Police Jury holds special meeting on road improvements

Some 25 parish residents attended a sometimes contentious special meeting of the Evangeline Parish Police Jury Wednesday, May 21, called to consider what roads will be improved with a tax-funded bond issue approved by voters last year.
Jurors were provided a list of roads that their consulting engineer, Ronnie Landreneau, presented earlier this month. During the special meeting, which lasted nearly two hours, Landreneau explained how the list was developed, and described a two-phase project that would start with improving asphalt roads and then improving chip seal and gravel roads.
People in the audience spoke freely about roads they use that are in need of repair and that apparently were not on the list prepared by Landreneau.
Landreneau said the cost of gravel and chip sealing was more than when the parish upgraded roads before, although the full cost won’t be known until bids are submitted. He said the roads he recommended for upgrading could deteriorate after money from the tax-funded bond issue runs out. He also cautioned that during this summer and beyond, roads weakened by expansion of water seeping into surfaces and freezing into ice during the severe cold temperatures of the past winter also will affect road conditions.
Landreneau said a high priority for road improvements were “collector roads,” that have higher volumes of traffic of people going between locations in the parish.
The bond issue is expected to raise $28.6 million over a 15-year period, but tax collections are lower than expected. Another factor discussed during the meeting was the decrease in industrial activity that also is slowing the local economy.
Juror Kenny Burgess said the original resolution had been changed, negatively impacting his district. At one point during the meeting, jurors Bryan Vidrine and Lamar Johnson argued about whether the majority of their constituents were in rural areas of the parish, causing the police jury president, Ryan Ardoin, to gavel the meeting back to order.
People in the audience questioned whether roads are being constructed properly. One citizen said the police jury, like the citizens attending the meeting, didn’t understand their own process of choosing roads to improve. “Use your money wisely,” another person in the audience said.
Another issue raised during the meeting was trucks hauling timber that are carrying more weight than allowed, accelerating road deterioration. There was some discussion about having weigh stations and calling in bonds issued to trucking companies that violate the weigh limits.
Chester Granger, parish public works director, said state requirements regarding use of contractors are driving up the cost of road construction. Landreneau cautioned that if the parish “circumvented state bid laws, it’ll put somebody in jail.”
Johnson, who had been in the process of making a motion to have Landreneau re-examine the list of proposed roads to be improved, walked out of the meeting room after exchanging words with Landreneau, who said without new instructions from the police jury, the list would “come out the same.”
The meeting lasted about another 15 minutes. Landreneau said he was trying to understand what Johnson was asking him to do, adding “we’ve been talking about this for months and months.”
Jurors Rocky Ryder and Ardoin, the police jury president, said they were confident in the work Landreneau has done on planning the parish’s road improvement projects.
Ryder moved that the jury accept Landreneau’s plan and allow it to be “tweaked” with the authority of the jurors representing the districts where the roads exist. The police jury approved, over the negative vote of Burgess, who had complained that the police jury had changed the original plan to draw up the list of roads based on the number of “road miles” in the districts.