Roads will head president's agenda
By William Johnson    December 2, 2007
wjohnson@dailyworld.com

Tougher regulations are needed for subdivisions. A land use plan is needed for the parish and efforts need to be greatly improved to clean up abandoned property. But it is roads that dominate the thinking of parish President Don Menard, who easily won re-election to a second four-year term in October.

“Roads — that is my number one priority. That was all I heard when I campaigned four years ago and that was all I heard when I campaigned this time,” Menard said.

In 2003, the people of St. Landry Parish voted for a home rule charter that changed the parish’s form of government from a police jury to a parish council with a parish president.

Under the police jury, the parish tended to function as 13 independent districts, each with its own office, employees, road equipment — and through the parish’s 35 special taxing districts — its own tax base.

When Menard and the council took office in 2004, most of that disappeared. Much of Menard’s first term was spent consolidating these police jury districts into a unified parish system.

The one thing he was unable to change was the host of taxing districts that collectively bring in three times more revenue than parish government as a whole.
Promising to address the deplorable condition of the parish’s roads, during his first term Menard set his sights on the parish’s nine road taxing districts that collective bring in about $3.2 million a year.

In a plan known as Roads For Our Future, Menard called for combining and expanding these road districts to create a single, parishwide district dedicated to road construction.

While that plan was heavily defeated by the voters in 2006, Menard said he still believes in it.

“We’ve got to consolidate those taxing districts. We are still working with the old police jury financial structure,” Menard said. “We can’t use the same thinking that created the problem to fix the problem.”

He said he is currently working on a new version of the Roads For Our Future plan that he hopes to put before the new council when it takes office in January.

He said roads must be the parish’s top priority for many reasons.

“When business and industry look at an area, education is number one but infrastructure is number two. We are holding back growth we could be experiencing,” Menard said. “We can build a better parish for ourselves and our children.”
He said he believes the roads proposal will pass this time.

One reason why is because some of the parish council members who most strongly opposed the plan the first time will not be returning this term. “I was disappointed that proposal was defeated. The people were being misled by people they trusted. Some of the things that were said were absolutely false,” Menard said.