Members of the House of Representatives sweated it out a bit Thursday during a briefing on the new financial disclosure requirements that take effect May 15. House Clerk Butch Speer took lawmakers through the recently completed forms page by page, explaining everything from spousal income to side jobs. It’s likely to be among the best-attended House gathering this session — most reps were reluctant to even slip outside for media interviews.
Speer was pressed hard by many lawmakers to define the differences between reporting income from full-time and part-time jobs. Speer told lawmakers the overriding goal is transparency, after all, and they should use their best judgment. “You are giving information to the public,” he says. “So, what do you want the public to know about your employment? And do you consider it full-time or part-time?”
At the urging (read: forceful hand) of Gov. Bobby Jindal last year, legislators agreed to begin publicly disclosing where the bodies are buried in their personal income. But the new forms drafted by the state Ethics Board are possibly more detailed than any of them originally thought. The wrong address or incomplete information could draw scorn, Speer warns. “And I guess I should say this now, and I’ll say it over and over again. If you do not have a CPA to give you advice about this, you should get one.”
Of course, there is another way around fretting about the new oversight “I don’t have any money, so I’m not worried about it,” says freshman Walker Hines, a Democrat from New Orleans and the youngest member of the Legislature at only 24.
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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