Parish ponders broader plan
Mayors hope all-for-one approach will get road proposal passed

By KEVIN BLANCHARD
Acadiana bureau
Published: Aug 5, 2006

LAFAYETTE — Just days after City-Parish President Joey Durel proposed a new sales tax to fund new roads within the city of Lafayette, a group of mayors are working on an alternative proposal: a parishwide sales tax that would be collected and spent all over the parish.

Durel said he expects the matter will be discussed by the City-Parish Council, which will ultimately have to put any measure on a ballot for voter approval.

But a parishwide sales tax presents too many complications, political and legal.

“I don’t know what the chances are of that really happening,” Durel said of a parishwide sales tax. “There are just some really complex issues are at play.”

Durel has been meeting with the other mayors in the parish for the past year to try to reach agreement on a sales tax proposal, but the mayors balked at all proceeds going to the city-parish council to control, Broussard Mayor Charlie Langlinais said Friday.

The mayors prefer an alternative that would divvy up the new revenues by jurisdiction, so that each area would have some control on where the money is spent, Youngsville Mayor Wilson Viator said.

Viator said Durel told them that such a legal mechanism to divvy up sales tax proceeds might not be possible.

Tuesday, Durel told the council he wanted them to ask voters for a new sales tax just inside the Lafayette city limits.

But proceeds from Lafayette-only sales tax would not be able to be spent outside the city limits — where Langlinais and Viator said many of the greatest traffic needs exist.

East Broussard Road, much of Verot School Road and La. 89 are  in unincorporated areas of the parish, where some 60,000 people live, but would not be able to be improved with city sales tax money, Viator said.

Viator said he has a bond attorney drafting a potential parishwide sales tax proposition that could carve up revenue collected parishwide and direct it to each jurisdiction — the city-parish, Broussard, Youngsville, Scott, Carencro and Duson.

The options include dividing up the money to each jurisdiction using population figures, or letting each jurisdiction keep the money collected in their area.
A population method would help a city like Youngsville, a mostly residential area where few sales taxes are collected, but it probably isn’t fair to Broussard or Lafayette, where large amounts of commercial areas bring in the most tax, Viator said.

Viator said he would favor simply letting Youngsville keep the revenue on large-ticket items, like vehicle sales, purchased by Youngsville residents no matter where those purchases were made in the parish.

Durel said there’s a simpler alternative to complicated methods of divvying up revenue to each jurisdiction.
“Why go through all this trouble?” Durel said. “Why not just let them (each area) do their own deal?”

Some of the mayors may be worried that their towns’ voters wouldn’t pass a sales tax, but the sheer number of Lafayette voters could carry a parishwide proposal, Durel said.

Additionally, city of Lafayette voters might not be happy to learn that sales taxes collected inside the city limits of Lafayette, under a parishwide tax, could be spent anywhere in the parish, Durel said.

Viator said he hopes to have a proposal drafted soon to present to the City-Parish Council, which will ultimately have the responsibility of approving any measure to send to voters.

Both Viator and Langlinais said they would be willing, should a parishwide sales tax pass, to sign intergovernmental agreements with the city-parish to help build roads in the unincorporated areas of the parish.

Residents of the smaller municipalities use those parish roads to shop and get back and forth from work, so there’s a benefit to them contributing to the improvement of those roads, Langlinais said.

Residents outside the Lafayette city limits would still be paying the new one-cent sales tax, even it was only imposed inside Lafayette, Langlinais said.

An estimated 30 percent of Lafayette’s city sales taxes are paid by people living outside the city, Langlinais said.

Durel said that councilmen represent everyone in the parish, including the smaller municipalities, and that those towns would be free to “lobby” for money with a no-strings-attached parishwide sales tax.

Without concurrence on a single parishwide tax proposal, Durel said, he will continue to recommend the Lafayette-only proposal, so that needed roads will begin being built somewhere.

“I don’t want to jeopardize it if we don’t have close to 100 percent consensus in the small towns,” Durel said.

Time is also important, as the deadline for getting a measure on the November ballot is drawing near, Durel said.

It’s still possible that the ballot will contain a city of Lafayette sales tax proposal, as well as similar measures in the unincorporated part of the parish or other areas of the parish, Durel said.

The council will ultimately decide how to craft any ballot proposal from the city of Lafayette or parish, while each town council would have to propose a measure to its voters.
  
 
Story originally published in The Advocate
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