The telecom offshoot of Lafayette Utilities System is using its recently achieved “cash positive” status as a marketing tool as it seeks to expand its customer base. In a mailer to LUS Fiber customers this week, LUS Director Terry Huval trumpets the fact that LUS Fiber is making enough money to cover its expenses and pay off the bonds issued to bankroll the venture:
LUS Fiber reached this financial position a year earlier than financial experts projected, which makes this milestone even that much more exciting,” Huval writes in part. “To have done so, so soon after we began serving customers, is a strong indicator that we are a healthy, thriving business that will continue to grow.”
LUS had to battle its way through the Legislature and fend off lawsuits to establish its fiber-to-the-home telecommunications business, which began hooking up customers in 2009. LUS Fiber had to take loans from LUS in order to meet its financial obligations — a scenario that was accounted for by the utility as it rolled out the multi-million dollar startup venture.
Huval adds that LUS Fiber’s newfound solvency will ultimately be a boon to LCG coffers: “As LUS Fiber continues to grow, it will hep reduce the need for new taxes because, like LUS already does today, LUS Fiber will generate new revenues for the city of Lafayette to support the cost of police and fire protection, along with many other municipal services.”
Huval’s letter to LUS Fiber customers is a prelude to LUS-F announcing the reinstatement of its “Refer-A-Friend” program that offers at $50 credit to LUS-F customers and the new customers they help get on the system.
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.
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