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NEWS + NOTES

January 17

Legislative auditor launches

investigation into Guillory
administration
by Leslie Turk

Representatives from the Louisiana legislative auditor's office arrived at LCG on Jan. 17 to conduct
an investigative audit.

I
nvestigators from the Louisiana legislative auditor’s office arrived at Lafayette
Consolidated Government Tuesday morning. 

Reached by phone at noon today, Roger Harris, the office’s executive counsel and
assistant legislative auditor for investigations, would only confirm his agency is
conducting an investigative audit at LCG. 

Harris would not say what concerns brought the legislative auditor to LCG this
week. “We can’t talk about that at this time,” he said when asked whether the
investigation is specific to drainage projects. 

Lafayette home builder Ed Francez, who owns one-third of the St. Martin Parish
property LCG destroyed early last year when it secretly removed decades-old spoil
banks, says investigators from the legislative auditor’s office also knocked on his
door today. LCG did the work in St. Martin Parish without Francez’s knowledge, and
he is now vowing to file suit in the coming weeks.

Lafayette home builder Ed Francez, who owns one-third of the St. Martin Parish property LCG
destroyed early last year when it secretly removed decades-old spoil banks, says investigators
from the legislative auditor’s office also knocked on his door today to talk about his property.
Francez was photographed in June 2022, several months after dirt and trees were removed
from his land without his knowledge. Photo by Travis Gauthier

Francez says it was obvious to him the investigators had done their homework.
“Their questions were specific to my piece of property,” he says. “They seemed to
understand everything that went on. Their basic focus was, you own one-third, the
city owns two-thirds, and they took your dirt and your trees. It was about that spoil
bank project. They didn’t go into any other issues.”

A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSORS

Several federal agencies — including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, EPA and FBI
— are said to be probing major flood protection projects launched by LCG.

The City Council is currently investigating the tens of millions of dollars spent on
drainage projects with a single contractor, Lafayette-based Rigid Constructors. 

LCG spokesman Jamie Angelle referred The Current’s questions to LCG’s legal
department. City-Parish Attorney Greg Logan did not respond to an email and text
seeking comment. 

LCG paid Rigid in excess of $60 million over the past year, according to LCG online
records. That figure includes $3.7 million spent on the cloak-and-dagger operation
to dig up Francez’s bank levees in Cypress Island Swamp over a 24-hour period in
February 2022, a project that lacked local and Corps permits and is now the subject
of barbed legal battles with St. Martin Parish in state and federal courts and has
federal investigators’ attention.

September 7, 2022 May 25, 2022

Scramble to keep digging after Lafayette’s spoil banks project in St.

court stoppage jeopardizes $22 Martin Parish avoided public bid
million for Lafayette detention law and netted a contractor
project millions

Read More » Read More »

Rather than bid the work in a competitive process, LCG accepted a no-questions-
asked, single-page quote from Rigid and ballooned a $390,000 contract into the $3.7
million job in St. Martin Parish. The earlier contract had been awarded in December
2021 to Rigid, the lowest bidder for as-needed excavation work. Asked to produce
evidence that it negotiated pricing with Rigid for the spoil banks job, as is required
by the as-needed contract, LCG did not provide any documentation. 

Legislative Auditor Michael Waguespack’s predecessor, Daryl Purpera, now retired,

suggested in an interview last year that the arrangement violated public bid laws.

“If you materially change the original scope of the contract, then you can’t just
amend it like that and be in compliance with the bid law. You have to go out and re-
bid it,” Purpera told The Current. “And certainly going from $300,000 or $400,000 to
$3 [million] or $4 million would be a material change in the contract. So it sounds to
me like they’re in violation of the bid law.”

In the days and weeks before that December as-needed contract was signed
between LCG and Rigid, Rigid CEO Cody Fortier, Rigid itself and Fortier’s CF LLC each
made $2,500 donations to the mayor-president’s campaign coffer, as did another
company associated with Fortier, Sunshine Homes LLC, for a total of $10,000,
according to campaign finance records. Guillory has denied undue influence in
awarding the contract. 

Rigid’s work is part of a massive spending plan Mayor-President Josh Guillory rolled
out in July 2021. Flush with $86 million in federal coronavirus relief and record local
tax revenues, he proposed an unprecedented capital plan that would churn millions
of cubic yards of dirt, combining a historic influx of federal, state and local cash.
Within a month of that announcement, Guillory and his wife Jamie had formed a
heavy equipment rental company, later removing their names from its public filings
only to add Jamie’s name back after the company was brought to light. 

