BATON ROUGE - In a unanimous vote, Mayor-President Sid Edwards’ tax plan was approved by the Metro Council, but this comes after months of back and forth between the administration and city-parish services.

Unity and compromise are the two words used by city-parish officials to describe the support that was needed to push the measure to the Baton Rouge voters. 

It’s a change in tone from a couple of months ago when the administration set its sights on the library’s savings account. 

"There was a bunch of doom and gloom that came out of the library initially was a primary target, but I believe that there's a system-wide approach to break down all dedicated taxes and millages,” Metro Council member Darryl Hurst said.

For a one-time dedication, $52.4 million could be used to pay off the city’s debt. $21 million could be used to pay off the debt expected for the next year, according to Hurst.

“This is the city-parish being very responsible with the money taxpayers have entrusted us with,” EBR Chief Administrative Officer Charlie Davis said. 

Davis broke down what voters will ultimately decide on come November. 

"What that does is increase our ratings, allows us to borrow more money if we ever need to, gives us more optionality from a funding perspective, and it also increases our bond rating, and it creates new annual revenue that's not being used to service debt in the past,” Davis said. 

Still, Hurst says the city parish is trying to accomplish a lot - balancing the books, providing pay raises, and not doing lasting damage to the mosquito abatement department, the Council on Aging, and the library.

Mary Stein with the library says the system will be able to operate and maintain business as usual, but they’ve already started freezing vacant positions, cutting expenditures, and making choices about cancelling specific annual database subscriptions. 

“What we want to do is consult each area to figure out how we can improve processes to ensure that we're as efficient as possible with how we spend tax payer dollars to make sure that whatever we do we don't have to keep coming back to the well of the taxpayer and ask them to fill our buckets,” Hurst said.