Lafourche opts for government term limits

Lafourche Parish government elected officials will now hear the clock tick as they work.

Lafourche voters voted in strong favor to approve term limits for the parish president and the parish council on Saturday’s election. Voters approved the parish president measure with 73 percent of the vote and the parish council measure with 71 percent.

The decision means Lafourche parish presidents will be limited to two consecutive, four-year terms, while council members can have three consecutive, four-year terms before having to sit out. Candidates could run again after sitting out at least one term. Lafourche joins the majority of 13 parishes from the Bayou Region and Greater New Orleans area with term limits, as only four parishes now do not have limits on council members.

The term limits do not take effect until the next parish elections in 2020, meaning Parish President Jimmy Cantrelle could run for two additional terms and any current council member could serve until 2032 with voter approval. Cantrelle made term limits one of his campaign issues last year, and councilmen Aaron Melvin and Corey Perrilloux put the vote in motion by co-sponsoring ordinances to send term limits to the voters, which the council approved. Cantrelle said “it is always good to bring in new ideas” and said the voters’ voices have been heard regarding the limits.

“I believed the voters should have a say on this matter and I am pleased that the Council approved it for public consideration. The voters have now spoken and it’s clear that the proposal was met favorably,” Cantrelle said.

District 9 Councilman Daniel Lorraine, a 33-year veteran of the parish council, railed against term limits, saying candidates should be able to run until voters do not want them anymore and act accordingly at the ballot box. He said he worried about term limits creating too much turnover and leaving the parish with an inexperienced council learning on the job.

“I was against term limits because I just think that you got to train too many people, and if it’s too many coming in at one time they don’t really know what’s going on. And by the time they learn, they’re going to get replaced, and you’re going to have the same thing over and over again,” Lorraine said.

Political scientists have examined the tension between the desire for fresh ideas and the value of institutional knowledge that term limits bring up. While term limits address the concerns of incumbents so comfortable in their positions they are disconnected from constituent concerns, they can also leave legislative bodies thin on experienced, effective legislators.

Dr. Robert Hogan, a political science professor at Louisiana State University, said research on term limits in state legislatures over the past 20 years has shown that non-term-limited legislators actually pay more attention to voter concerns, noting they are reliant on voter approval to continue in their position. Hogan said state-level research shows term limits empower governors and bureaucrats when legislatures are weakened by losing veteran legislators with large support.

“Research has shown with congress that legislators who are effective tend to be the ones who stay around longer. Those who aren’t very effective voluntarily leave – they find something else to do or voters vote them out. So there is some evidence that representation works in that regard,” Hogan said.

While Lorraine was strongly opposed to the limits, he is not concerned for his own future, as he would be 79 with 48 years of council service under his belt before he would be termed out. He said the vote showed the will of the public and he would go with it.

“That’s what they chose, so ain’t nothing I could do. It is what it is,” Lorraine said. •

VOTERS APPROVE PROPERTY TAXES

Lafourche Parish voters also voted to give funding to the parish’s Council on Aging, as well as to Golden Meadow for drainage issues.

Voters passed a 5.09-mill renewal for Golden Meadow by a 63-percent majority – a tax renewal that will help fund drainage projects in the town.

A 5.09-mill tax renewal also passed to assist the town’s levees.

The Lafourche Parish Council on Aging proposed 2-mill tax renewal during the election cycle, and it passed with a 55-percent majority, generating 8,680 of the more than 15,000 ballots cast.

Turnout for the election was far lower than for the presidential election – an expected result. •

No. 3 Lafourche Parish President comes under fire

Lafourche Parish President Jimmy Cantrelle behaved badly – though not with criminality – when he squeezed staffers to make some personnel transfers and engineer some raises for key employees, in return for his support of an employee insurance plan they favored. Cantrelle himself favored a different plan, which he said was a better deal for the parish. District Attorney Cam Morvant made that determination after being asked to look into the matter by the Parish Council. Also ill-advised but not criminally actionable, according to Morvant, was the decision to target a parish employee for testing under a “random” drug testing program.

Cantrelle himself has not commented on Morvant’s findings, and in 2017 more controversy is expected during appeals of firings by Cantrelle of some other employees.

Morvant’s report does not mean the end of official review for Cantrelle. Several of the matters studied by Morvant are expected to be looked at by the Louisiana Board of Ethics, which can make determinations as to whether the state’s ethics code was violated.