The majority of the $2.5 billion mortgage settlement paid by the five biggest banks to 49 states and the District of Columbia, a settlement reached in April and intended to go toward consumer-focused programs, has been diverted into the states’ general funds, according to a survey by the investigative journalism website ProPublica. More than $966 million of the pot now resides in general funds; $545 million was distributed as direct aid to homeowners; just under $35 billion has been devoted to investigations while the states are still sitting on nearly $1 billion and haven’t yet decided what to do with the windfall.
Louisiana’s share of the settlement was $21.7 million. None of that money has been earmarked, according to ProPublica, which contacted attorneys general offices in the states to find out where the money is going. According to the site, “An AG spokeswoman said the office was working with the legislature to fashion a plan. An AG proposal earmarks a portion for consumer protection.”
Louisiana’s mortgage delinquency rate, according to ProPublica, stood at 6.85 percent in early June, just slightly higher than the national average of 6.65 percent.
See a chart of state allocations of the mortgage settlement here.
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.
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