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September 4, 1939 — August 12, 2023

Douglas William White, 83, of Austin, Texas, passed away peacefully on August 12, 2023. He was born in Wichita Falls, on September 4, 1939 to Mary Estes and Robert Lugar White.

Doug graduated from Morgan City High School in Louisiana in 1957.

He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from University of Southwestern Louisiana in 1962 and his Master of Arts from Central Michigan University in 1979. He married the former Bonnie Allbritton on August 23, 1959. Doug had a 28-year career in fuels and energy management and logistics in the United States Air Force where he retired as a Colonel. In retirement, he enjoyed wood turning on his lathe, reloading ammunition, and was a state ranked competitive trap shooter. Doug and Bonnie were married 57 years
when she passed in 2016.

He is survived by his children, Douglas White II (Joanne), Mary White Freelove (Jeffrey) and Robert White, (Jose Salinas); his grandchildren, Sara Freelove, Kaitlin White,
Claire Freelove Lowande, and Douglas (DJ) White III; and great-grandsons, Hudson Lowande and Everett Lowande as well as his brother, Jim White (Karen).

A Memorial Service will be held at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday, August 26, 2023 in the Cook-Walden/Capital Parks Funeral Home, 14501 N IH 35, Pflugerville, Texas 78660.

Fond memories and expressions of sympathy may be shared at www.cookwaldencapitalparks.com for the White family.

Feb. 15, 1937 — Aug. 13, 2023
NATCHITOCHES — Lovan Barton Thomas, publisher of The Natchitoches Times, passed away peacefully at his home Sunday morning, Aug. 13, 2023.
Services were Wednesday, Aug. 23, at the First United Methodist Church on Second Street in Natchitoches.
Visitation was at 9 a.m. with services at 11 a.m. A private burial will be in the American Cemetery on Second Street for family and close friends.
Mr. Thomas was preceded in death by his wife, Patricia; mother, Elsie Mae Childers; step-mother, Freda Scoggins Thomas; father, Maxwell John Thomas; sister, Mary Galen Thomas; uncle, Kenneth Thomas; aunt, Ann Childers Barton; uncle, Norman F. Childers; and granddaughter, Madeleine Renee Mayo.
He is survived by his daughter, Tracy Thomas Mayo; son, Maxwell John Thomas II and husband Gabriel Masson; grandson, Lovan Thomas Mayo; sister-in-law, Kathleen Wilson Farmer; brother-in-law John Oliver Wilson and wife Beclee Newcomer Wilson; and cousin Galen Clavier.
Pallbearers were members of the Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia at Northwestern State University.
Honorary pallbearers were Scriven Taylor, Burton Weaver, Sen. Don Kelly, John Luster, the late Sam Friedman, the late Jerry Pierce, the late Bill Rush, the late Judge Jerry Stillman, Steve Colwell, Carolyn Roy, Jerry Hooper, and the staff of The Times, and members of the Agitators, Dirty Dozen, Gerousia lunch group, and his golfing group.
Thomas was an active member of the Natchitoches community.
He was a past president of Rotary Club, Natchitoches-Northwestern Symphony Society and the Natchitoches Industries Board. For 35 years he served on the Board of Directors for Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts.
He also served on the Louisiana Board of Trustees for Universities and Colleges, Red River Waterway Commission, Natchitoches Tourist Commission, Natchitoches Chamber of Commerce and Peoples Bank and Trust Co. Board of Directors.
He was a charter member of Mystic Krewe de St. Denis and Southern Trace Country Club in Shreveport.
He enjoyed membership in several mens organizations including the Dirty Dozen, Agitators, Gerousia, Walter Ledet Coffee Club and a couples supper club called Happy Bunch.
Thomas enjoyed many activities, including duck hunting, golfing, snow skiing, scuba diving, boating and landscape gardening. He was an accomplished artist having painted in oils.
A member of the 50 Year Club in the Louisiana newspaper industry, he served the Louisiana Press Association as president and spent over two decades serving on its Board of Directors.
He was a pioneer in the industry installing one of the first web offset presses in the state and oftentimes lending a hand to fellow publishers in need.
He and his wife purchased a number of community newspapers throughout Northwest and Central Louisiana. Current newspapers that are part of The Natchitoches Times family include the Colfax Chronicle, Sabine Index, Winn Parish Enterprise, Coushatta Citizen, Mansfield Enterprise, Bienville Democrat, Caddo Citizen, Springhill Press, Armed Forces Retiree News and Piney Woods Journal.
He has also published newspapers in Bossier City, Homer, Haynesville, Jonesboro, Leesville, Deridder, Central and even published the Louisiana Jaycee News for a brief time.
Lovan Barton Thomas was born Feb. 15, 1937, in Carlsbad, New Mexico, to Elsie Mae Childers of Booneville, Missouri, and Maxwell John Thomas. In 1943, the family moved to New Iberia after the marriage of his father to his second wife, Freda Beatrice Scoggins of Welsh.
During World War II, while his father served in the U.S. Army, he lived for a time with his grandparents, John H. and Eudoxia Clavier Thomas, on the family farm in Kingfisher, Oklahoma.
They also owned the local movie theater and the Thomas name is still visible in the brickwork across the front of the building. Young Lovan spent happy summers working on the family farm in Newkirk, Oklahoma, with Uncle Kenneth Thomas.
Around 1945 the family moved from New Iberia, where his father owned the Daily Iberian, to Crowley after his father purchased the Crowley Daily Signal and started radio stations KSIG in Crowley and KJEF in Jennings.
Thomas grew up in Crowley working with his father in the newspaper business and graduated from Crowley High School in 1956. He was a member of the state championship football team.
He attended the University of Oklahoma to study architecture and then transferred to the University of Missouri School of Journalism, and later attended the University of Texas to study business.
At the University of Missouri he met his wife, Patricia Ann Wilson of Rolla, Missouri. He also served as president of his fraternity, Phi Kappa Alpha.
Thomas was drafted into the U.S. Army and was stationed at Fort Chaffee, Arizona, where he was editor of the post newspaper, the Fort Chaffee Sentinel.
After his discharge from the U.S. Army, Thomas worked in public relations for Freeport-McMoran in New Orleans.
In 1967, he and his wife and almost 4-year-old daughter Tracy moved to Natchitoches where he purchased The Natchitoches Times from Charles Cunningham. A son, Maxwell John Thomas II, was born in 1968.
In lieu of flowers the family requests donations be made to: Natchitoches-Northwestern Symphony Society-Scholarship Fund, c/o Gayle Howell, 1050 Hwy. 494, Natchitoches, LA 71457.