Josh Guillory turns to side hustles LCG launched an infrastructure

for more income boom; Josh Guillory and his wife
launched an equipment company
Read More »
Read More »

Guillory has had limited success in court defending his use of quick-take
expropriation for drainage projects, with the Third Circuit Court of Appeal ruling
against LCG last month in the Homewood case. Constructed on a nearly 400-acre
tract after LCG seized property north of Milton from a private landowner,
Homewood is the largest detention pond project ever undertaken in
Lafayette. LCG’s website estimates its cost as high as $60 million.

For yet another detention pond project along Coulee Ile des Cannes near Scott, the
state has been withholding millions in capital outlay funding, largely due to LCG’s
unusual decision to allow Rigid to purchase land so the company could keep
working — likely violating its cooperative agreement with the state. Led by state
Sen. Page Cortez, the Acadiana delegation helped secure tens of millions of capital
outlay money for LCG’s drainage projects over the past two years.

Jacques Berry, a spokesman for the Louisiana Division of Administration, says a

total of about $30 million in reimbursements are held up, most for Ile des Cannes,
itself a $30 million project. When a district court shut down Homewood last year,
the state put the breaks on payments for that project, he says. The state also has
not released the $1.5 million the Guillory administration told the City Council it was
getting for the spoil banks work when the council signed off on an ordinance
accepting the money and agreeing to a $500,000 match.

“I think they may have given up on Cypress Island [funding],” Berry told The Current
in September.

A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSORS

LCG CFO Lorrie Toups confirmed last year that LCG was notified by one of its
consultants that federal ARPA money cannot be used for either Homewood or
Coulee Ile des Cannes because the projects did not go out for bid. All of which
means LCG is holding the bag for costs it expected both the state and feds to cover.

So far, the state has paid out approximately $19 million on the Homewood and Ile
des Cannes projects, with only about $2 million to $3 million going to Ile des
Cannes, Berry confirms.

A potential claw-back by the state on Homewood is not out of the question.

“We’ve done it before,” Berry says. “I can tell you we are watching the case carefully
and certainly wouldn’t move until the courts have had their final say.” 

The City Council’s probe is separate and apart from the legislative auditor’s
investigation, though both appear to be homing in on the embattled drainage
program. In recent months, the council authorized up to $100,000 to hire an
independent auditing firm that is also analyzing the potential violations of the
state’s public bid laws in awarding drainage contracts and possible violations of the
Home Rule Charter. Additionally, the auditors are seeking more information about
Guillory’s decision to avail himself of Lafayette Police Department officers for his
full-time security, an extraordinary and unconventional practice. 

City Council members Nanette Cook and Glenn Lazard, who have led the charge on
the council investigation, could not be reached for comment.

It’s unclear how long the legislative auditor’s staff will be in Lafayette, or how
long it will take to complete the inquiry. According to his bio page, Harris supervises
a 16-person investigative audit unit and has three decades of experience handling
fraud and compliance matters as a law enforcement officer, a commercial banker,
an investigative auditor and an attorney. He’s been involved in all aspects of fraud
and compliance investigations during his career, the bio notes, and “has aided in the
prosecution of hundreds of alleged fraudsters.” 

The legislative auditor is appointed by a majority of the members of both the state
House and supports the Legislature in a variety of ways, including serving as a
financial detective when there’s a potential misappropriation of funds. In April 2021,
Waguespack, a CPA and former Assumption Parish sheriff who later worked in
finance for an industrial contractor, was unanimously elected by members of both
chambers.

Guillory is up for re-election this year and so far has drawn a single challenger,
Republican attorney Jan Swift. Monique Blanco Boulet, who heads the Acadiana
Planning Commission, is also expected to enter the race. Boulet changed her party
affiliation from Democrat to Republican in September.

SHARE:     

 Posted on January 17  News + Notes

 Drainage, Greg Logan, investigation, Josh Guillory, Lafayette Consolidated Government,

legislative auditor, Rigid Constructors

ABOUT LESLIE TURK

A founding editor of both The Independent and ABiz and senior editor at The Times of Acadiana
in the 1990s, Leslie Turk is an award-winning investigative reporter who has worked in the
newspaper business in Lafayette for more than three decades. In 2007 and again in 2017 she
received the Louisiana Press Association's highest honor, the Freedom of Information Award. Her
work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Acadiana Advocate, The Daily Advertiser,
Baton Rouge Business Report, Louisiana Illuminator and Gambit. Contact her at (337) 207-4312
or leslie@thecurrentla.com.

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