Boiling mad crawfish farmers are meeting tonight in Rayne to decide if they will go on strike. According to Steve Minville, director of the Louisiana Crawfish Farmer’s Association, farmers have been complaining of price fixing by crawfish processors--those who buy and resell Louisiana mudbugs. The price being offered for live crawfish, Minville says, is 75 cents on the wholesale market, three cents below cost. “How am I supposed to pay for my daughter’s college education? How am I supposed to pay for my electric bill at home?” asks Minville, a farmer since 2000. The high cost of diesel, currently about $3.40 a gallon, used to pump freshwater into the ponds, is contributing to the problem, but Minville says the dispute with the middle man has been ongoing for years. “Our industry has begged for us to address price fixing.” Crawfish farmers will meet at 6 p.m. tonight at the Rayne Civic Center to vote on whether to cut off the supply of crawfish, just as the season begins to kick into gear.
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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