Officials say pacts crucial to tax votes

By KEVIN BLANCHARD
Acadiana bureau
Published: Sep 7, 2006


The proposal to levy 1-cent sales taxes in each of the seven government jurisdictions of Lafayette Parish hinges on a concept popularized by President Ronald Reagan in his nuclear arms talks with the Soviet Union — trust, but verify.

City-Parish President Joey Durel has proposed a new sales tax in the unincorporated areas of the parish and inside the various city limits of Lafayette, Broussard, Carencro, Duson, Scott and Youngsville.

The arrangement will require a series of agreements on how to spend those collections — given that each area’s voters approve the measure, which would appear on the Nov. 7 ballot.

“It requires a certain degree of trust,” Chief Administrative Officer Dee Stanley said.

Because those entities make up the whole of Lafayette Parish, some have questioned why the administration didn’t simply propose a single, parishwide measure, to be collected and spent everywhere, regardless of boundary lines.

Broussard Mayor Charles Langlinais and other area mayors said a parishwide measure couldn’t get support, because decisions on how and where to spend the money would all be left up to the City-Parish Council — with no control by the local municipalities.

The second option was to have each jurisdiction call its own tax, but that ran into legal problems, Stanley said.

There are caps on how high some jurisdictions can raise sales tax levels. Legislation passed by State Sen. Mike Michot, R-Lafayette, during the recent session exempted from that cap a new 1-cent sales tax called by the parish, the city of Lafayette or the School Board.

Because the smaller municipalities were not included in that exemption, four would only be able to raise sales taxes half a penny — to 8.5 percent — while Youngsville, which is already at 8.5 percent, couldn’t raise a sales tax at all.

So the City-Parish Council on Tuesday set the ball rolling to set up special taxing districts of the parish, with boundaries that encompass each of the smaller municipalities.

Because the parish is calling for the new tax, it would not count toward the cap, under state law.  However, using that mechanism requires the City-Parish Council to be the governing authority over the taxing districts — meaning it determines how the money is spent.

Which brings into play the trust issue.

Stanley said Tuesday the administration will propose intergovernmental agreements with each of the other councils in the parish, agreements that would allow those areas control over the money collected in their jurisdictions.

In other words, the City-Parish Council would, while still being the legal authority to spend the taxing districts’ money, it would cede or share that authority with the various town councils.

Those agreements should be hammered out in October, perhaps less than a month before the Nov. 7 election, Stanley said.

And if the agreements reached are not to the liking of the smaller municipalities, Langlinais said, then the municipalities will do their best to kill the sales tax measure at the ballot.

Also Tuesday, the council established two new taxing districts along Interstate 10 in anticipation of private development in those areas.  Shoppers in those areas would pay an additional 1-cent sales tax, the proceeds of which would be used to build public infrastructure to serve the area — like service roads and drainage.  That tax was raised by a simple vote of the council because those particular districts were drawn to include no residents.

Should all the other sales tax proposals pass the following areas would collect these sales taxes:

Story originally published in The Advocate

HOME