The Lafayette Charter Commission will hold its first public meeting at 5:30 p.m. Monday in the council auditorium, beginning a nine-month process that is likely to result in at least changes to the Lafayette City-Parish Home Rule Charter.
Monday’s meeting will be mostly practical in nature as the nine-member commission will establish its rules of order for conducting meetings as well as hear from members of the Durel administration and the City-Parish Council. The CPC recently amended the ordinance creating the commission allowing the panel to conduct business outside the confines of Robert’s Rules of Order, a set of guidelines for parliamentary procedure under which most deliberative assemblies operate. Suspending RRO should allow the commission to be more free-wheeling in its deliberations.
Sources tell The Independent that an early area of interest for the commission will be the possibility of asking parish voters next spring to extend the term of the current council and city-parish president by one year, which would move those elections from October 2011 to the fall of 2012. This would allow any significant recommendations by the commission — most importantly repeal of the charter — to go into effect by 2013, pending voter approval, rather than 2016; state law prevents an elected official’s term in office from being truncated by a change to the charter. If council/c-p president elections are held in 2011 as scheduled and voters don’t weigh in on a referendum related to the charter until after that election, any changes to the charter that would affect representation in those offices, including charter repeal, couldn’t go into effect until council members and the city-parish president complete the four-year term that begins in January 2012.
... written by ragin_cajun , August 02, 2010 - 05:21 pm
"the possibility of asking parish voters next spring to extend the term of the current council and city-parish president by one year, which would move those elections from October 2011 to the fall of 2012."
No. Absolutely not. There is no way that my current councilman escapes the wrath of this voter for an extra year. There's just no way I can see letting this crop of fiscal lunatics have an extra year with the checkbook. I would have to see a complete 180 from my councilman to even consider something like that.
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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.
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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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No. Absolutely not. There is no way that my current councilman escapes the wrath of this voter for an extra year. There's just no way I can see letting this crop of fiscal lunatics have an extra year with the checkbook. I would have to see a complete 180 from my councilman to even consider something like that.