Clock ticking on new Evangeline Campus

The Louisiana Community and Technical College System Board of Supervisors has until June 30 – this coming Monday – to select an alternate site for the Evangeline Campus of South Louisiana Community College.
That date represents sundown on a special provision written into law by state Sen. Fred Mills Jr. allowing the board “to identify an alternate construction site.”
Mills told Teche News he was alerted by a senate staffer that the amendment – which essentially allows the Evangeline Campus to be sited anywhere in or out of St. Martin Parish – expires with Act 14 of 2013.
“Nobody asked me to reintroduce the legislation,” he said. “It didn’t get done.”
The board of supervisors can hold a special meeting with 24 hours notice, Mills said. As of presstime today, no such meeting has been announced.
Not picking an alternative site by the end of this fiscal year could have one of three results, Mills said.
“They either have to build it where the legislation says [the old St. Martinville Sr. High football field] or wait until 2015 and reauthorize an alternative site,” he said.
A third consequence, he said, could be the loss of the $8 million authorized for the new building to some other project.
The LCTCS Facilities Corporation in April announced the selection of an alternate site just outside the city limits of St. Martinville, on land to be donated by the Levert-St. John holdings. The LCTCS Board of Supervisors was set to vote on the selection at its May meeting but held off because of a protest filed by Pellerin Life Insurance Co. of Breaux Bridge, which has made a competing offer.
Mills said a factor in the decision by the facilities corporation, a private non-profit entity set up to manage construction of a wide range of LCTCS projects, was the intent of the original legislation, codified as R.S. 17:3394.3(B)(1)(a): “Replacement of campus buildings on campus-owned land across the street from existing location,” but taken to mean at least in St. Martinville.
Subsequent to the passage of that law, the St. Martin School Board transferred ownership of most of a city block catercorner across Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. from the existing campus and once occupied by the old high school football field.
But engineers for SLCC determined that the anointed site was at best problematic for the construction of the planned 36,000-square-foot, $9.2 million ($8 million plus 15 percent) building.
At the request of LCTCS, Mills inserted into House Bill 1, now Act 14 of 2013, the following language: “Provided, however, that the Board of Supervisors of Community and Technical Colleges shall have the authority to identify an alternate construction site for the purposes of implementing provisions of R.S. 17:3394.3(B)(1)(a).”
Two requests for donations of land in or around St. Martinville went unheeded, and when the SLCC chancellor, Dr. Natalie Harder, told a group of businessmen in Breaux Bridge that the parish was in danger of losing the school altogether, insurance man Frank Pellerin offered acreage behind his company, adjacent to where the school board’s new headquarters has been built.
Two offers from St. Martinville followed, one from the city for a site in a cane field owned by the Levert family, and one just across Moore Avenue from that site at the International Trade Center, the old Martin Mills.
A committee picked by the LCTCS Facilities Corporation scored the three sites based on several criteria, including proximity to a resident population, other schools, businesses that could serve students, and major thoroughfares. When the City of St. Martinville’s offer scored higher than the Beaux Bridge site and even the ITC site across the road, Pellerin filed a formal protest, citing several departures from the requirements set up in the official request for land, or RFL.
However, Mills said, lawyers with LCTCS and the legislature have concluded that neither the facilities corporation nor the board of supervisors is bound by the criteria in the RFL, which also states, “...the Corporation does reserve the right to reject any and all responses for any reason or no reason whatsoever...”.
Mills said he has been assured that the facilities corporations have done a good job of shepherding these major construction projects, not just the $173.7 million package passed in 2007 that includes the Evangline Campus but other state construction all around the state capitol.
“They are very efficient, I’m told,” Mills said.
Last year the legislature authorized LCTCS to issue another $250 million in bonds for construction projects to be overseen by its facilities corporation.