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The Delta Dispatch
The drainage canal at the parish line

Parish government

The drainage board met for eleven minutes and moved $4.2 million

No public comment was taken. Check this. — ed.

No public comment was taken. Three of the seven seats have been vacant since March, and nobody at the table could say who is responsible for filling them.

The meeting was called for four o'clock and gavelled out at 4:11. In between, the board approved a contract amendment, a change order, and the transfer of the remainder of a bond issue that voters approved in 2019 for pump station work that has not started.

The agenda was posted the previous afternoon, which satisfies the notice requirement by a little under two hours. Two residents arrived at 4:20 for a meeting that was already over.

What follows is a reconstruction of the eleven minutes, drawn from the recording, the agenda packet, and interviews with four people who have attended these meetings for years.

Also this week

Water

The saltwater wedge moved eleven miles upriver, and nobody told the towns it passed

Three water systems draw from the river inside the new line. Two learned about it from a hydrologist's public dashboard.

Land & work

A plant promised 340 jobs. Six years on, the parish has counted 71.

The tax exemption runs another four years. The clawback provision the council was told about was never written into the agreement.

Courts

The public defender's office is down to four lawyers and 1,900 open cases

A judge has begun releasing defendants who have waited more than sixty days without counsel. The district attorney is appealing.

Government

Four parishes, one consultant, and the same $180,000 report

We put the documents side by side. Only the place names and the cover page differ.

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