Questions aren’t always criticism

As I look back over a quarter century of doing this kind of work, it is interesting to note that somehow between now and then one of the chief functions of newspapers and other objective media has become sorely misunderstood and maligned.

Our job is to inform people of things going on in their world that they might not have known about unless we told them. After all, the value of a newspaper is in the information it contains. To know what a government entity is doing or not doing in full view is discernable enough from agendas, meeting videos and other means. And the public at large is getting a lot more adept at using those tools, to a point of sometimes asking why a middle man is needed at all.

A good example of this is a story I worked on for some time this past week, which is within the pages of this issue. It starts out as a fairly simple thing, the potential purchase of some parking space adjacent to the government tower in Houma.

The amusing part of all this is that a whole lot of people in government didn’t know that the parking area didn’t belong to the parish at all. It was presumed by many that 17 years ago when Terrebonne Parish purchased the government tower — a pretty controversial thing back then — the Barrow Street – West Main Street parking area was not included in the deal.

The parish now has an interest in purchasing or possibly that not likely leasing the lot space from its newest owner, television mogul Martin Folse, who closed on his purchase of it just a week or so ago. He bought it from Edward “Sonny” LeBlanc, who inherited the land and had been leasing it to Chase Bank, which recently decided to get out of the Houma site.

Discussion by the Parish Council and its authorization of Parish President Gordon Dove to negotiate with Martin might have been a little matter of a paragraph or two in a larger parish government story.

But because Martin has had several business proposals relating to the parish over the past few years it made sense to look closer The closer look revealed an email Martin sent to Gordon Dove early in December disclosing his interest in leasing parking spaces to the parish. It’s an email nobody seem to remember reading, though it popped up due to a public records request.

That led to further examination of the deal, and it had so many moving parts in its history I thought you might want to know some of the details.

The story doesn’t suggest that anyone did anything wrong. Martin owns the lot now. If the parish wants the spaces they must negotiate with him. Nobody but the newspaper was asking why, if parking was needed, discussion wasn’t had with its initial owner, before he sold it to Martin.

To tell the story truthfully a lot of questions had to be asked of a lot of people, because it seems as if government folks here are not used to being questioned.

The answers are all in the story ,and you’ll have to come to your own conclusions.

If anything on its face was improper we would have said so.

But as you read about the parking lot negotiations just remember that the information you are getting is only out there to the degree it is because we asked.

And questions are not criticism, just a way of getting to truths that are at times more elusive than they need to be, from a government where laws are not always as firm as they should be about the right of the people to know nearly every step of how their money gets spent and how decisions about that are made.