COG sheds light on Lafayette Parish’s political dynamic.
I attended a meeting of the Lafayette Council of Governments last week in Duson, the parish’s westernmost outpost. COG comprises representatives of the six municipalities in Lafayette Parish — Broussard, Carencro, Duson, Lafayette Consolidated Government, Scott and Youngsville — plus the Lafayette Parish School Board. Duson City Hall is a low-slung cinder block building across the street from a church at the edge of a tidy neighborhood filled with modest, wood-framed houses. A prayer, the pledge and a barbecue dinner preceded the proceedings.
Four long rows of folding tables draped with patriotic paper cloth and bejeweled with randomly scattered red, white and blue foil-confetti stars filled the main chamber. After-dinner mints in stars-and-stripes wrappers filled jars lined up every four seats or so along the rows of tables, joining flags and other patriotic paraphernalia. It was the most un-selfconsciously ardent room I’ve been in in a long time. Like a church picnic in Mayberry on the Fourth of July.
With adumbrations of fireworks dancing in my head, I attended hoping Charlie Langlinais and Wilson Viator, the mayors of Broussard and Youngsville respectively, would be there. But alas, the foils, whose public squabbles over the Ambassador Caffery South extension have been less than diplomatic, were no-shows.
The assembly reflected geography; most of those in attendance represented Duson and the nearby towns of Scott and Carencro — the “parish people,” as some in the city of Lafayette are wont to call them. They spoke easily among themselves on a first-name basis, trading personal trivia.
Three representatives of LCG — the city people — attended the meeting, seated at the margin, and there was a sense that they were on the outside looking in. Others.
The main agenda item for the meeting was a discussion of annexation in the parish — a topic that has put civility to the test in recent weeks. At one point the conversation veered to what one of the mayors characterized as “hard feelings” from the past, the battles over land and resources that long ago created a climate of suspicion mainly between Lafayette and its smaller neighbors. The parish people traced those grievances back to the headstone of Kenny Bowen, the irascible, three-term mayor of Lafayette. Bowen, who died in 2002, was the last mayor of the city of Lafayette before it hitched its wagon to consolidation. Infamous among them was Bowen’s threats to cut off the supply of clean, drink-from-the-tap Lafayette Utilities System water to the towns and most of unincorporated Lafayette Parish as a means, many believe, to create an incentive for annexation.
Yet LCG data tell a different tale about annexations in the parish going back to the mid-1970s. While Lafayette and Duson have grown about 140 percent in land mass in the last 35 years, Broussard, Carencro and Scott have grown roughly 1,500 percent each, and Youngsville has expanded 6,400 percent. The small towns have clearly been the empire builders in Lafayette Parish, Bowen’s alleged bullying notwithstanding.
I realized that one can learn more about what our parish is, and isn’t, in an hour at a COG meeting than in a month of Lafayette City-Parish Council meetings. A mid-sized city and five small towns (plus two communities — Judice and Milton — that have no elected officials) is what Lafayette Parish is. Monolithic is what it isn’t. Despite being the third-smallest parish in geographic area with the fourth-largest population in the state — in other words, a densely packed place — Lafayette Parish remains a city orbited by satellites intent on preserving their small-town identities.
As the CPC begins interviewing applicants for the charter commission, we’ll see those disparate priorities and competing identities jostle for a place at the table. Let’s hope the process isn’t more Ambassador diplomacy.
One can learn more about what our parish is, and isn’t, in an hour at a COG meeting than in a month of Lafayette City-Parish Council meetings.
... written by Jason D. Faulk , May 26, 2010 - 07:58 am
How do these small, rural, farming-focused "towns" propose to keep their identity intact while rapidly moving to spread the plague of suburban sprawl upon our Parish? The two are not consistent goals.
All of this sprawl is for one, a reason the parish is supposedly broke (at least on the infrastructure side) and for two, a reason why increased sales taxes were requested even in a time of growing population, expanded numbers of developed acres, and of growing tax receipts at the existing taxing levels. Simply, sprawl wastes our financial resources by ineffeciently delivering transport and utility bases to the public sector for management, while producing the secondary demand for redundant, bloated and easily congestible public systems of transport and utility not initially developed by the private sector.
