MEET MAYOR TYRIN Z. TRUONG
Tyrin Truong is a son of Washington Parish. He was born here, raised here, went to school here and when he had every reason to build a life somewhere else, he came home instead.
Service runs in his family. His grandfather came to this country from Vietnam and served in the Vietnam War. His mother served in the United States Army. Tyrin grew up understanding that you don't get to complain about a place unless you're willing to do something for it.
He left for Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied African and African American Studies with a minor in political science, focusing on economic development, social justice, and the machinery of how government actually works, or doesn't. He watched other cities figure out how to reinvent themselves. He kept thinking about the one he came from.
Bogalusa was built almost overnight. The Goodyear family came down from New York, saw a pine forest, and put a city in the middle of it. That's how a place earns the name Magic City. But the mills that made this city couldn't carry it forever, and by the time Tyrin came home, Bogalusa was living with the consequences from shuttered storefronts and aging infrastructure to families watching their kids leave for Hammond and Slidell and New Orleans because there was nothing here to keep them.
In 2022, at twenty-three years old, he ran for mayor against a two-term incumbent, after pleading to help the city officials at the time. Nobody gave him a chance.
He won, becoming the youngest mayor in the history of Bogalusa and one of the youngest in the state of Louisiana. He was sworn in on January 8, 2023.
He inherited a city with real problems and a budget that couldn't solve them, and he went to work. Homicides in Bogalusa fell from nine in 2022 to two in 2025. He put crime cameras on the streets, recruited the largest class of patrolmen in over twenty years, and gave the fire department its first raise in two decades. He brought back the Mayor's Camp after a twenty-year absence and built a Youth Corps that has put more than 150 teenagers to work in their own neighborhoods, painting the Richmond Street Bridge, refurbishing parks, and learning what it looks like to be responsible for a place. He secured more than $2 million in grant funding, grew industrial park revenue by over 155 percent without raising a dime on residents, and hired the city's first properly licensed water and sewer operator in more than
twenty years.
He has pushed for investment in young people from the beginning, on the conviction that a city that won't spend money on its children is a city that has already decided how its story ends.
He is the father of a young son who will grow up in this city.
Tyrin Truong is running for reelection because the work isn't finished, and because he believes Bogalusa's best chapter is still in front of it.