Written by Walter Pierce
Wednesday, 17 March 2010
A weighted vote could be the salve that soothes our consolidated sores.
The breathless deconsolidation talk that swept Lafayette began Feb. 1 when a charter committee advanced an ordinance that would put repeal of the City-Parish Home Rule Charter up for a parishwide vote. It wasn’t supposed to be that way.
One of the main reasons City-Parish Council Chair Jay Castille appointed the committee in the first place was to look at tweaking the existing charter, particularly with regard to wording in the charter concerning the Lafayette Public Utility Authority, the governing body of city-owned Lafayette Utilities System — our multi-billion dollar public utility.
Written by Walter Pierce
Wednesday, 10 March 2010
For elected officials, the intersection of public and private is wide.
This week’s column pains me to write. I prefer lighter, more cumulus fare to the slate-gray miasma that has blown over my desk. I didn’t write last week’s cover story about City-Parish Councilman Brandon Shelvin’s financial and legal problems, but I’ve moderated each of the many comments posted about it at theind.com. They have been plentiful and, save for a couple of defenders, overwhelmingly tinged with disgust.
Mr. Shelvin was aware weeks ago that the story was coming. He knew because I told him when he called to ask why a “white woman,” as he put it — Leslie Turk, the story’s author — was asking questions about him in his neighborhood.
Written by Walter Pierce
Wednesday, 03 March 2010
Jefferson Street Market’s closure doesn’t bode well for our historic downtown.
Businesses go out of business all the time. It is as prosaic to the life cycle of commerce as a sale or a receipt. So it wasn’t a shock to the system when we learned last week that Jefferson Street Market will close by the end of the month. It was a punch in the solar plexus for many who support downtown Lafayette. But a shock it was not. Traffic wasn’t exactly robust in the quirky market-slash-art gallery. For the last several months, if not year, a good month at JSM was a break-even month.
For me, the closure last spring of City News Stand was as great a loss for downtown, in part because it was the last news stand in the city and also because a news stand — such a quaint and quintessential 20th century enterprise — fit the district’s historical and spiritual character.
The needs of our public school system far exceed the public’s interest.
As deconsolidating Lafayette Parish and the funding mechanism for downtown security grab our attention and our headlines, an equally big story involving a huge chunk of our fiscal resources is garnering astonishingly little mention.
Early this month during a workshop, members of the Lafayette Parish School Board were presented with scenarios for our public school facilities by the Baton Rouge planning firm hired to assess our infrastructure needs. The scenarios range from a low figure of $207 million (scenario A — selective maintenance at all 42 school sites) up to $487 million (scenario D — replacing nine of the most dilapidated schools, among other measures).
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.
Most Read
in case you missed it