UL Lafayette is facing a state-mandated budget cut of $4.3 million, and yesterday the university announced where those cuts would be made. University officials also indicated that this is the first in more cuts to come, in light of the state's projected $2 billion shortfall. UL Lafayette President Dr. Joseph Savoie says, "In making budget adjustments, the top priority is to protect the university's core mission of academics and academic services that benefit students."
The largest reduction in budgeted expenditures will be in deferred maintenance and major repairs - $3.2 million.
The university is also reducing funding to information technology initiatives and various outreach services, such as economic development initiatives. Among the centers affected are the Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise and the Picard Center for Child Development. University funds to those centers will be reduced by 4.62 percent of their entire state general funds appropriation. Also being cut by 4.62 percent is university support for athletics.
Travel is being reduced by $200,000, while supplies will be trimmed by $100,000.
Collectively, these actions will reduce the university's current year expenditures by the targeted $4,320,845, or 4.62 percent.
David Calhoun and Elizabeth “EB” Brooks are the first two employees of Lafayette Central Park Inc., the nonprofit charged with turning Lafayette Consolidated Government’s 100-acre Johnston Street Horse Farm property into a passive public park. Calhoun was named executive director, and Brooks is director of planning and design.
There will soon be a whole lot of shakin’ going on at Benny’s Sportshack Supplement Depot, a new concept by Opelousas native Benny Nele. Located at 2002 Johnston St., the supplement shop, smoothie bar and café, featuring hot off the press paninis and wraps, plans to open in late May.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
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