2008 will be a busy year

Ken Grissom

Take a good look around if you’re the nostalgic type. Chances are things will look very different by this time in 2009.

Breaux Bridge will be taking on a decidedly more urban look as new businesses spring up along I-10.

A new government complex will be taking shape in downtown St. Martinville. There will be less visible changes in the parish seat, too, powerful new sewage pumps to handle growth. Lower electric rates to encourage growth.

A new parish civic center at Cade and a new Cade fire station are set to open in ’08.

The fall’s freshman class will be looking at a new and tougher concept of high school education.

The parish’s legislative delegation — one old hand who is new to us and one familiar face new to Baton Rouge — will have the difficult tasks of helping to reform the state without shutting off the pipeline of much-needed funds for local projects.

Parish Government

“2008 will be a very busy year for Parish Government,” said Parish President Guy Cormier. “I think we’ll have probably a dozen projects all cranked up at the same time, going on continuously, all sorts of infrastructure projects and we’re excited about that.”

“For ’08 the big thing that we’ll see in our parish is hopefully the beginning of the construction of our new courthouse annex,” said Parish Council Chairman Mike Huval.

The annex, which will house the clerk of court, assessor, and registrar of voters, will take shape on the parking lot behind the existing antebellum courthouse, Huval said. Once those offices are relocated, the old courthouse can be renovated as a judicial building for courtrooms, judges’ chambers, and offices for the district attorney’s staff.

“Then we also hope to break ground on the new Council for the Aging building in Breaux Bridge,” Huval said. The building, adjacent to the sheriff’s office substation on Mills Avenue, will also house satellite offices for the clerk of court, assessor and registrar of voters, so that residents in the most populous part of the parish won’t have to travel down to the parish seat for routine courthouse business.

“Finally, we hope to develop a site for an industrial park in the northern part of the parish,” Huval said. “People want to come here and they’re just looking for a place to build a business.”

State funding for frontage roads connecting Breaux Bridge to Henderson in the I-10 corridor will be used to prepare and open up raw land to development along the interstate.

Sheriff’s Office

Meanwhile, the work of transforming the courthouse complex has already begun. Sheriff Ronny Theriot, who last year moved his patrol division and dispatching center to Ruth, has broken ground on an attractive new building to replace old makeshift storage and make way for the courthouse annex.

Theriot also has plans to tighten security at the jail facilities in St. Martinville and Breaux Bridge.

“Since our 911 has been moved to the complex in Ruth, our plans are to remodel that room downstairs we were using for 911 for the AFIS Automated Fingerprint Identification System that a lot of people use,” Theriot said. “Right now they have to go up in the jail. There is a possibility of compromising security. The least amount of interaction with the public you have inside a correction facility, the better off you are.”

Theriot said he is also building a visitation center at the Breaux Bridge substation which will be apart from the jail facility there. And in St. Martinville, SMSO property near the jail will be used to build a discrete but very secure compound to temporarily contain visitors in the event it becomes necessary to evacuate the cells.

There is an evacuation plan currently in place, but the sheriff said he wants something better to protect both the public and the prisoners.

“It’ll probably never be used but it’s like an insurance policy,” Theriot said.

There are plenty of challenges ahead for 2008, he said.

“We have to take a constant look at the fuel consumption,” Theriot said. “Insurance rates keep going up, not only auto liability but we’re mandated to pay for the employees’ health and life insurance. But we’re optimistic that we’re going to have an increase in revenues, too.”

Breaux Bridge

With an upscale subdivision on the drawing board and funding in place to create an I-10 corridor business park, Breaux Bridge Mayor Jack Dale Delhomme is excited about the future of his beloved community.

“I think you’re going to see in the next year and years to come that Breaux Bridge is going to be a city that many people are going to want to come to,” Delhomme said. “This new subdivision, The Lakes, that is being built off of Rees Street, this is going to open up to where people who are transferred to the Lafayette area are going to choose Breaux Bridge as a community to come to live in.”

The challenge will be to keep the city from being spoiled by its success, he said.

“I see nothing but good things for the future of Breaux Bridge,” he said. “However, we don’t want to lose sight of what made us good, our people, the friendliness, We don’t want to lose our flavor. We still want to keep Breaux Bridge Breaux Bridge.”

St. Martinville

Probably no elected official in the parish comes into the new year with more challenges than Thomas Nelson, the mayor of St. Martinville.

Sidelined by the interstate, abandoned by the garment industry, ripped asunder by racial factionalism, and stuck with high electric rates, St. Martinville has been moribund for decades. Even Wal-Mart, once the emporium of Small Town America, is packing up and leaving.

