By Leslie Turk
July 18, 2012
The white trucks, arson, stab wounds, poison ivy, bloody pictures of himself, women’s IDs. Brandon Scott Lavergne has a lot to explain.
Cheap and convenient, plastic grocery bags are becoming an ecological threat to our oceans and waterways.
By Elizabeth Rose
Photos by Elizabeth Rose
July 11, 2012
An empty plastic bag left over from the grocery store sits in the back of a truck and flies out of the bed while driving down Johnston Street. It floats across the road for a few hours, and then an unavoidable summer downpour rolls through and the bag floats into a storm drain, where it travels to the Vermilion River. Eventually, it’s dumped into Vermilion Bay, where it drifts out into the Gulf of Mexico.
The final round of the Boustany-Landry showdown is starting to come to life. It won’t be pretty.
By Jeremy Alford
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
Right now they’re just shadowboxing. They’re throwing jabs at an imaginary opponent from the comfort of their Beltway offices, shuffling in their shirtsleeves and loosening up their political muscles.
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
By Leslie Turk • Photo by Robin May
Now that the Louisiana Board of Ethics has filed charges against development consultant Greg Gachassin, it’s time for Lafayette government’s leaders to turn their attention to the complicity of the Lafayette Public Trust Financing Authority’s attorney and board members. And it appears that’s about to happen: Last Friday Lafayette City-Parish Council Vice Chairman William Theriot asked City-Parish attorney Mike Hebert for guidance in requesting that the Legislative Auditor be called in to audit LPTFA.
The environmental and cost benefits of using compressed natural gas for city-owned vehicles has LCG on a green path to fuel efficiency.
By Heather Miller
Photo by Robin May
Louisiana as a whole is “way behind” on the use of compressed natural gas as a cheaper and cleaner fuel for vehicles, but leave it to Lafayette to once again distinguish itself a leader in the state for its efforts to lower the city’s carbon emissions with CNG-run government vehicles and natural gas fueling stations for the public.
MAY 24 Blogger Robert Mann posts this entry about the Baton Rouge Chamber's recent report on Louisiana's higher education system. It's critical to economic development, and yet our system is facing a "funding crisis" with no way to resolve it, the report says. The Chamber says control of tuition and fees must be returned to the higher ed governing boards.
MAY 24 Here's a NBC33 story about Tyrann Mathieu. He has signed with the Arizona Cardinals, inking a $3 million, four-year deal. He gets a signing bonus of $265K, but gets another, larger bonus if he doesn't get cut from the team for doing drugs. The deal reportedly includes mandatory tests and meetings for the player.
MAY 24 Jarvis DeBerry posts here about the redonkulus rhetoric that would have us believe NOLA is a safe city with a murder problem. Maybe the city's crime stats don't compare with its murder stats because you can't manipulate a murder, he says: a dead body's a dead body. It just doesn't make sense, he says, and his readers agree: a poll asks if they believe the city is safe, and more than 90 percent say no.
MAY 24 Jindal administration officials announced Thursday that the privatization of public health care is going to cost a lot more than they budgeted for, the Advocate reports here. "I'm so surprised," said no one. Anywhere. The cost they're projecting now is more than $1 billion - a lot more than the $626 million budgeted for it. And, it's more than it cost the state to operate those hospitals. So why are we doing this again?
MAY 24 Blogger CB Forgotston ridicules the recent PR campaign by the state GOP in the wake of a legislative auditor's request to both major parties. The GOP (apparently unaware that the Dems got the same request) started yammering about being targeted because it had "killed" a tax increase. CB finds that laughable, but it's also pretty funny that the GOP was comparing this episode to the IRS scandal (Because the President has so much to do with our state auditor. Right?).
MAY 24 Politico details some recent fund-raising efforts by Sen. David Vitter, which have raised the question of his future political plans. This time, it is a $5,000 per head "bayou weekend" that includes "Cajun cooking" and an all-caps "alligator hunt," the story reports. Funds raised go to a super PAC that can spend money to support Vitter in federal or state races, the story points out.
MAY 24 The pink building on Royal in the quarter was sold at a sheriff's sale Thursday, this Picayune story reports. An injunction that would have halted the sale wasn't enforced because the family failed to post a $150,000 bond, the story reports. So the owner of the mortgages on the building bought it, for nearly $7 million. Now the feuding family will have to negotiate with that company to get a lease on the building that has housed their business for close to 60 years.
MAY 23 This post in Louisiana Voice tells us about a bill by a Winnsboro lege that would require all public high school students to take at least one Course Choice online class in order to graduate. (What?) Blogger Tom Aswell says it's a monument to "waste and corruption," especially in light of the problems he's exposed with the program in recent weeks. Idaho had a similar program, but voters removed it by a 2-1 margin, Aswell says.
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