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CURRENCY
A series exploring the highs and lows of Lafayette’s economy, providing critical commentary
about what’s working and what’s not.

August 16, 2021

OPINION: Guillory’s proposed ARPA

budget is a bad deal for the parish
by Geoff Daily

Illustration by Peter DeHart

T
his time last year the Lafayette Parish government was borderline broke,
carrying a general fund balance teetering on zero. Now the Parish Council
has $47 million from the American Rescue Plan Act to spend. It’s an incredible
opportunity to undertake transformative projects for our parish and to finally
address maintenance issues that have been neglected for years. 

In Mayor-President Josh Guillory’s proposed ARPA budget, he includes a number of

projects that fit this bill, such as spending almost $5 million on drainage, buying
new tanker trucks for volunteer fire departments and installing new fire hydrants in
unincorporated Lafayette. But too many of his proposals deliver questionable
returns, create unfunded maintenance liabilities and inexplicably use parish dollars
to pay for city responsibilities. 

It’s a bad deal for the parish, and not just because of how the overall budget is
structured as a single, joint ordinance that ignores the original intent of this
funding.

Take roads, for example. The parish has a backlog of road work that’s tens of
millions of dollars long, totalling $60 million as recently as 2019. So it would make
sense to use some of this money to fix that — if roads prove to be an eligible
expense to use this funding for. That’s a big if.

ARPA’s interim rules make clear that general infrastructure projects are not eligible.
But there’s a loophole: Local governments can use ARPA money to backfill any lost
revenue and earmark those funds for any expense, including roads. The feds define
“lost revenue” as the gap between local revenues and the 4.1% national average
growth rate. By that calculation, Lafayette Parish could potentially use up to $4
million on roads, if it spent all of its lost revenue allowance. Guillory’s budget has
$23 million in parish road projects. 

But even if roads are an eligible expense, the road projects in this budget have a
questionable return on investment. 

For example, the proposal budgets $3.5 million to extend Frem Boustany Drive from
Edinburgh Drive to Vincent Road and $2.75 million to extend Cue Road to
Homewood Drive. The primary return on these investments is to enable a few
hundred homes each to save a couple minutes on their drives to Ambassador
Caffery and Kaliste Saloom, respectively. That’s $6.25 million building new
infrastructure that could instead go to fixing existing roads. And that new
infrastructure creates new unfunded maintenance liabilities. Because the cost to
properly maintain this infrastructure is greater than the additional tax revenue
that’s generated, even if the empty land around these projects gets developed.

Most baffling is suggesting $5.5 million go to road, bridge and sidewalk projects in
the city of Lafayette. City taxpayers are responsible for their own roads, bridges and
sidewalks, and can easily afford a few million dollars of additional capital spending.
Why on earth should the parish government pay $1 million to add a right turn lane
to Kaliste Saloom Road and Ambassador Caffery Parkway, for example, when that
money could be better spent on parish roads or other more important areas — like
drainage? 

A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSORS

Guillory’s proposal suggests spending $4.95 million on drainage, only 10.5% of the
parish’s $47 million ARPA allotment. The same proposal uses $17.2 million of the
city’s $38 million ARPA allotment for drainage, which is more than 45%. I don’t
understand why the parish wouldn’t be spending more money on drainage. It’s
clearly an eligible expense. It’s supposedly everyone’s top priority. And the parish
doesn’t have any other pots of money to draw from, other than, apparently, the
city’s ARPA and capital improvement funding.

Done right, investing in drainage is valuable and can reduce unfunded maintenance
liabilities. Plus, drainage is actually a responsibility of parish government. Yet there are
other projects still in this proposal that seem to offer significantly worse returns.

Like spending $1.65 million on more improvements for the Buchanan Parking
Garage in Downtown Lafayette. The Parish Council already appropriated $3.5
million to renovate the Buchanan Garage, which was the figure the administration
proposed to get the job done. Now it seems the cost of this project is coming in over
budget and the administration thinks the parish should spend additional money
making this garage nicer. But what’s the ROI of having a nicer garage from a parish
government perspective?

The biggest red flag here is Guillory saddles the Parish Council with 100% of the cost
of staffing both the parish and the city’s portion of this spending. That cost is $3.9
million for “Rescue Plan Temporary Staffing Adjustments” and $360,000 for a
contract with Cornerstone for consulting on ARPA project eligibility — a resource
not made available to the council members, by the way, who are ultimately
responsible for passing this budget. 

Let’s set aside the fact that $4.2 million seems like a ton of money to burn on
overhead. What I just don’t get is why the city shouldn’t pay its fair share of that
overhead, which would be 45%, based on the total share of ARPA dollars delivered
to LCG. That’s $2.4 million of parish money that could be spent on parish
infrastructure instead of the city’s overhead costs. Combined with the $5.5 million of
parish money being spent on city road, sidewalk, bridge projects I referenced
earlier, that’s nearly $8 million of parish money not being spent on parish
infrastructure or parish services. 

It honestly feels surreal to be complaining about the parish subsidizing the city, but
these are strange times we’re living in. This whole proposed budget just doesn’t
make sense to me. 

Why appropriate so much money to roads when they’re potentially an ineligible

expense? Even if you think the final rules may expand to include roads, why not set
aside the money and wait to appropriate it until we know for certain?

If roads do become eligible, why spend so much money on projects that serve so
few homes when there are plenty of parish road projects that would improve the
lives of more people? For that matter, why should the parish spend parish money
improving city roads? 

If drainage is a top priority, why should the Parish Council deploy so little of this
funding to it? And why appropriate millions of dollars for lower priority projects?

And finally, why on earth should the parish have to pay for all of the overhead? 

Parish Council members tell me they trust Guillory’s intentions — that they have
little reason to believe he’s spending this money in ways that will come back around
to bite them. But this isn’t about trust. It’s about making the most of a
transformative opportunity and squeezing as much value out of this one-time
windfall for the parish as possible. When you look at it that way, on paper, this
proposal is a bad deal for parish taxpayers. 

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 Posted on August 16, 2021  Currency, News + Notes

 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), Drainage, Economy, Josh Guillory, Lafayette, Lafayette
Consolidated Government (LCG), Lafayette Parish Council, Politics, Roads

ABOUT GEOFF DAILY

Geoff Daily created FiberCorps and helped launch the Lafayette General Foundation. He now
works as a launch strategist.

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COLUMN: LCG’s Got $300? Run for Want my vote? Keep

budget process is a something Downtown alive
bad deal for the city
Don’t sit on the sidelines. A chance at Downtown is enjoying important
City residents are disenfranchised by shaping Lafayette’s future costs just momentum. We can’t afford to let
a budget-making process that $300. that stop.
prevents the City Council from
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