Lafayette Consolidated Government has gone live with its own
internal phone network, expected to generate approximately $1 million in
savings over the next decade. The new Internet-Protocol-Telephony system
converges local government’s phone and data services onto one network, run
largely over city-owned fiber optics and managed by the city’s IT department.
The system greatly reduces LCG’s dependence on AT&T’s services. “AT&T used to do everything,” says LCG Chief
Information Officer Keith Thibodeaux. “Now, the entire system is internal to
us.” While the system will still be relying on some AT&T network lines, Thibodeaux anticipates LCG’s phone bill with AT&T to go down from $60,000 a month to approximately $20,000 a month. The majority of the savings will go toward paying off the system's costs as well as upgrades to the city's network. The IPT system, which has been a goal of City-Parish President Joey Durel's administration over the past three years, also offers LCG employees added features such as call-forwarding and integrated messaging. “It’s efficiency, productivity and some cost savings,” Thibodeaux
says. “That’s why we did it.”
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.
Philip deMahy Sr., a once respected New Iberia ad exec, was sentenced May 2 to spend the next two years (he faced up to 100 years) in a state penitentiary after state and federal investigators found dozens of images depicting children engaged in lewd sexual acts on his personal computer.
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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