From the Editor. 2020 mayor's race is far from set

Morgan City Councilman Louis Tamporello would like you to know that he hasn’t ruled out a campaign for mayor in the Nov. 3 election.
My story in Friday’s paper reported that Parish Councilman Kevin Voisin and businessman Lee Dragna confirmed that they plan to run. Based on a conversation at Tuesday’s City Council meeting, the story reported that Tamporello has no plan to run.
That was true as far as it went. But the ink hadn’t dried on the Friday paper when Tamporello called to let us know that sounded too final. He hasn’t decided not to run, either. He’s still thinking about it.
If you don’t get completely burned out by politics next year, what with tax propositions, presidential primaries and other federal races, the mayor’s race might pique your interest.
The last time Tamporello faced competition, in 2012, he got 77% of his district’s vote.
In addition to his success as a shipyard owner, Dragna can talk about his contribution to straightening out Drainage District No. 2. That was after a state audit report found evidence of $2.5 million in work directed by a former staff member to himself and improper payments to a former board chairman during a previous administration.
Voisin has won election to the Parish Council five times: three times from a Morgan City-area district and twice parishwide in one of the three at-large districts.

Looking back,
looking forward
You’ll be bombarded soon, if not already, by year-end and decade-end stories. #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, Facebook, random Russians and a long assortment of presidential misfires may attract the attention of writers.
But they’ll probably miss something we’ve come to take for granted: the transformation of the U.S. role in energy production.
That development has done St. Mary Parish no favors, except maybe at the gas pump.
After 40 years of declining U.S. production and growing dependence on foreign oil, the same directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing techniques that had been applied to natural gas production in inland shale formations began to be applied to oil.
U.S. producers needed only seven years, beginning about 2010, to make North America the world’s leading producer of crude. Production that had languished at about 5 million barrels a day before this decade is now over 12 million.
The rapid increase in oil production did for oil prices what the increase in gas production did for prices: It drove them sharply downward. Oil dropped from over $100 a barrel to consistently under $40 for a while, although it’s back up to $50-$60 these days.
Suddenly, the future of U.S. oil production was no longer in the Gulf of Mexico, where it would help St. Mary’s economy.
We've seen the beginning of another kind of transformation. In the last year or so, and certainly in the last decade, the realization has dawned that St. Mary can’t rely on the energy industry as heavily as it has since real off shore work began in the 1940s.
You hear the call from those mayoral candidates, and you heard it from Parish Council candidates in this fall’s elections: economic diversification.
The Urban Land Institute study commissioned by St. Mary Excel last winter was a step in that direction with its recommendations for the local shipbuilding industry and retail.
People are hoping that Ochsner Health System’s new role as manager of the former Teche Regional Medical Center will stabilize the hospital and maybe provide the sort of economic spinoffs we see in larger communities around the state.
This decade saw us realize that St. Mary needs a more sustainable economy. The next decade will test our determination to do something about it.
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review.