To be fair, Lafayette (city and unincorporated sectors) is an equal participant in this sprawl nonsense, in the past, and still to this day (even with a TND zoning mechanism.)
Everyone wants to get rich and GROW, but the benefits of this are short term in nature if not taken with a comprehensive long view of the situation.
We know better now, now being the time to make a change in how we grow that cannot wait any longer.
In the end, Lafayette Parish can demand its future be efficient, financially, culturally and environmentally sustainable, or it choose to waste resources, then under-tax itself to maintain a sub-par state of affairs.
What's your choice "Lafayette"?
... written by ragin_cajun , May 26, 2010 - 06:25 pm
Sprawl is why the parish is broke? That doesn't sound right. I thought it was because the cities were annexing anything with a tax base. But I could be wrong.
How about if we get some real data to talk about? Let's see a 20 year graph of tax burdens, expenditures, administrative overhead as a percentage of the budget, population, etc. Where do we get that information? Somebody has it, can we not post it on the Internet?
... written by Jason D. Faulk , May 28, 2010 - 09:41 am
Firstly, we can all pull up population data from the US Census department, it can be rather arcane to deal with tracts and block data, but it's there. For LCG data, we'd have to go back more than 20 years to do a good comparison, to show the budgets of city, and parish(reflecting unincorporated areas). The real trick would be in gathering data from public works from those eras, and doing an analysis of infrastructures miles and feet travelled, compared to vehicle mileage for the roads, material quality based on demand loads, and road widths, along with land occupation density and conversion ratios of open land to developed to help show water absorbing capacity diminshment and increased drainage demands, etcetera, all this to show the snowballing effect of growth for growth's sake, but only to serve the automobile as the transport mode for 95%+ of the population. That's why we're in this situation, because we did not grow with diversity of transport modes in mind from the 1950's onward, and as such have become built-out in such a way that we now underserve all age demographics in our society. It took a few decades to get this way, for populations to age mostly in place even as their nests emptied, and such now we see, even with some of those nests turning over, there simply cannot be enough nesting grounds but to go out to the cane fields and cattle pastures to make new ones. It's all about striking a balance.
Such studies have been done in other places, and there are some generally reflective data from other places that can be used in comparison, but RC, basically you're challenging me to put together a GIS and produce this report on my own for Lafayette. Having said that, I believe one of the planners has a report that breaks down the demographic transition of the City of Lafayette, it was given in relation once that I witnessed, to the Johnston St. Stakeholders group a few years back.
Really though, but not for the opportunity cost of borrowing money to build a road to help private owners develop their property and add value to the community, would we not ever see the need to borrow money as a city to build new roads, bridges and concrete ditches? We pay a good bit of interest over the years, and it seems strange we can only achieve these gains by decades long indebture. Maybe development doesn't pay the true cost of extending services to support it, if all things being equal, a gov't has a neutral balance of payments year in year out, then in times of growth can't come up with enough funds to take on the added costs of growth.
A business may have to borrow capital to expand or to start, but it still seems odd that government would have to do this. But then, government is a business, isn't it?
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All of this sprawl is for one, a reason the parish is supposedly broke (at least on the infrastructure side) and for two, a reason why increased sales taxes were requested even in a time of growing population, expanded numbers of developed acres, and of growing tax receipts at the existing taxing levels. Simply, sprawl wastes our financial resources by ineffeciently delivering transport and utility bases to the public sector for management, while producing the secondary demand for redundant, bloated and easily congestible public systems of transport and utility not initially developed by the private sector.
To be fair, Lafayette (city and unincorporated sectors) is an equal participant in this sprawl nonsense, in the past, and still to this day (even with a TND zoning mechanism.)
Everyone wants to get rich and GROW, but the benefits of this are short term in nature if not taken with a comprehensive long view of the situation.
We know better now, now being the time to make a change in how we grow that cannot wait any longer.
In the end, Lafayette Parish can demand its future be efficient, financially, culturally and environmentally sustainable, or it choose to waste resources, then under-tax itself to maintain a sub-par state of affairs.
What's your choice "Lafayette"?