The gist: Robideaux has about $43,000 in his war chest, according to The Advocate. At this point during his 2015 bid for office, he had $335,000. He’s widely seen as vulnerable to a challenge, a somewhat rare occurrence for an incumbent mayor in Lafayette.
The gist: An ordinance correcting errors in the legal descriptions of the new split council districts is under review by city-parish attorneys, with a report expected soon. Legal opinions on a fix have clashed along familiar political lines.
Among nearly 4,000 submissions, Lafayette polymath illustrators DeHart and Durand were named winners in Communication Arts Magazine’s 60th Annual Illustration Competition.
The gist: The secretary of state washed his hands of the charter amendment mess, recommending an election to fix new city council district boundary errors but leaving the issue up to local authorities. City-Parish attorneys favor an ordinance, a solution the secretary worries could draw a lawsuit that would impact this fall’s elections.
The gist: When his initial defense of an ethically questionable loan to one of his top aides fell short, Mayor-President Joel Robideaux turned to the city’s legal department to produce a report exonerating both his administration and the assistant. The report does neither.
The gist: The secretary of state tossed fixing the charter amendment errors back to Lafayette officials, acknowledging he doesn’t have the authority to disqualify the election that created separate city and parish councils. But he predicted a suit would come if new elections aren’t held to address the mapping mistakes.
The gist: Only months to go before elections to seat new city and parish councils, and last fall’s vote to create the separate bodies may be thrown out. City and parish voting maps do not match underlying legal descriptions, an error of hasty work, which gives potential cause to invalidate the result.
The gist: Mayor-President Joel Robideaux has proven evasive in his evolving attempts to defend a suspect loan received by one of the his top aides. The Acadiana Advocate kicked over a hornet’s nest with a story that raises questions of conflict-of-interest and influence-peddling.
Recent headlines indicate 2018 might be the year our economy started recovering. But there’s ample evidence that any optimism should be guarded given the situation our economy’s in.
Shortly after Robideaux’s October 2015 victory, he bought a north Lafayette home owned by Marcus Bruno’s wife, one listed for years in arrest reports as the residence of a repeat drug offender.
Acting on conflict-of-interest and influence peddling allegations first reported by The Acadiana Advocate, Councilman Jay Castille called on the mayor-president to investigate a suspect loan to one of his assistants.
The gist: Lafayette lags far behind other American cities in job creation and retention and economic growth. The city ranked 196 out of 200 cities measured in the Best-Performing Cities index created by the Milken Institute, a California-based think tank.
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