Fentanyl Part 6: The City

“You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.”

— James Clear

At 7 a.m. on a humid Saturday in August, I met up with a group of Keep Tiger Town Beautiful volunteers to help clean the Siegen Lane corridor. This was my second time volunteering with the group, and they collectively referred to a section of Siegen Lane — a concrete area located underneath I-10, as the “Hell Hole.” Siegen Lane is a 3-mile stretch of road lined with shopping centers, grocery stores and big chains like Walmart, Target and Hobby Lobby, anchored to the south by Perkins Road and to the north by Airline Highway.  It’s a retail hotspot, but in the last five years it has also become an area known for homelessness, drug use and panhandling, especially near I-10 and along Rieger Road which is perpendicular to Siegen Lane. All of those elements create a trash nightmare and volunteers with KTTB never know what they will find in the “Hell Hole.”

There is also a methadone clinic on Rieger Road. The Baton Rouge Comprehensive Treatment Center offers Medication-Assisted Treatment or MAT for people suffering from opioid addiction. When I drove by the building that Saturday morning, the line snaked out the door and around the building. There was a young woman standing in line, holding a baby against her hip.

Wearing my duck boots, gloves and bright fluorescent vest, I joined KTTB founder Jennifer Richardson and a few of the other veteran volunteers as we made our way to the concrete underneath I-10. They had cleaned this area of Siegen many times before and knew what they would find as they pointed out the piles of used and haphazardly discarded needles. I snapped a picture of them on the ground and inside of garbage cans before we used our litter sticks and gloved hands to place them safely inside of red sharps containers provided by a KTTB volunteer. There was no one under the Interstate that early in the morning but it smelled like urine and feces and rotting garbage. I also picked up lots of flosser picks and batteries, which I learned later are used to make methamphetamine and cut drugs.

We worked our way from underneath the Siegen overpass to an area behind Po-Boy Express and in front of Hobby Lobby’s parking lot, in a small secluded grassy area that looked like an abandoned homeless camp. There were layers of trash, everything from clothing to vegetable pouches for toddlers to plastic cups and straws and along the fence, used needles. So many used needles.

Richardson said most of the needles the group finds are either near methadone clinics or “seedier” hotels/motels along Sherwood Forest Boulevard, Siegen Lane and Airline Highway near Old Hammond Highway. I wanted to understand why these hotels and motels attracted so much crime so I reached out to Laurie Adams, East Baton Rouge Metro Councilwoman for District 11.

There are 11 hotels and/or motels identified by the City of Baton Rouge as problematic, meaning they are boomerang sites for crime and drugs and visited often by police and first responders, Adams said. Seven of them are in her district.

Adams said that city officials were aware of the stigma associated with these motels and hotels, and have been for years. In 2018, then councilmen Matt Watson, District 11 and Dwight Hudson, District 9, drafted an ordinance to address some of the issues at these hotels and motels and to hold their owners accountable for criminal activity.

I asked Adams about some of the specific crimes that have occurred since 2018.

“Domestic abuse, battery, there was a toddler who died or was allegedly murdered at one of the hotels, homicide cases, overdose deaths,” she said. “There are concerns about drug dealing, drug overdoses and neighborhoods and business owners feel strongly that people staying in and around the hotels are committing thefts in the neighborhoods or places of business.”

On April 21, a woman was shot and killed at the OYO Hotel at 9999 Gwenadele Avenue, off of Airline Highway near Interstate 12, and on Aug. 7, a two-year-old boy died after his father allegedly beat him with a belt and left him unconscious at the same motel.

The purpose of the hotel/motel ordinance is accountability, Adams said.

According to the ordinance (read it in its entirety here) if there are a certain number of criminal calls in a certain timeframe, the permit for the establishment can be revoked. This revocation triggers the need for an administrative hearing which would determine whether the hotel/motel owner could continue to operate with a permit, Adams said.

The problem with this ordinance is that there’s no oversight, no enforcement, and no infrastructure in place to hold an administrative hearing.

“The administrative body to hear the cases has not been set up so the processes didn’t get put into place,” Adams said. “There wasn’t infrastructure or process built around it to make it effective. There was nothing from preventing (hotel/motel owners) from going back to city parish the day after their permit was pulled and reapplying for a permit. There’s nothing that says you can’t reapply for 30 days or six months to have your permit reinstated.”

That makes no sense, I thought to myself.

“So there’s no communication between the city office that pulls the permit for these hotels/motels and the city office that issues a permit for them?” I asked her.

“No. I’m not sure we have the systems properly in place,” she said. “If a hotel/motel gets its permit pulled for cause, there needs to be conditions in place.”

This blew my mind.

It’s hard not to be frustrated when the system we all live under seems inherently broken. It’s easy to point fingers, which to be honest, is what I wanted to do during the research and reporting on this part of the series. If everyone is doing their job correctly and all of the collective puzzle pieces fit together, government runs smoothly, but it’s rare – for a variety of reasons (red tape, politics, employee shortages, COVID, constant changes in administration, budget constraints, corruption) – that all of the pieces do fit together. Baton Rouge leadership is very siloed, divided by race and political parties, and it’s rare that everyone is working together on a united goal. And that disconnect leaves a lot of mismatched pieces and unfortunately a lot of gaps.

The wheels of government also move very slowly, and when our elected city officials are only in office for a short amount of time and — best case scenario — everything is running smoothly, it’s still hard to make instrumental change. When you look at all of these factors, it’s not a surprise that an ordinance like this wasn’t functioning properly.

I wanted to see what the OYO Hotel was like up close, so once again, I tagged along with Keep Tiger Town Beautiful at 7 a.m., on a Saturday in September, to pick up trash at Airline Highway and Interstate 12. I walked the length of Gwenadele Avenue with Richardson, picking up a few beer bottles, lots of plastic cups and straws, and two tightly balled up pieces of aluminum foil. There wasn’t much traffic that morning, just a few cars driving to the Cracker Barrel for breakfast.  I saw three people walking in and out of the OYO hotel and one man walked past us on the street, nodding a hello. Besides the tinfoil balls, which I thought might contain drugs (when I cut them open later that morning, they were empty), we also found two Walmart grocery carts, two used condoms and one used hypodermic needle. I stopped in front of the OYO for a moment to think about the lives lost there, and my eyes quickly moved to the right of the hotel where Celebration Station stood, maybe less than 25 yards away, and I thought about how many times my husband and I took our kids there to play miniature golf or ride Go Karts.

Adams is working with fellow council members, Cleve Dunn Jr., District 6, Dwight Hudson, District 9 and Denise Amoroso, District 8 – who are all affected by the 11 troublesome hotels/motels. These businesses either bump up against their districts or are actually located in their districts. They all want them same thing — Adams said — to rework the ordinance to make it more effective. She is hoping a revamped and more effective ordinance will be complete in the next couple of months.

I couldn’t help but wonder to myself, If these hotels and motels attracted that much crime, why not just shut them down? But this dichotomous thinking is not reality. I know that as a city we can get more done collectively if we collaborate, create seamless systems, understand how to navigate and enforce the systems, and start thinking in “and/both” instead of “either/or.”

“The truth is that as bad as things are right now, an empty hotel would be worse,” Adams said. “It’s in our best interest as an entire city parish that we find a way to work with these hotel owners, support them and help them police their own property and shore up and tighten up this ordinance.”

The seventh part of this series, “Law Enforced” will be published Monday, October 31, 2022.

October 24, 2022