The big flap a couple of weeks ago was over Jason Aldean’s country song, “Try That In A Small Town.” Aldean sings about a gun-toting rural population that won’t stand for the kind of crime that afflicts big cities.

A random punch on a sidewalk? A car-jacking? A liquor store robbery? “Well try that in a small town,” Aldean sings. “See how far you make it down the road. ‘Round here, we take care of our own.”

Aside from the vigilante tone, part of the controversy is over race, as though Aldean is defining “urban” the way the recording industry does. That is to say, Black. It doesn’t help that his video was filmed at the site of a notorious 1927 lynching.

The first thought here was, “Where has this guy been?” More than 20 years of reporting in towns of 20,000 or fewer residents makes me doubt that small-town armed robberies and random violence require big-city intervention. Our homegrown criminals are every bit as bad, thank you very much.

As for race, crime has always been an equal opportunity employer.

But a combination of YouTube lectures and newspaper stories that coincided with the Aldean fracas led to a deeper question about the small towns Aldean tries to represent.

It’s a question about the economic health of rural America.

In the last few weeks:

—A story by David J. Mitchell in the Advocate quoted LSU research as finding that three quarters of Louisiana saw more deaths than births over the last three years. The exceptions are big cities, what Mitchell describes as “prime suburbs,” and a couple of outliers, the areas around Fort Polk and Louisiana Tech.

The implication is that rural Louisiana is getting older and that younger people are going elsewhere, or at least not having as many children while they’re here.

The biggest loser on the Gulf Coast from “natural decrease” — when the number of deaths exceeds the number of births — is St. Mary.
COVID plays a role, of course. During 2020 and 2021, the pandemic toll was equal to more than 25% of the deaths you’d expect in two normal years. But even before COVID, in the 2010-20 period, St. Mary lost 9.6% of its population.

Mitchell points to a local consequence: the end of obstetrical services at Ochsner St. Mary, blamed on trends toward an aging population with fewer women of child-bearing age.

Since that story came out, the hospital board that owns the Morgan City hospital and leases it to Ochsner Health has withdrawn two tax propositions from the Oct. 14 ballot.

The proposition would have made $2 million a year and $700,000 from a tax no longer collected available to bring labor and delivery back to Ochsner St. Mary.

But no agreement with Ochsner has been reached.

—America’s wealth is increasingly concentrated in urban areas.

