By james art BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) – In our latest EBR mayoral candidate profile, WAFB political correspondent Liam Combs sat down with Independent Champagne Roundtree. Roundtree is the head of a property management firm in Baton Rouge. She said there needed to be big changes in the way the city was run.
As a transgender woman, she hopes to bring a new set of ideas to the table. One of them is called “The Ring”, which will be a battle arena for young people to fight and settle their differences.
“Something public, come on, I’ll take you to the ring,” Roundtree said. “Fight an old-fashioned battle with your hands. Go back to teaching these kids how to resolve an argument in different anti-gun ways because all they know is guns.
At the top of the “Ring,” Roundtree said he would divide the Baton Rouge Police Department into many substations so that each area of the city would be under surveillance until crime was reduced. “Common sense is not ordinary, it just isn’t,” Roundtree said.
Roundtree said the lack of nightlife plays a role not only in young people leaving the city, but also in crime.
“This town is a ghost town after 10 o’clock,” Roundtree said. “Do you want to know why youth goes away? That’s why. Young people like nightlife. Youth has nothing.” As for the inclusion of the new town of Saint George, she is sympathetic to that. “If the city of Baton Rouge had its stuff together, we wouldn’t have the city of St. George,” Roundtree said. “They did them for a reason because they were tired of the things that were going on in this town.”
To provide services to St. George, it has an unorthodox approach: it divides each city’s tax revenue by how much land it has. If it gets to the point where every square mile is worth $10, guess what, if you have 10 square miles, you get $100 today,” Roundtree said.
She also wants to bring the Bayou Gospel Festival to Baton Rouge. She said we need the community to come together. “Oh, that area is a hood, that’s because they took the neighbor out of it,” Roundtree said. “Look where you live, you live in the hood too, take the neighbor from her.”
Roundtree’s thoughts on transgender issues also defy the norm, such as how you identify yourself on your license.
“If you’re male, change to female, let’s just put it as F. No, I want you to put MT. It says male trans. That way, they know that if I go to the women’s room and they check my ID, I have to be there.” Or even transition too soon. “Let the child find out what the gender is before actually trying to determine what their gender is.”
She said her life experiences make her create unconventional ideas.
“In 2001, I was robbed and shot six times, left for dead,” Roundtree said. “At that point I washed off my makeup, washed my hair. Everything went away and I went back to what I was when I was born and a friend of mine sat me down and he grabbed me and said today I’m going to your funeral. i said what He won, he killed you. If you won’t be Champagne, then Champagne is dead, let him win.
For Champagne Roundtree, the mayoral race is a shake-up of the status quo. “We need to stop worrying about what someone is and worry about who they are.”
Click here to report a typographical error. Please include the title.
Click here to subscribe to our daily WAFB 9 news roundup and breaking news alerts delivered straight to your email inbox.
Copyright 2024 WAFB. All rights reserved.