Lafayette Parish voters will decide in two separate fall elections whether to renew parish-wide property taxes that help fund schools, Vermilionville and keeping the river clean, and road maintenance and public health.
The millage renewals that help fund the Lafayette Parish School System and Bayou Vermilion District will appear on the Oct. 11 ballot and the millages that help fund Lafayette Consolidated Government will appear on the Nov. 15 ballot.
Representatives from all three groups spoke at a panel hosted by the Lafayette League of Women Voters Wednesday and stressed the importance of renewing the millages.
What do the four millages fund?
Lafayette voters will decide whether to renew four separate millages. These millages have to be renewed by voters every 10 years for agencies to continue collecting the funding.
The millages up for renewal are:
A Lafayette Parish School System millage of 7.79 mills
A Bayou Vermilion District millage of .75 mills
A Lafayette Consolidated Government road and bridge maintenance millage of 4.47 mills
A Lafayette Consolidated Government public health and safety millage of 3.81 mills
The LPSS millage generates about $20 million annually for the school district, said School Board Member Roddy Bergeron. The existing property tax that voters will be asked to renew has existed for 50 years.
The money collected goes toward the district’s general fund and helps with operations and maintenance. That includes teacher salaries, transportation costs and utilities for the district’s 46 campuses. The money collected from that tax not only funds traditional public schools, it “follows” a student if they are enrolled in a charter school, Bergeron said.
The Bayou Vermilion District millage generates more than $2 million annually. It helps fund Vermilionville, the living history museum that attracts about 60,000 visitors each year, including tourists and school children.
It also helps fund “bayou operations,” said Brady McKellar, the managing director of the Bayou Vermilion District. That means working to prevent it from returning to its 1980s reputation of the most polluted body of water in North America through clean-up and conservation efforts.
“We consider ourselves not only stewards of culture and environment,” McKellar said, “but stewards of structures that are ours to protect, and stewards of education that we can bring to families and to children and to visitors.”
The two LCG road and bridges maintenance millage generates about $12.7 million annually and the public health and safety millage generates about $10.8 million annually.
They fund what Mayor-President Monique Boulet called “very basic services” for the parish. The first goes toward roadway servicing, bridge replacement and grass mowing for public areas. The second goes toward drainage, the animal shelter, rural fire departments, and the coroner’s office.
“They are very critical,” she said. “They are fundamental to our public works and our drainage requirements.”
What happens if the millages aren’t renewed?
If the millage renewals fail, all three entities will have one more chance to bring the millages back to voters for reconsideration before the millages expire.
But if the millages expire, it’ll be detrimental to operations, all three organizations’ leaders said.
“It would be fairly disastrous,” said McKellar. “We would have to make a lot of cuts.”
Those cuts could include auctioning off historic buildings and pulling back on river and conservation and conservation efforts.
For LPSS, the loss of $20 million would mean a loss of about $440,000 per campus. The board would have to look at major cuts to areas such as staffing or non-required curriculum, Bergeron said.
“It would be a tremendous gut,” he said.
When is voting?
Early voting for the Oct. 11 election is from Sept. 27 to Oct. 4, excluding Sunday, Sept. 28. Polls are open from 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. at three locations — downtown Lafayette, 1010 Lafayette St.; the MLK Rec Center, 309 Cora St.; and the East Regional Library, 215 La Neuville Road.