St. Martinville police chief censured

The City Council emerged from a closed, or executive, session Monday and voted to suspend Chief of Police Paula Smith for two days, docking her pay, for failing to provide council members with periodic written reports.

They also instructed Mayor Thomas Nelson to issue the chief a written reprimand over her handling of an incident at Robert’s Lounge.

And the council demanded a written report from Smith about SMPD’s handling of an incident involving a pit bull in the Durand Subdivision.

These incidents were discussed behind closed doors and no further information was provided when the council came back into open session.

Chief Smith declined to comment for this newspaper account.

In other business:

Solomon Tention, administrator of the Evangeline Campus of South Louisiana Community College, invited the council to an open house at the current campus on Martin Luther King Drive Wednesday, May 21, which he stressed is open to the public. Tention is asking for the public’s help in recruiting students for the fall session, beefed up with college-oriented subjects.

“We have to build on what we have now,” he said. “Or we might wind up with a multi-million-dollar campus with no one on it.”

Tention was referring to the decision by the Louisiana Community and Technical College System to build a $9.2 million facility on property donated by Levert-St. John just north of the city limits.
SLCC had deemed the current location within St. Martinville too small to match its projections for the Evangeline Campus.

Jim Poche, the city’s contract electrical engineer, came with a recommendation that the city extend its contract with CLECO for wholesale electrical power for a year. Poche said the falling cost of natural gas and the rising cost of coal, due in part to the cost of emission control, has “stabilized” the cost of electric power from municipality to municipality and even into rural areas.

The disparity between the high cost of electricity from CLECO’s gas-fired generators and the low cost from SLEMCO’s coal-fired plants used to fill City Hall with protesters.

Poche produced charts derived from data provided by the Louisiana Energy and Power Authority, (LEPA) and the Louisiana Public Service Commission, that put St. Martinville in a very competitive posture alongside neighboring communities.

Wholesale costs to St. Martinville in 2013 were below that to Abbeville (CLECO), Gueydan (SLEMCO), and Kaplan (SLEMCO). The retail cost, what the municipalities pass on to their customers, put St. Martinville significantly below Abbeville, Gueydan, Kaplan, Breaux Bridge (CLECO), New Iberia (CLECO), and Crowley (CLECO) in 2013.

Poche made the further point that in most communities, the cost of electricity goes directly to the provider, while the City of St. Martinville gleans enough profit to ensure about $1.6 million in annual revenue to the general fund.

Councilman Craig Prosper said the lingering problem of high electric bills in St. Martinville is due to the number of poorly insulated buildings and energy-inefficient appliances.