Nelson is nonetheless optimistic. A unified effort by him and a largely new City Council of blacks and whites succeeded in passing an additional one-cent sales tax last year. The extra revenues from that tax will more than take the sting out of the loss of sales tax revenues from Wal-Mart.

“It’s a sad thing that Wal-Mart is leaving, but looking at our budget, looking at the revenues we took in last year — both under the original one cent sales tax and the additional one cent sales tax for the last six months — I put the pencil to it, and we’re going to take in the same amount or better,” Nelson said.

“We’re going to take in more revenues in 2008 if the economy stays like it is than we took in last year.”

That means more money for police protection and for computer upgrades to give the city’s utility customers a break from the seasonal peaks that play havoc with household budgets and businesses alike.

Electric bills are going down, regardless, Nelson said.

“Electricity is going to go down two cents a kilowatt, that’s going to be a big help to the citizens,” he said.

“We’re also going to change the way we do the billing, billing on the third or the fifth instead of the 25th,” Nelson said.

School System

The toll will sound in 2008 for high school as we know it, said Superintendent Richard Lavergne.

“One of the big things we’re getting ready to see is called high school redesign, and its going to totally change how high schools operate,” he said.

“We’re going to have new graduation requirements, and for students who opt out of it, we have to look at other ways for these students to graduate. We have to reduce the dropout rate.”

The solution will be for students to start planning their career paths earlier, and for them to channel themselves toward college academics or some level of technical or vocational training.

What it does not mean, Lavergne said, is a watering-down of high school instruction.

“We see an increase in rigor and relevance in the curriculum,” he said.

Under the new “LA CORE 4 Curriculum,” College-bound students will have to take four maths, four sciences, four Englishes and four social studies.

“We have to look at different types of what we call certificates, which means you can have a technical certificate and you can have an academic endorsement certificate, so it’s not just one diploma anymore. You have a diploma plus.”

He said the parish’s high schools will be working more closely with Louisiana Technical College’s Evangeline Campus to create more career-type classes.

“High schools are going to change,” Lavergne said.

Baton Rouge

St. Martin’s (and Iberia’s) new state senator, Troy Hebert, D-Jeanerette, said the budget surpluses generated by rebuilding after the hurricanes have largely been well-used on teacher pay and roads, but that the new Legislature must guard against spending too lavishly.

“Now here we are facing another $2 billion surplus, and what we need to do, in my opinion, is probably what most people would do in their homes and businesses — we don’t need to spend all of it. We need to put some of it on the roads and other important matters, but we need to put away a lot of it because obviously the economy is cyclical and its going to go down.”

Hebert, who spent three terms in the state House of Representatives, said he is excited about working with Gov.-elect Bobby Jindal, a Republican.

“For the longest time we never had partisan politics in Baton Rouge,” he said. “That snake raised its ugly head over the last few years, but we need to make sure that doesn’t continue. We need to just go and look at things based on facts, look at the issues for what they are and what is good for Louisianians, not necessarily Republicans or Democrats.”

Freshman state Rep.-elect Fred Mills — who is hardly a newcomer to public service, having been on numerous advisory and governing boards as well as the Parish Council — has been studying statewide issues diligently since his landslide election this past fall. The two issues that loop paramount in his mind are roads — always an issue in a rural parish — and funding state retirement benefits.

“The big issue that we have is the retirement issue,” said Mills. “We have an unfunded accrued liability hovering around $15 billion. We’re only making payments on the interest and not the principal.”

Mills, a bank president, said it is a debt hanging over future generations that must be removed.

Also a pharmacist, Mills said health care issues, particularly for the elderly, come in among his top three priorities.

Although this report is broken down into different jurisdiction, there is a consensus that the real strength of St. Martin Parish lies in the way officials at all levels interact, most time pulling in the same direction.

“We have an atmosphere of partnership and cooperation in this parish,” said Sheriff Theriot. “Not just within our own organization but the entire leadership, with the city administrations, with parish government, with the district attorney’s office, the judges the school board. All of us are working together for the good of the constituents, the taxpayers and the people who live and work here and even the ones who just come here and visit.”

Ditto, said President Cormier:

“I can’t say enough about the leadership that we have pushing St. Martin Parish forward right now,” he said.

“I’m talking about every mayor of every municipality, the superintendent of the school board, the sheriff, our new representative, our new senator. I’m just really looking for some exciting things to happen in 2008.”