Ethics board reduces fine against former candidate
The state Board of Ethics has agreed to reduce the fine against a former candidate for state representative. George Bourgeois, an Opelousas attorney, was fined $480 dollars by the board for filing a campaign report eight days late. Bourgeois was an unsuccessful candidate in the District 40 state representative election in August. According to a board spokeswoman, Bourgeois’ fine was reduced to $200. The board declined to waive or reduce a $400 fine against District 7 Lafayette City-Parish Councilman Don Bertrand, who was 161 days late in filing a campaign report in connection with his successful October 2007 election.
Upcoming at the Ethics Administration, the board next week will hear a request by District 8 Lafayette City-Parish Councilman Keith Patin to withdraw a request for an advisory opinion. The board was contacted by Pat Ottinger, city-parish attorney, for an advisory opinion on whether Patin, then employed by a company that contracts with the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office to provide nurses at the parish jail, was in violation of any ethics laws. However, Patin has since ended his employment with the company, hence withdrawal request.
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.
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.
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.
Episcopal School of Acadiana’s Dr. Joshua Caffery, chair of the school’s English Department, is headed to Washington, D.C., and the Library of Congress as the latest winner of the Alan Lomax Fellowship in Folklife Studies.
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