At a special meeting Wednesday night, an abridged Evangeline Parish Police Jury discussed the proposed 2018 budget that includes a $12,000.00 pay raise at 20-percent for Secretary-Treasurer Donald Bergeron which would bring his salary to an estimated $70,000.00.
According to Jury President Ryan Ardoin, “I’m really pleased that most of our expenditures are down. I think the last six to eight years we’ve been working hard to try to get it that way, and I have to give that credit to Donald and his staff. I think he deserves the raise, and he worked hard or it.”
Arguing for a raise to be given in increments instead of all at one time was Juror Lamar Johnson. “I’m not arguing the fact that (Bergeron) shouldn’t be the highest paid person in the parish,” he said. “I’m arguing that it’s kind of hard to justify to folks when we tell them that we don’t have he money to do this or the money to do that with. We should do it in increments where we can live with. You can make an argument with somebody out there about that.”
Juror Bryan Vidrine stated that he did not “want to make any decision without the full jury to make that decision.”
According to Ardoin, “if the raise is approved, then at most it’ll be $20,000.00 which is 12-percent.”
Bergeron preferred not to comment on the proposed raise because “nothing has been approved” by the jury. The pay raise along with the proposed budget will be discussed further by the jury at another special meeting on December 20.
The five jurors present also discussed applying for a grant to be used for the regional watershed project. The grant money will come from funds allocated to the Acadiana Planning Commission from Governor John Bel Edwards. Donald Bergeron informed the jury that the deadlines for a “skinny application” is soon approaching.
“FEMA said projects had to be in by February,” Bergeron said. “That blew up a lot of our plans. We now have to have a project submitted to the Acadiana Planning Commission by December 15 where it will be ranked, graded, and then presented to the commissioners, which are the seven parish presidents, to vote on what projects will be submitted.”
Bergeron suggested a retention project “would have the best opportunity to be funded and completed both from a regional perspective and also the knowledge we have of what would be required to get permits from the Corps of Engineers.”
Parish Engineer Ronald Landreneau agreed. “The bottom line appears that the consensus is that retention, which is holding water back, is something that everybody thinks is a good idea,” he said. “Anything that we slow down in Evangeline Parish will benefit Acadia.”
According to Landreneau, the retention project would be two-fold. “It would be to impound water and divert it into an impoundment which would slow it down through the duration of the storm.”
He also agreed with a plan designed during the meeting by Juror Bryan Vidrine. Landreneau said the plan consists of “holding about 50 or 60 acres north of Bois de Soileau on Thurman Floyd’s property.”
Vidrine told the jury, “All of those houses got affected, and if we divert that water and hold it there, then it will help every one of these houses.”
The jury voted to take any recommendations from Ronald Landreneau regarding the project.
In other business, the jury:
• approved a quote from LWCC for workers’ comp coverage.
• and approved changes to the policy and procedures manual to add an ethics policy, a cash procedure policy, and a debt service policy to satisfy the new requirements of the state auditors.
Image
TONY MARKS