Emergency repairs to the Surrey Street bridge over the Vermilion River near Lafayette Regional Airport will force of the closure of the bridge for nearly a month. The closure, following the execution of a contract with a Lafayette engineering and construction firm, is expected to begin July 12 and end on Aug. 10. On Tuesday the City-Parish Council approved an emergency ordinance transferring $350,000 from two bridge-repair funds and from surplus money from the Camellia Boulevard extension project to bankroll the Surrey Street bridge repair project.
Lafayette Consolidated Government’s Traffice and Transportation Department will brief Surrey Street business owners on the project at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, July 1 at the Lafayette Public Library’s main branch downtown. The department will also issue press releases about detour routes in the coming days.
In a Monday e-mail to Public Works Director Tom Carroll and Associate Director Pat Logan, City Engineer Mitch Wyble details four problems with the span including failing embankments on both the east and west approaches that are compromising the road surface, the rocker bearing mechanism that allows the bridge to move freely has jammed, and several areas of concrete railing on the bridge have been damaged and need to be repaired.
The bridge was built in the mid 20th century and designed for a much lighter traffic load.
“In those days, they didn’t build approach slabs,” explains Logan. “They built a road and they built a bridge in between. And what has happened is the approach has washed out ... so we’re going to have to redo that and do it how it’s done in current times.”
The project is also on the fast track because the the 2010-2011 school year is looming — students report on Aug. 12 — and the Lafayette Parish School System’s bus depot is near the bridge; a closure during the school year could pose a logistical nightmare for the LPSS’ transportation system.
But the overriding motivation is safety, says Logan. “What the structural engineers who looked at it said was, [the bridge] is likely to fail — not tomorrow, not next week, but in the foreseeable future. And if it fails, we’ll lose the bridge, it’s going to go in the river. So, we’re going to take all the appropriate steps to get it fixed.”
The closure is sure to cause headaches for commuters who live on the east side of the thruway near Pinhook Road. Because there’s no left turn onto the thruway from westbound Pinhook, Surrey Street has been the common route to getting from that part of town to Highway 90/Evangeline Thruway. Traffic and Transportation Director Tony Tramel has decided that temporarily allowing a left turn onto the thruway from Pinhook would create more problems than it would address, according to Logan, so Tramel’s department is determining viable detour routes.
The 2.2-mile stretch of Surrey Street between Highway 90 and Jefferson Boulevard (near what old-time Lafayette residents call Pontiac Point) is among just over six miles of roadway LCG took over from the state in December 2008 in a deal to get the Ambassador South extension built; the state Department of Transportation and Development has a statutory limit on how many miles of road statewide it can be responsible for, so in order to get the six-plus mile stretch of Ambassador built, LCG had to take up some DOTD slack.
MAY 17 Here's a column from James Gill, this time in the Advocate. Gill, who has jumped ship from the Picayune, writes about the absurdity of dueling polls in this post. The numbers are so wildly different, it is obvious that both sides are "cooking the books," he writes. In particular, he looks at Sen. Mary Landrieu, and how her recent actions in DC have been received by those polled. Gill's acerbic, amusing prose is a welcome addition to a paper so conservative as to be occasionally lacking in personality.
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.
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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