LCTCS board sticks with Levert site

The Louisiana Community and Technical College System Board of Supervisors is sticking with its facilities corporation recommendation to build a new campus on property just outside the city limits here.
An executive committee the board ratified the selection Monday, the last day of a special legislative release from a requirement it be built near the existing school.
“This will be good for St. Martinville,” said Mayor Thomas Nelson, who lobbied hard to keep the school. “We can’t keep losing everything.”
Nelson said the first order of business for the city will be to incorporate the property including a 30-acre sugarcane field, a portion of which is being donated to the state by J.B. Levert Land Company.
He said he also plans to work with SMEDA, the St. Martin Economic Development Authority, to include the campus in a tax-funded industrial park, which could help pay to extend utilities to the nine-plus-acre site.
Nelson said the 36,000-square-foot facility will probably have to be redesigned to fit the property.
“I think it’ll probably be six months before they start building,” he said.
The new campus, part of Lafayette-based South Louisiana Community College (SLCC), was an $8 million line item in a $173.7 million state-backed bond issue authorization passed in 2007. A 15 percent tack-on built into the law brings the total amount for the local project to $9.2 million, some of which has already been spent on design and engineering.
The legislation did not authorize the purchase of land, so when SLCC officials determined that the designated site off Martin Luther King Jr. Drive was not suitable, LCTCS put out formal requests for land donations. The requests went unheeded until a Breaux Bridge firm, Pellerin Life Insurance Company, offered land in the heart of that city, sparking a contest between the parish’s two main population centers.
Nelson says the deciding factor was the lingering influence of the late Sydnie Mae Durand, the state representative who had inserted into the original legislation a requirement that the new Evangeline Campus be built “...on campus-owned land across the street from existing location.”
It was clear that Durand (who had actually attended the school, to learn welding as a hobby) wanted the campus to remain in St. Martinville, Nelson said.
Language inserted into the state funding bill for fiscal 2013-14 temporarily loosened the siting requirements to allow for a site outside of town – ironically leading to the contentious inter-city rivalry.
St. Martinville has come out on the short end of the stick in recent years, losing the St. Martin School Board headquarters to Breaux Bridge, Walmart to Broussard and the Fruit of the Loom factory to Honduras.
The existing Evangeline Campus was built half a century ago as a branch of the T.H. Harris Vocational Technical School. In 2012, SLCC merged with Acadiana Technical College to form an archipelago of community colleges with campuses in Abbeville, Crowley, Franklin, Lafayette, New Iberia, Opelousas, Ville Platte, and of course St. Martinville.
The new Evangeline Campus will be constructed across the street (Moore Avenue) from the International Trade Center, the former Martin Mills now home to Superior Derrick Services.