City-Parish President Joey Durel offered a roughly $580 million budget to the City-Parish Council during a special meeting Thursday night. Durel also offered the council a challenge: be fair to the city of Lafayette.
In his budget message, Durel told the council he believes the parish — unincorporated Lafayette Parish, to be exact; the five smaller municipalities are autonomous and operate on separate budgets — has gotten about $32 million worth of services from the city since the inception of consolidated government in 1996. Although Lafayette operates under a consolidated form of government, it’s not truly consolidated; the city and parish have separate budgets and the city and parish split the cost of providing services and infrastructure to unincorporated Lafayette Parish on a 84 percent (city) to 16 percent (parish) ratio.
“When you talk about not being able to hire more policemen, more firemen, things like that, and you look that we may have 32 or so million dollars no longer in the city that maybe potentially should be, it gives you a pretty good picture of where he have been and where we would continue to go if this was not be exposed,” Durel told council members.
Durel said the ratio should mirror the population ratio in the parish: 54 percent (city) and 46 percent (parish). That means the parish would be on the hook for covering nearly $6 million more in services in the upcoming fiscal year beginning Nov. 1. All at the meeting acknowledged the parish doesn’t have that kind of cash laying around. Durel is proposing the parish only assume $4 million of that cost.
Indications from Thursday’s meeting are that this isn’t sitting well with the council members who represent mainly unincorporated Lafayette Parish and the small towns, although those councilmen are a four-vote minority on the nine-member council. Council members will have to hammer out the issues during the budget-hearing process that begins Tuesday.
To watch last night’s meeting, click here.
To read more, check out The Advertiser’s coverage here.
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MAY 17 Blogger Tom Aswell continues delivering bombshells about the state education department and Gov. Jindal's education "reform" efforts. In this post, he reports that students in the Shreveport area have been signed up for a charter school without their knowledge or consent. Most interesting to Aswell is how this Texas-based charter (with ties to GOP types) got the personal student information it has, if the students didn't give it.
MAY 17 This post by JR Ball in the Baton Rouge Business Report is an interesting tongue-in-cheek look at recent Baton Rouge economic development efforts. Among the items he examines is the idea that gaining a Costco makes BR a "world-class city." (Really? All you need is a different brand of Sam's? MK!) This effort, and other recent ones, are all built on the taxpayer's back, with tax zones, tax incentives and tax rebates, Ball writes.
MAY 17 Blogger CB Forgotston is critical of the legislature's reliance on a revenue-estimating committee's decision to include projected tax amnesty income in this year's forecast. That's a problem, CB posts, because the deadline for these people to pay their taxes is June 30, 2014. So when do you think these people who haven't paid taxes in years are going to pay their taxes? Surely not before June 30, and that means the money won't be there for this year's budget, he argues.
MAY 17 Here's an interesting blog out of California by a Hollywood writer, attorney and academic named Brian Alan Lane. He blogs about higher ed, and was a whistle-blower in a scandal over false credentials. In this post, he takes aim at LSU's new top dog, King Alexander. It's convoluted and a little confusing, but it sure makes Alexander a lot more interesting than he was yesterday.
MAY 17 Blogger Robert Mann writes about the LSU Board's refusal to allow Dr. Fred Cerise to testify before the legislature about Gov. Jindal's plan to close down all the state's charity hospitals and dump the poor on the private system. It's hard to imagine anyone more qualified than Cerise to testify about that, so why would anyone try to prevent him doing so? Mann thinks it is because the powers that be aren't interested in hearing any truth about the plan.
MAY 17 This post on the Louisiana Sinkhole Bugle, a blog that notes developments in the Bayou Corne and Jefferson Island salt domes, talks about a proposed expansion of the salt dome storage under Lake Peigneur in Iberia Parish. Residents are working against it for several reasons, including two biggies: the sinkhole disaster in Bayou Corne and the continuing, unexplained bubbling on the surface of the Lake.
MAY 17 NOLA police arrested more people Thursday accused of either being involved in the Mother's Day shooting or hiding the suspect afterward, this Gambit story reports. The NOLA police chief said he suspects the whole thing was gang-related and throws out a challenge to the gangs: he's got informants now, he says, and he knows a lot more than the gangs want him to know. The people who live in the neighborhoods terrorized by gangs are ready to talk, he says.
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