When others said no, he opened his town to hurricane evacuees
Unnoticed in the avalanche of news about formaldehyde in FEMA trailers and this summer’s final closing of the last of the trailer parks with some Katrina victims still scrambling to find housing, is the story of Harold M. Rideau, the mayor of Baker. When other towns in Louisiana were passing ordinances forbidding the establishment of FEMA trailer parks in their jurisdictions, Rideau, a Vietnam veteran and graduate of Southern University welcomed a flood of desperate people into his small town of 14,000. Rideau, who grew up poor in Bunkie, determined to help those unfortunate people the way his family had been helped. The FEMA trailer park that grew to house 2000 people on the outskirts of Baker, the largest FEMA encampment by far, is called Rennaissance Village . It has gotten a lot of press in the past two and a half years, both good, for its arts workshops, and bad, for the stories about perceived crime in the trailer park. But what no one has reported until now, is how Mayor Harold Rideau worked tirelessly to make the trailer park a decent place to live, how he fought to bring city services to the evacuees, and how he built a bridge between his constituents and the residents of Renaissance Village. Click here to read the story about Rideau in today’s New York Times.
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.
Is it a crime for citizens to photograph, video, or take notes of a police officer in the line of duty, or a right protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? Locally, such activity, as witnessed recently, will at the very least result in a night spent behind bars.
At Thursday's State of the Economy luncheon, LEDA President and CEO Gregg Gothreaux said PXP has already quietly hired 180 people for its Broussard expansion.
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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