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Parish road session set for March
The newly-elected St. Landry Parish Council has called a special meeting at 6 p.m. March 6 to deal with roads.
"This meeting will be just to address that issue. We want to make it happen," said Council President Kenneth Vidrine.
Council members said they hope they will be able to come up with a plan to begin repairs on the parish's hundreds of miles of failing roads. Exactly how remains up in the air.At Tuesday's regular monthly council meeting, numerous proposals, from charging a $1 fee on license plates to taking funds from other areas, such as video poker receipts were proposed.
Many of these issues had been discussed at length last year by a citizen's roads advisory committee appointed by the previous council.
That committee found the license plate fee was illegal and the video poker money, which totals about $300,000 a year, inadequate.
Road resurfacing is currently costing about $180,000 a mile, meaning even if all the video poker money was dedicated to roads, it would still only be enough to repair about two miles a year. It is estimated the parish has about 250 miles of roads, out of a total of 1,000 miles, that need immediate attention.
"Personally, I don't think there is a magic bullet," said Advisory Committee Chairman Hayden Cochran when he presented a list of about a dozen suggestions to the council last year.
At Tuesday's meeting, Parish President Don Menard praised the council for wanting to tackle the issue head on. He promised to support and fight to pass any proposal they came up with.
While the decision will be up to the council, Menard told the them he still supports a modified version of his previous "Roads For Our Future" proposal.
That plan called for replace the parish's nine existing road taxing districts with a single, parishwide taxing district dedicated solely to road construction.
Those nine districts currently bring in more than $3 million a year that Menard argues is, for the most part, being wasted.
While there are no road districts in the western parts of the parish around Eunice, he said, for the most part, such a parishwide roads district wouldn't be a new tax. Instead it would be a more efficient use of the money already being generated.
"Seventy-nine percent of the property in the parish is being assessed to one of those road districts. Seventy-three percent of that money is in the hands of people we have no control over - we don't get any of that money," Menard said.
Exactly what form such a proposal would take this time is unclear. The original plan, which called for a 25-year, 15-mill property tax was heavily defeated by the voters in 2005. At the time, some argued 15-mills was too high while others argued the 25-year time frame was too long.
That plan also called for only addressing the parish's roughly 500 miles of blacktopped roads. At Tuesday's meeting, Menard said he believes upgrading some gravel roads to blacktop needs to be added this time.