At its Tuesday meeting, the Lafayette City-Parish council will go into executive session to hear from lawyers for the waste transfer station that was legally permitted for construction just outside the city limits but later had its plans bulldozed by a unanimous vote of the council. That vote came just days before the October election.
The claim for damages, which sources knowledgeable about the potential legal action estimate to be upwards of $5 million, will likely be spelled out in a federal lawsuit if the developers and council fail to negotiate a settlement. Waste Facilities of Lafayette has maintained that it followed all guidelines when applying for a local permit to build a waste transfer facility on a small island of unincorporated land in north Lafayette and promised to take necessary steps to recover its losses. Work had already begun on the 16-acre site when the permit was revoked.
The facility was to be a daily stopping point for truckloads of garbage being hauled from surrounding areas so that the waste could then be trucked to a landfill outside of the parish. Just as the company was receiving its final approval from Lafayette Consolidated Government’s Planning, Zoning and Codes Department, nearly 10 months after the permitting process had begun, someone on Sunbeam Lane caught wind of the plans. Neighbors who feared the high volume of large trucks coming in and out of narrow roads leading to the Sunbeam Lane facility, noise from those trucks, the stinch of garbage and trash blowing into their yards complained to council members.
Sunbeam Lane residents also were livid that they were never notified by the project’s developers or anyone else with a hand in the project — including LCG’s permitting office — that a facility of this type was moving in. Regulations governing unincorporated Lafayette Parish do not require public hearings or notifications for projects of this type, though even LCG Chief Administrative Officer Dee Stanley has said informing residents of the imminent construction would have been the “corporate neighborly thing to do.”
Faced with opposition, Waste Facilities’ developers said trash wouldn’t escape, the facility would be clean and deodorizers would ameliorate any odor problems the business may cause. Their assurances fell on deaf ears.
However, before the council voted to revoke the permit, City-Parish Attorney Mike Hebert issued an opinion stating the legal liabilities “could extend into the millions of dollars” to compensate for the cost of land, money spent so far to develop it, relocation cost and lost profits.
Tonight the council will find out just how accurate Hebert’s opinion was. “It’s kind of to let us know what our exposure is,” Councilman Don Bertrand says of tonight’s executive session. “I know it’s in the millions.”
Read more on the Sunbeam Lane saga here.
MAY 21 Gambit columnist Clancy DuBos writes about the Mother's Day shooting, and how the stages of shock and blame and healing mirror those traveled by the same city following Hurricane Katrina. The city will recover, just as it did following the storm, by reaching out to help the people injured most seriously by the event, DuBos writes. It's how we heal, he says.
MAY 21 Here's a post on the Advocate (but buried on a subpage, not on the front) that reports something Louisiana Voice reported some time ago: a top DOE official lives in Los Angeles and "commutes" to Baton Rouge. The positioning of the story caused a stir on Facebook Monday, with several posters asking if the Advocate was covering someone's hiney. Sentell's stories on DOE are notoriously soft, and this one is no different: don't expect any hard questions in here.
MAY 21 Here's another post from blogger Tom Aswell about the "course choice" program. He's already reported on kids being signed up without their consent or knowledge, and has more here: For example, he tells of a six-year-old who was signed up for high school Latin. He also digs a little deeper into the sister companies of the main one operating in Louisiana; all of them seem to have complaints against them. Stinky.
MAY 21 Given the 80 percent cut in higher ed funding since he's been in office, it's clear Gov. Jindal would rather give tax cuts to out of state companies than have a functioning system, blogger Dayne Sherman argues in this post. The cuts have been such a disaster, Sherman says, that it will take 30 years to fix what's been broken. He says he believes the aim is to shut down most of the schools before Jindal leaves in 2016.
MAY 21 Blogger CB Forgotston says there are too many elections in Louisiana, and they're costing us too much money. The proof is in the pudding: turnout for most of these nonsensical pollings gets worse and worse, CB opines, even as millions of dollars that could be spent on health care or higher ed go down the tubes. The legislature must take action to stem the tide of pointless elections, he says.
MAY 21 Here's an interesting investigative piece by WVUE on the retirement benefits of some Jefferson Parish public employees. According to the story, the taxpayers are paying 100 percent of the retirement contributions of employees who started work prior to a certain date in April 1986 -- and have done for more than 30 years. It costs the parish millions annually, and might not be legal, the story reports.
MAY 21 This post on Bayou Buzz provides insight from Louisiana's intrepid pollster, Bernie Pinsonat, on the winners and losers from this year's legislative session. But to hear Bernie tell it, there's almost nuttin but losers: Jindal, the Republican party, the Fiscal Hawks all get big goose eggs in his win column.
MAY 20 This post on The Lens takes a look at a huge (either $500K or $250K) bill that one NOLA charter now has for school lunches. The RSD says the charter group didn't fill out the proper paperwork for federal reimbursement, but the story details how the RSD didn't ensure the people running the charter had the proper training, despite requests from hapless charter employees trying to fill out forms. Either way, somebody's asleep at the wheel.
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