City-Parish President Joey Durel addresses a Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce breakfast crowd Wednesday morning at the Petroleum Club.
Telling a dining room packed with Lafayette business people at the Petroleum Club Wednesday morning that Lafayette is the lowest taxed parish containing a major city in the state of Louisiana, City-Parish President Joey Durel advanced his latest mission: adjusting the way Lafayette Consolidated Government covers expenses in terms of the ratio of city versus parish revenue devoted to those expenses. Durel believes the cost of running LCG should reflect population distribution in the city and the parish; currently the city overwhelmingly bears the load.
Durel also borrowed from Tuesday night’s remarks to the City-Parish Council when he urged the lawmakers to keep property tax millage rates the same as last year, thereby ensuring that LCG revenue keeps pace with inflation so LCG can continue to provide its current level of services to residents.
And the three-term Republican floated the idea of levying, pending voter approval, temporary sales taxes to fund specific projects. He used as an example the planned bridge over the Vermilion River at the South College Drive extension, a project that will have a roughly $30 million price tag.
But it was Durel’s slide presentation highlighting the disparity between the city and parish in terms of covering the cost of operating LCG that monopolized the breakfast presentation. “We all know what drove [the vote to consolidate in the 1990s] was the parish potentially going bankrupt,” Durel said. “What we have done is disguise the truth for the last 16 or 17 years.”
He pointed to a chart showing the city-parish allocation ratio for funding LCG. The first year consolidated government was in operation, 1996-97, the city of Lafayette covered 60 percent of the cost while the parish covered 40 percent. Those figures were commensurate with population distribution at the time: 60 percent of Lafayette Parish residents lived in the city limits of Lafayette; 40 percent lived outside. But even as that population distribution steadily shifted in favor of the parish — Lafayette city residents now make up only about 53 percent of the overall parish population — the city has taken on a great burden in terms of funding LCG. In 2001 the ratio jumped to 82 percent city-18 percent parish. Five years later it jumped another percentage point, 83-17, and in 2009 it rose to its current allocation level. The city of Lafayette now pays 84 percent of the cost of running LCG while the parish pays only 16 percent, even though the non-city population is about 47 percent of the overall parish population.
“This starts with the premise that it is illegal to spend city dollars that city people voted for outside that city. It’s against the law to do that,” Durel said. “You can’t take city dollars from Lafayette and go spend them in New Orleans. ...We can’t take city dollars and go spend them out in the parish because we just feel good about it. That, to me, is huge. This is a big, big deal.”
Durel reiterated his estimate that the city of Lafayette has more or less illegally spent about $35 million on parish projects since consolidated government’s inception. “Can you image how pretty and shiny Lafayette would be if we could spend $35 million cutting grass and cleaning things and painting things and paying our fire- and policemen and that sort of thing? ...Millions and millions of dollars in city taxes that city people voted for to stay in the city didn’t [stay in the city].”
Durel told the audience it’s time for a parishwide discussion on this topic — he indicated that he plans to conducted town hall meetings across the parish for that very purpose — adding that a new company has been hired to study and make recommendations on city-parish allocations. A company representative will address the council on the topic next week.
“The good news is we’re the lowest-taxed city and parish in the state of Louisiana,” Durel said. “The bad news is, you get what you pay for.”
In closing the city-parish allocation portion of his presentation, Durel took aim at the concept of “consolidation” in Lafayette Consolidated Government — the parish and the city keep separate books; LCG is more or less consolidated in name only — and delivered what could be considered a dig at Councilmen Jared Bellard and William Theriot, the reining chairman and vice chairman on the council, whose constituents largely reside outside the city of Lafayette and who consistently votes against the interests of the city: “I’m not going to stand for people outside of my city to vote on the governance of my city," Durel said. "That is un-American. We have the most un-American form of government in America today.”
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.
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.
Subscribe to this comment's feed