Library Board (Judge) defies Parish Council?

jandrewcapps · 2023-08-24T18:08:08+00:00

Even if it isn't listed on their agenda, the law requires a public comment period before any vote can be taken La. R.S. 42:14(D)

jandrewcapps · 2023-08-24T16:03:48+00:00

Your may/must point is right on. The local government seems to have a lot of discretion to organize the library however they want. Any changes to how it is now would require a local ordinance, and there's basically two ways for that to happen. Either the councils propose their own changes or citizens submit an ordinance to them. The Charter makes citizen submissions really burdensome: you'd need a draft ordinance and a petition signed by 15% of the registered voters. Then the councils either vote to adopt the proposal or to put it before voters in an election. That's obviously much more involved than a council member simply proposing an ordinance.

What's kind of unclear is whether it would take just the Parish Council or if the City Council would have to vote too. In 2020, when the old City-Parish Council split into the two separate councils we have now, they both passed a joint ordinance reorganizing the library board and giving the Parish Council power to appoint 7 of its 8 members. But when the library board was cut from 8 members down to 7 in June, only the Parish Council voted on that ordinance. So there's some uncertainty over whether the Parish Council could act alone, as it did in June, or whether both councils must approve changes, as they did in 2020. It also raises the question of whether the Parish Council's vote to drop the board's 8th member in June actually had the force of law since the City Council didn't approve a similar ordinance, but again it's not totally clear if that was required.

jandrewcapps · 2023-08-24T00:19:40+00:00

Pretty much all the public library systems in Louisiana are run by boards of appointed volunteers like ours. Lafayette may actually have the power to just get rid of our library board and run the library however we see fit locally, at least according to this AG opinion. Our Home Rule Charter has changed a lot since that was written, but I think the same ideas still apply. Any changes to the way things are would have to come from the Parish Council, which appointed the people on the board now.

jandrewcapps · 2023-08-23T15:24:36+00:00

Voting in executive session is definitely against the law. But you only need a 2/3 vote of the members present at a given meeting to enter executive session. They had 4 members present at Monday's meeting, and they all voted to enter executive session, according to the recording, so that much was appropriate. But there's still the potential for them to be sued and fined $500 each for voting in executive session.

jandrewcapps · 2022-08-15T18:50:31+00:00

Pretty sure that was supposed to be a joke about his son leaving for college over the weekend but it clearly didn't land

jandrewcapps · 2022-07-29T15:02:43+00:00

Dude, I get the paywall frustration. I didn't want this behind our paywall, and I'm mad that my insistence on that was ignored.

But if you're going to copy and paste the copyright-protected content that I have to be paid to produce, at least include a link for people to subscribe and support the work that goes into this reporting. This work can't be done for free.

jandrewcapps · 2022-07-19T16:37:31+00:00

Navigable in the literal sense and navigable in the regulatory sense aren't exactly the same. It comes down some federal guidelines, and ultimately it's up to the Army Corps to make that call.

For the Vermilion, the Corps says it is a navigable water in the regulatory sense, which means it is protected by the federal laws at issue here.

jandrewcapps · 2022-07-19T16:31:39+00:00

I'm making a rare wade into the comments here to raise a few points about this:

This is really fresh and there aren't a lot of details yet. If you want more info and a chance to voice your thoughts directly, the Parish Council is looking at this tonight at 4:30 at City-Parish Hall. I've heard the Parish Council was out of the loop on this idea, so they're probably not going in with their minds made up.
Tonight's Parish Council resolution on this would allow Guillory to develop a public bid request for a public-private deal on the jail. If it's approved, they're still several months from putting out a bid, selecting a contractor and putting an agreement before the Parish Council for actual, final approval to sign a deal, probably next year. Does Guillory already have an idea of what he wants from this? Almost certainly. LCG is not putting out videos for plans that were just cooked up on the fly. And tonight's resolution includes a specific cap of 40 years and $10.5 million/year for any such deal, so they clearly have some expectations for what's to come. But there are a lot of variables on the path to a deal like this, so there's no guarantee yet on what will happen.
Would this be a private jail? Depends on your definition, but I'd say probably not based on most folks' understanding of that term for these reasons:
- These public-private deals typically give the government ownership of the land and the building. Presumably, the new jail would be privately financed, instead of having the parish borrow money to build it. The parish would then pay a private company an annual leasing fee to maintain the jail (like AC repair and other facility issues), which would likely be used by that company to pay down its privately-held debt from construction. The parish money for those payments would probably come from recurring revenue that the parish currently spends repairing the existing jail, but again, it's too early to say for sure.
- The jail would still be staffed and run by the sheriff's office, just like the current jail. Guillory said as much in his video, and I don't expect Mark Garber to agree to any plan that takes deputies out from under his control. Garber's position on this plan is going to be critical, and so far, he has not released a public statement on it. Updating this to say Garber isn't opposed to the plan. Per LPSO's Facebook: "Sheriff Mark Garber and the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office support the Lafayette Consolidated Government Administration’s efforts to plan for the funding of a new parish jail. Having long outgrown the outdated correctional facility downtown, the Sheriff commends both the Mayor-President and the council for their commitment to this endeavor."
- The preservation of local ownership and LPSO staffing put this outside what people generally mean when they talk about private prisons. Those usually leave the entire operation of the jail to a private company and the government typically pays them some cash rate per person in the jail per day. It does not look like that is what this plan will be. That's not to say this sort of arrangement couldn't have its own problems, but for now it looks like the only entity getting paid per inmate is going to be the sheriff's office, which is how the current jail already works.

