Mayor hopefuls take part in one last forum

Morgan City’s three mayor candidates have similar visions for what the city needs the next four years. So they again tried to differentiate themselves based on their experience at Monday’s final St. Mary Chamber forum of this election cycle.
The common threads Monday at Morgan City Municipal Auditorium were a belief that the city government has a lean budget that nevertheless should be examined for cost-cutting opportunities; a need for economic diversification; and a need for more housing and business investment.
The most obvious policy difference was between Don Hicks on one hand and Lee Dragna and Kevin Voisin on the other when it comes to housing. Dragna and Voisin see a need for new residential construction, with a focus on the Hellenic property. Hicks said 14% of the city’s housing units are unoccupied and that the emphasis should be on rehabilitating the existing housing stock.
Voisin served 20 years as a Parish Council member, including three as council chairman and eight years as a finance committee chair. Hicks served in the nuclear Navy and is retired after working in Entergy’s commercial nuclear power program for 35 years. Dragna pointed to his rapidly growing LAD Services Inc. and his service as chairman of Gravity Drainage District No. 2 and as a member of the Port of Morgan City board.
Voisin is a small business owner in addition to his service on the Parish Council.
He sees the biggest challenges in the next four years as businesses leaving the parish, the COVID-19 pandemic and keeping the Port of Morgan City waterways open.
The departure of businesses “is why it is so important to work with the businesses that are here,” Voisin said.
It’s important to look for opportunities to privatize and consolidate services in an already lean city budget, Voisin said.
He returned often to a theme of bringing different groups together to achieve improvements, working with Morgan City Main Street for downtown improvements, with the Louisiana Energy & Power Authority, and with the City Council on controlling the cost of city employee health insurance.
He sees the Brownell Carillon as a tourism asset and wants to find ways to work with the port board to make Morgan City an attractive stop for yachts and pleasure craft passing through on local waterways.
A major theme for Hicks is emphasizing the advantages he says Morgan City already has: a major highway, the port and a nearby airport. He said it’s important to promote dredging to keep commercial waterways open.
“We have all the tools to make a phenomenal success,” Hicks said.
He emphasized what he said is a need to rehabilitate existing homes and businesses and to promote local tourism.
The biggest challenge he sees in the next four years is the loss of business and industry.
“Tracking business and industry is essential to our growth,” Hicks said.
His short-term goals are promoting tourism and promoting a clean city effort.
“We want to have a city that visitors will be impressed with and we can be proud of,” Hicks said.
He said his work with Entergy made him familiar with supervising a large work force as well as with human resources and purchasing.
Dragna emphasized his experience as the owner of a business that has grown beyond barge-building to employ 200 workers.
As a business owner, he has learned to perform the diversification that Morgan City’s economy needs, he said.
As a leader of the drainage district, he said, he cut wasteful spending and helped the district do its portion of the multimillion-dollar levee improvement project and improve the pump stations that protect Morgan City from flooding. He was in contact with Hellenic during the levee project, he said.
And Dragna said he helped the port board obtain millions in funding.
“There are plenty of good ideas,” Dragna said. “And there’s lots of funding out there.”
The key to increasing the city’s tax base is new housing, he said.
Dragna was the last of the three candidates to make his closing statement, and he used the time to strike at his opponents’ experience.
In a reference to Voisin, who he said deals with only a single employee, Dragna said the mayor’s post should be more than a “bucket list job.”
And Hicks has been retired for a few years. “In five or 10 years in business you lose all the contacts you had, if you had any,” Dragna said.