Council to Randolph: Bring back former permitting group

The Lafourche Parish Council formally requested the parish president to hand control of building code enforcement back over to South Central Planning and Development.

Parish President Charlotte Randolph would not say after the last council meeting whether she would heed the request.

South Central Planning, based in Houma, handles code enforcement and building permitting services for five parishes and several municipalities, including Lockport. Lafourche’s agreement with the quasi-governmental agency ended amid conflict regarding permit issuances in 2009.

Randolph has opposed returning to South Central Planning since the parish opted against renewing its contract. She has attributed the split to South Central Planning filing complaints against the parish with state code authorities.

The parish opened a self-managed permit department in January of 2011. Critics have said it is mismanaged, and the director of the department stepped down in December.

Phillip Gouaux, the councilman who sponsored the resolution requesting Randolph to “re-institute” an agreement with South Central Planning, said the parish’s department is currently operating at a deficit and won’t be able to sustain itself over time.

Using taxpayer money to fund a service isn’t something specific to the permit department, Randolph has said, emphasizing parish-offered services have to be financed somehow. “You can say the same thing about recreation,” she said in November.

The resolution passed 8-1. Jerry Jones cast the only dissention.

Gouaux has long been an opponent of the split with South Central Planning. He has argued that instead of handling the nuances of the office solitarily, the parish should join a group of six parishes that would absorb legal, training and software costs, provide support in emergency situations and serve as an alliance when requesting code changes to the State Code Council.

The parish has yet to transfer its permitting system to a computer database, Gouaux said, yet it helped finance South Central Planning’s system, which the parish still has the software to adopt.

Gouaux also reiterated a popular refrain: The move would eliminate the potential for politics in permit acquisition.

Aaron Caillouet, newly elected councilman in District 3 and former parish president, supported the move. “I’m voting for this hoping that we will be able to strike an agreement with them,” he said. “It’s good to have a third party involved with something like this.”

In the aftermath of hurricanes Gustav and Ike, the parish issued more than 100 permits without approval from Mike Wich, South Central Planning’s Chief Building Official.

Wich has said there were instances of “brand new construction,” in which no plan reviews or inspections approved by anyone were made. “Those were the types of things that were going on at the time,” he said last year.

South Central Planning reported the parish to the regional and state code councils, who requested the parish retroactively approve the permits they say were issued improperly.

The parish has yet to do so and officials contend they adhered to an interpretation of the law that allowed some projects to be permitted without a CBO’s approval.