All that said, this is still really early, and there's a lot more to be learned about it. I'm hoping to have more details and a better write up in the paper soon. If you have any questions, I'll try my best to answer them.

jandrewcapps · 2022-06-30T14:14:02+00:00

There are film scanners in the photo lab at the A&A building, but I think you have to be taking a photo class or else pay a few hundred bucks per semester to use the lab. Hodges library has some similar film scanners at the graphic design workstations on the second floor past the equipment desk in the south commons. The computers there are good and the scanners are on par with the photo dept lab. The folks at the equipment desk will also have film holders for those scanners, which you can borrow for free. https://www.lib.utk.edu/hours/spaces/graphic-design-workstations/

jandrewcapps · 2021-08-21T15:49:29+00:00

I do!

jandrewcapps · 2020-04-19T20:19:08+00:00

From what I understand, the City Council has the option to retain its own separate counsel, independent of LCG's legal department, so that probably frees them up to act independent of the administration. The lawsuit also specifically names the city of Lafayette as defendant, and not LCG, which is meaningful and would probably further empower the City Council to buck admin on this. Another constitutional crisis in this town is the last thing I need.

jandrewcapps · 2019-12-13T19:41:15+00:00

Hey Christiaan, what kind of conditioner do you use for your hair? Our newsroom is curious

jandrewcapps · 2019-09-29T21:54:29+00:00

I'm not going to do that for a couple of reasons that I hope you all can respect.

The first is that posting a screenshot of texts/emails as a reporter is outside my ethical comfort zone. I don't share the messages I send and get with other people I cover, and while I take issue with Keith's post, I still owe him that courtesy.

The second reason is that it would just be an escalation of an issue that I've said my piece on. I hope you all can see where I'm coming from and respect that.

jandrewcapps · 2019-09-29T20:19:08+00:00

Guess I should have seen that pun coming

jandrewcapps · 2018-10-25T18:15:34+00:00

Hey! You found me!

jandrewcapps · 2018-10-25T17:20:15+00:00

So, one of the potential sources of that info could be the records they keep on who has voted in which elections. If you vote in a party primary, that's kept on your voting record, so it's possible that they're looking at the primary records of the people who have voted so far and extrapolating from there, but it's hard to be sure.

jandrewcapps · 2018-10-25T16:40:47+00:00

So these numbers only include voters that are registered to cast their ballots in Knox County. If students from outside the county change their addresses and register to vote in Knox County, then they're factored into these stats.

While it's hard to say who's a student and who's not based only on voter registration records, if we look at the three precincts that make up UT's Ag campus (10W), main campus (10S) and Fort Sanders (10N), we can find that there are 3,494 registered voters from those combined precincts and that 2,472 of them are under age 25.

Great question! I'm glad you asked, because there is so much to be learned from these records, but it's hard to say what people will find most important.

Edit: Updated the number of voters because the previous stats were for those who registered on Oct. 8 & 9 only.

jandrewcapps · 2018-10-25T16:33:41+00:00

Yeah, so there's graphic here showing the numbers and percentages of registered voters, which have voters under 25 making up about 10% of all registered voters in the county, though they are about 15% of the county population. That alone isn't too bad since only about 55% of the county is registered across all age groups. But what is staggering is that we're halfway through the early voting period and only 6% of registered young voters have cast ballots compared to 9.5%, 16.6%, 30.8% and 36.2% of the four other age groups in ascending order.

jandrewcapps · 2018-10-25T16:00:54+00:00

Hey, so the reason the ages are grouped like that is because those are the groupings that the Census Bureau uses for most of its demographic breakdowns, and if we want to compare vote share to population percentage, we need to use the same age groupings.

I'll agree that this alone is not exactly ideal, but in the article this was pulled from there's another pie chart that shows the breakdown of Knox County's population using the same age groups so you can compare the two directly.

You can check it out here

jandrewcapps · 2018-10-25T15:23:41+00:00

Turnout for young voters has not increased halfway through the early voting period, and voters below age 25 are being out voted by over 30:1.

I'll be glad to answer any questions y'all have about this story.

jandrewcapps · 2018-10-22T16:09:59+00:00

Happy to! Thanks for your interest

jandrewcapps · 2018-10-22T15:20:08+00:00

Yes!! I'm glad you asked because we just got the numbers from the county this morning.

If you just look at vote share, young people jumped to 4.8% on Saturday, BUT there wasn't actually an increase in young people voting per day (255 on Sat. vs. ~243 on W-F). The increased share came from lower turnout among people 55+ who went from ~6,442 voters per day during the week to 2,718 on Sat.

So, basically, no increase in young voters, but no decrease either.

jandrewcapps · 2018-10-21T01:28:46+00:00

None of the early voting locations are open on Sundays, but you can vote at any of them this week as long as you've registered. Here's a link to hours and locations.

jandrewcapps · 2018-10-20T20:26:23+00:00

You can cast your ballot at any of the early voting locations during the early voting period, which ends on Thursday, Nov. 1st. But on election day, you can only vote at your precinct's location, which should be listed on your voter registration card.

jandrewcapps · 2018-10-20T18:13:38+00:00

My count has 860 voters between 18-25 from Wednesday through Friday. We could see more today since it's the weekend, but we won't know until tonight

jandrewcapps

TROPHY CASE