LCTCS board to pick Evangeline Campus site Monday

The Louisiana Community and Technical College System Board of Supervisors will meet Monday, June 30, to select a site for the new $9.2 million Evangeline Campus of South Louisiana Community College.
Being the last day of the 2013-14 fiscal year, Monday is the deadline to select an alternative to the site written into the original legislation, which is adjacent to the existing school on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in St. Martinville.
The LCTCS Facilities Corporation, a private, non-profit entity tasked with overseeing LCTCS’s multimillion-dollar building programs, has approved an alternate site just outside the city limits of St. Martinville, on land to be donated by the Levert family.
It was a controversial choice because of the language of the official request for land, or RFL, which set up a specific scoring system and enumerated several prohibitions, including: “Oral communications with the Board, the Corporation, the College or any person or entity connected with them...”
Pellerin Life Insurance Co. of Breaux Bridge, which had made a competing offer, protested the tentative selection of the St. Martinville site because of glaring discrepancies in the process set down in the RFL. The scorers gave the Levert site higher marks because of its proximity to St. Martinville Senior High while ignoring the fact that the Pellerin proposal is closer to both Breaux Bridge and Cecilia high schools, for example.
And St. Martinville Mayor Thomas Nelson, who proposed the Levert site, made several public proclamations indicating he not only was in contact with LCTCS officials during the selection process but that he had secured their assurances the new school would be built in St. Martinville.
However, attorneys with LCTCS and the legislature concluded that neither the facilities corporation nor the board of supervisors is bound by the criteria in the RFL.
And there is significant political pressure to keep the school in St. Martinville, as evidenced by a letter, made public by state Sen. Fred Mills Jr., urging the LCTCS board to designate the Levert site and signed by Mills, state Sen. Elbert Guillory, state Reps. Terry Landry, Mike Huval and Taylor Barras, St. Martin Parish President Guy Cormier and Breaux Bridge Mayor Jack Dale Delhomme.
Frank Pellerin, president of Pellerin Life Insurance Co., said, “We just hope the board does the right thing for the students of SLCC Evangeline Campus.”
Pellerin said the legislation as amended by Mills would have allowed LCTCS to site the school outside St. Martin Parish if no suitable land could be found.
When Pellerin made the officer, two RFLs had gone unheeded and the SLCC chancellor was warning that the school could wind up in Carencro.
The intent of the 2007 legislation authorizing the state-guaranteed bond issue was to put the new school “... on campus-owned land across the street from existing location ...” – specifically the old St. Martinville Senior High football field catercorner across Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. from the existing campus. But South Louisiana Community College officials determined that the site was unsuited for the construction of the planned 36,000-square-foot building.
At the request of LCTCS, Mills inserted into House Bill 1, now Act 14 of 2013, language allowing the LCTCS Board of Supervisors “to identify an alternate construction site ...”
There is no such amendment in HB 1 of 2014, which goes into effect July 1.