BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Agriculture Commissioner Mike Strain will borrow $7 million to take control of a defunct sugar cane mill in southwest Louisiana that was built with state tax dollars and only operational for 90 days.
Strain received approval Thursday from the Bond Commission to borrow the money through a bond sale and repay it over 10 years.
The mill is teetering on default of its debt payments. Strain says if the state doesn't buy out the mill, a bank would take over the property and the agriculture department wouldn't be able to sell it or lease it to recoup some of its investment.
Strain said his department has spent $78 million to build and maintain the Lacassine mill constructed under his predecessor, Bob Odom. It was appraised for less than $7 million.
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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