From the Editor: Changing St. Mary's charter

By BILL DECKER
bdecker@daily-review.com
St. Mary Parish voters have a chance to change the parish’s home rule charter Saturday. They may get more chances soon.
Along with the runoffs for secretary of state, sheriff and coroner, a proposed charter amendment appears on the Dec. 8 general election ballot. It would set the pay for parish council members at $800 per month for those who represent specific districts and $1,200 for those who are elected by voters across the parish.
Supporters point to language in the proposed amendment that forbids a pay raise vote in the last year of a council term and says no pay raise can take effect during the term in which it is enacted. That gives voters an opportunity to say whether they go along with the raise their elected representatives have voted for themselves.
But the St. Mary Industrial Group thinks voters deserve an even louder voice in that process. In an ad that appeared in The Daily Review last week, SMIG came out against the amendment, saying it gives the council rather than the voters the power to raise its pay. SMIG also hinted that the council was trying to pull a fast one by putting the measure on the runoff ballot rather than on the Nov. 6 primary ballot, when turnout was likely to be higher.
Maybe. There’s an argument to be made that the Nov. 6 ballot already had a couple of state-level races, the 3rd District House race, the sheriff and coroner elections, municipal elections, school board elections, property tax renewals and six — count ’em six — proposed amendments to the state constitution.
At any rate, voters have the chance to decide how the council’s pay will be set.
Meanwhile, a parish charter review committee began meeting last month. It’s chaired by Oray Rogers of Franklin, with Morgan City attorney Nicholas LaRocca serving as vice chairman and Ed Jones, a Patterson attorney, as secretary.
It’s not clear yet what recommendations, if any, will come out of the committee. But two major changes in St. Mary governance have been talked about for at least the last couple of years.
One of them is the possibility of turning the parish president position into a full-time job with full-time pay. This idea tends to bubble up after a major economic blow, most recently last year when PHI began talking about consolidating its Amelia operations with those in Terrebonne Parish.
The underlying sentiment here is that a fulltime parish president would be able to devote his or her energy to pursuing economic development opportunities.
My time at The Daily Review has coincided with the administration of Parish President David Hanagriff, who is a businessman but doesn’t miss many public events around the parish. This year, Hanagriff successfully lobbied local governments to give him the power to streamline applications for industrial property tax exemptions. He’s also been on hand for several of the Hospital Service District No. 2 meetings focusing on finding a new company to manage Teche Regional Medical Center.
Hanagriff has been busy.
But when the initial shock of losing a job provider dies down, so does the talk of making the president position full time. We’ll have to see if a full-time parish president causes a blip on the charter committee’s radar.
The other change talked about often is some consolidation of St. Mary’s patchwork of taxing districts. The current system seems designed for inefficiency and to confuse people.
It doesn’t help that our property tax rates are expressed in mills, a coin that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s like going to the grocery store and being told they accept only shekels.
Yet this would be a complicated task. Somewhere along the way, some combination of voters and legislative authorities created all those districts and set the tax rates. If any bonded debt is involved, someone is going to have to take the temperature of bond attorneys.
It’ll be a bear, and it’s not something you can wave a magic wand — or a charter amendment — to straighten out.
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review.