A Brookings Institute analysis breaks down the vote for Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. The analysis isn’t about who makes the better president or who has the better policies. It uses the Biden-vs.-Trump vote as a proxy for comparing urban and rural America.

And it makes a very good proxy.

Trump carried almost 2,500 counties in 2020. Biden won only 509. Yet Biden won by nearly 7 million votes.

Here’s the zinger: Brookings says those 509 Biden counties account for 70% of the nation’s gross domestic product, which is to say 70% of the U.S. economy.

—Robert Reich, a former secretary of labor, is a very liberal economist who goes to pains to give the capitalist point of view in his UC-Berkeley lectures on YouTube.

Mostly, you hear jobs divided into two categories: manufacturing and services. Reich breaks out another category: symbolic analytical services, “tasks such as problem-solving, problem-identification, and strategic brokerage services.”

Those symbolic-analytic services are overwhelmingly creatures of urban areas, Reich says. And that’s where the biggest income growth has been for more than 30 years.

The portrait of small-town America that emerges isn’t encouraging. Like largely rural counties across the country, St. Mary is moving into a different world that we can’t really see yet.

There have been some economic wins. The Kumho tire distribution center coming to Franklin is forecast to create 200 jobs. The First Solar factory coming to Iberia Parish offers the prospect of 700 jobs, some of which will no doubt be filled by St. Mary people.

Otherwise, my observation is that our economic future could be bound up somehow with the community college campuses and hospitals in Morgan City and Franklin.

Lafayette to the west and Houma-Thibodaux to the east have been, like St. Mary, historically dependent on the energy industry. But unlike St. Mary, where the population fluctuates with the price of oil and gas, Lafayette and Houma-Thibodaux seem to have reached a critical mass of diversification.

They have the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and Nicholls State, and they have vibrant, competitive hospital systems. The St. Mary health care operations and the South Louisiana Community College campuses are on a smaller scale, but they’re not nothing.

You have to start somewhere. And here we are.

Bill Decker is managing editor of the Morgan City Review.

The Louisiana Tax Commission has reviewed proposals for assessments on vessels and carbon capture technologies, with a decision likely next month.

The meeting centered primarily on competing proposals for assessing taxes on commercial vessels for 2024.

Wendy Thibodeaux, Lafourche Parish assessor representing the Louisiana Assessors’ Association, offered her rebuttal to a proposal to tax watercraft using a new system based on dead weight tonnage from the Offshore Marine Service Association.

Thibodeaux said information on vessel tonnage is difficult to find, alleging “there is no third party that gives the tonnage” or capacity of the watercraft. She argued vessel owners can also modify aspects of the vessels to adjust what they can carry.

“I just don’t think that’s sustainable because that can change from year to year,” Thibodeaux said.

She also objected to assessments based on a five-year average proposed by OMSA. Thibodeaux proposes instead to update current values more frequently to reflect the market, to bring a better balance to assessments on offshore vessels and in-shore vessels.
OMSA attorney J Adams, representing 140 companies operating offshore energy vessels, argued a lack of data from the assessor’s association makes it difficult to evaluate fairness.

OMSA’s proposal was done through a third party company, Vessel Values based in London, using market data and dead weight tonnage.

The five-year timeline “is more predictable and more transparent,” which would benefit both the industry and assessors, he said.

He provided an example of a vessel valued at $9.1 million currently that would go to $12.7 million under OMSA’s proposal and $18.5 million under the LAA proposal. He said the dead weight tonnage is verifiable information set when a vessel is constructed that represents its total potential carrying capacity.

“There’s a tremendous amount of data,” he said. “It’s something that’s third party and readily available.”

The commission is expected to review the proposals and rebuttals before coming to a decision in September.

Other discussions focused on assessments for carbon capture technology, with a request from the LAA to delay rules and regulations for carbon capture, sequestration or utilization properties to gather more information on the emerging industry.

Calcasieu Parish Assessor Wendy Aguillard, representing the LAA, asked the commission to assemble a working group with industry leaders “so we can come up with some good valuations for the future of this process,” noting projects in the works have yet to gain federal approvals.

Bob Adair with the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association suggested companies would prefer rules now to understand the tax implications of investments that run into the hundreds of millions.

“They’re trying to get a handle on what they can project on the property taxes,” he said.

Commissioners suggested if the commission opts to establish a working group, it would be essential to set a timeline for completion to avoid drawn-out disagreements of the past. Aguillard suggested discussions over a couple of months to prepare for rules in 2025.