New machinery will help clean up Mamou

MAMOU -- The Town of Mamou isn’t wasting any time utilizing its newly purchased heavy machinery equipment.
This past Friday, workers from the city departments were starting to demolish a burned out and long vacant home located on Fourth Street. The house, which had been vacant for five years, was quickly demolished as pieces of wooden planks and chunks of cement slab were torn off and dug up.
There was one worker who controlled the new John Deere Backhoe Loader and was digging up a portion of the home’s slab, while another worker manned the new CAT Excavator which was being used to rip down large sections of the house and then dumping them into a large disposal bin.
“These houses sit here and become dangerous eye sores for our community,” Mamou Mayor Ricky Fontenot said. “In addition to devaluing the property, these types of houses are being riddled with drug users and dealers, vagrants and other criminal activity. Having the tools to clean these houses up is good for our community.”
According to the mayor, the city paid $192,000 for the two heavy duty machinery, which will now give the town the ability to take on multiple projects for all four town departments, including street, gas, water and water waste.
For example, the town has targeted more than 20 condemned homes to be torn down, and is planning on having four of those projects completed by the end of May.
“The better equipment we have the more efficient we will be with these projects,” Mamou Public Works Director Roddy Fontenot said. “The quicker we can get to fixing an issue the better the situation is. This is going to help us with all four of our departments.”
Before the town was forced to contract said projects out to outside firms, and was forced to wait on their schedules to have work projects completed. Now that will no longer be an issue, as the town workers express just how much more efficient they will now become with the new equipment in hand.
“It is definitely going to make our job a whole lot easier,” Armand “A.J.” Benoit said. “We will now be far more efficient.”
Added Rogers Allison, “We are really excited about it. We are going to get jobs done a lot faster now. That is a good thing for the town.”