A relatively light meal is on the menu for the Tuesday meeting of the Lafayette Consolidated Council — a respite between grueling weeks of budget hearings and next week’s budget finalization meeting, which many government watchers expect to go late into the night. Today’s meeting could be the shortest in recent memory: the obligatory preliminaries followed by just five mundane discussion items ranging from concerns about residue in garbage bins to recycling containers at fire stations.
The council gets down to brass tacks on Sept. 29 when it finalizes City-Parish President Joey Durel’s almost $600 million proposed budget for the coming fiscal year. The budget was amended several times over the last month, promising a showdown with the administration over such expenditures as funding for cultural and social service nonprofit agencies and investing in the comprehensive master plan. The budget as it currently stands is also about a half million dollars out of whack — red ink that will need to be squared with reality.
The load next week was lightened somewhat Monday when the administration, anticipating it doesn’t have enough votes for passage, pulled a Sept. 29 vote by the council on a proposed LUS rate increase. That matter will be brought before the council in a few weeks.
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.
Subscribe to this comment's feed