Unexpected expenses add to parish budget woes

Another potential confrontation over St. Mary Parish government finances faded away Wednesday, when unsettling financial news led to an agreement to have monthly budget meetings between the administration and the Parish Council.
Also at Wednesday’s council meeting, the council applauded a group of Hanson Memorial students who are going to the United Kingdom later this month for a theater festival. The festival will be in Edinburgh, Scotland. The council passed a resolution of support.
Budget
The agenda for Wednesday’s meeting included discussion about seeking a state attorney general’s opinion.
At issue is the council’s decision last month to appropriate $5,000 to the Baldwin Police Department. The money was to come from a 3/10ths cent sales tax dedicated to projects in wards 1, 2, 3, 4, 7 and 10.
Parish President Sam Jones, who has been tightening the budget since he took office last year, pointed to the parish charter, which gives him the power to reject spending outside the budget without certification that the parish has the money.
Councilman the Rev. Craig Mathews of Jeanerette, who chairs the council’s budget committee, came back on the latest agenda with the possibility of seeking the attorney general opinion on whether the president can block a council-approved expenditure.
But Mathews withdrew his request for discussion after Chief Administrative Officer Paul Governale gave a budget update requested by Jones.
Governale, who was finance director before becoming CAO, said he looks at the parish’s cash balance each Monday. This time, Governale said, the parish had $1.1 million less than at the same time last year.
Recent expenses have included $1.2 million for equipment repair and upgrades at the Harold J. “Babe” Landry Landfill in Berwick and $132,000 to restore electricity at Kemper Williams Park near Patterson.
Road work funding that comes from severance taxes is down. And while the parish received $3 million in property taxes from 2024, it also pays $4 million a year for debt service, Governale said. The parish payroll costs $560,000 per month.
More expenses are ahead, he said, including repairs for the Avoca ferry and a new scale at the landfill at a cost of about $300,000.
Governale, a 19-year parish employee, has been unable to follow the long-standing practice of paying bills twice a month as they come in, he said. That doesn’t mean bills will be overdue or that the parish is defaulting, he said, but some bills will be paid later than they’ve been paid in the past.
“This is the first time in my career here, and it’s happened over the last two or three times, that I had to hold off paying some bills,” Governale said.
“Anyone and everyone we have a bill from for something we’ve had repaired will be paid,” Jones stepped in to say.
Mathews objected to what he saw as a contradiction between Jones raising the possibility of a $600,000 year-end surplus earlier this year and the current talk about a deficit. Mathews’ own term for the situation is a “temporary cash flow shortage.”
Jones said he’d hoped the surplus would materialize.
“We’re not having it now,” he said.
What started as a debate ended with an agreement for monthly meetings between the council and administration to talk about the budget.
They settled on a 5 p.m. meeting before the regular council meeting Aug. 13.