, Edwards described it as "a record-breaking flood event, with floodwater all over the state of Louisiana, in places where it's never been before." His administration managed the flooding response, which still continues today.
But the hits started coming even earlier, soon after Edwards was elected.
Before his January inauguration, Edwards and his incoming administration learned the budget woes being left behind by then-Gov. Bobby Jindal were deeper than expected.
And the holes kept growing bigger in the first few months Edwards was in office, eventually estimated to reach as high as $950 million in the financial year that ended June 30 and $2 billion in the current budget year. Public colleges, health care services and public safety programs were at risk of deep, damaging cuts.
Louisiana's credit rating was downgraded in February by one of the national rating agencies for the first time in more than a decade. Two months later, another rating agency followed up with a similar drop, making it more expensive for the state to borrow money.
Eventually, after a 19-week slog across three legislative sessions, the governor and lawmakers rebalanced last year's budget and crafted a budget for this year with a mix of cuts and tax hikes. They raised about $1.5 billion to shrink holes in the current year spending plan and largely avoided the devastation that had caused so much concern.
But already there are worries Louisiana may have ended the last financial year with a deficit, and the numbers used to build this year's budget are shaky, leaving further question marks.
If that's not enough continued uncertainty for the governor, Louisiana's in the middle of hurricane season.
– by AP Reporter Melinda Deslatte
