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BERWICK – Not long after JP Henry joined the Berwick Police Department, he told then-Chief James Richard that he wanted to be the chief someday.
That day came Tuesday. The Town Council voted to confirm Henry's appointment to succeed Chief David S. Leonard Sr., who will retire Nov. 22.
Also Tuesday, the council passed a resolution urging state lawmakers to help find funds for sewer system upgrades.
Police chief
Richard, who is now a town councilman, made the motion to appoint Henry, but not before the council had a bit of fun at Henry’s expense.
After Mayor Duval Arthur called for a motion to name Henry chief, long seconds ticked away with not a word from the council.
Then, “it’s been long enough,” Richard said.
Richard then made the motion to appoint Henry, and the council voted 5-0 in favor.
One of the votes came from Councilman Lud Henry, the new appointee’s uncle, who said he checked to make sure the vote wouldn’t violate rules against nepotism.
“It’s an honor on behalf of your dad and the family to say yes,” Lud Henry said.
Henry joined the department in August 2000, hired by Arthur when the future mayor was police chief. Henry worked at the jail and in communications for three years, and then as a patrolman 2003-2019, when he became Leonard’s assistant chief.
Speaking to the council, remembered telling Richard about his desire to be chief.
“For him to make the motion and the mayor to make the appointment was pretty cool,” Henry told the council.
“This has always been my goal,” Henry said after the meeting, “and here we are. I’m honored for sure.”
Resolution
The council voted unanimously to pass a resolution asking state Rep. Vincent St. Blanc and state Sen. Robert Allain “to seek any assistance possible from the State of Louisiana as far as funds, grants or capital outlay to help improve the infrastructure of the Wards 5 & 8 sewerage district benefitting the Town of Berwick, the [city] of Patterson, and the Parish of St. Mary.”
The resolution is another piece of fallout from the Wards 5 and 8 Joint Sewerage Commission’s abrupt announcement this summer that it was raising its rate by $1.50 per 1,000 gallons it treats.
The commission operates sewage collection and treatment facilities for Patterson, Berwick and portions of unincorporated East St. Mary Parish. Customers are billed by the local governments to pay for what the commission charges the governments.
The resolution recognizes that citizens will have to pay for sewage treatment under the 40-year-old agreement creating the commission, and that the commission’s infrastructure needs upgrades, updates and repairs.
But there is concern about what the impact will be on customers as the commission seeks funding for the needed work.
Arthur said after the meeting that the latest invoice from the commission for Berwick came before the town government could collect the higher rates from customers.
The higher rate added $36,000 to the latest monthly invoice.
Also Tuesday:
--Council on Aging Executive Director Beverly Domengeaux gave the council a From the Heart Award. She said Berwick officials don’t just allocate funds to the council. They ask what the council needs.
The council collected $1,450 at last weekend’s Lighthouse Fest, including $250 from a raffle.
“It goes a long way to help get people off the waiting list and get meals,” Domengeaux said.
--Arc of St. Mary/Center of Hope Director Kristal Hebert thanked Berwick police for being aware of the needs of developmentally disabled people in the town.
Her agency in Centerville trains and employs the developmentally disabled. Among its 23 clients are five from Berwick, Hebert said.

A Morgan City man is accused of arson in three fires in the city, including two at local businesses.
Brittan Boudreaux, 41, Elizabeth Drive, Morgan city, was arrested at 11:37 a.m. Tuesday on charges of simple arson, attempted simple arson theft (under $1,000), simple criminal damage to property, two counts of criminal mischief (tampering with property) and three counts of criminal trespass.
On Nov. 3, the Morgan City Police Department responded to a report of fire damage to a building in the Brashear Avenue area. Officers discovered that someone had attempted to start fires on the exterior of two businesses in the area.
Since that time, the department has received several additional complaints involving suspicious activity, including surveillance camera tampering and thefts at multiple business locations throughout Morgan City.
On Nov. 6, officers responded to another incident involving a garbage can that had been set on fire in the Swamp Gardens area. A photo of a possible suspect was released to the public, and through further investigation, detectives identified Boudreaux as the individual responsible, the Police Department.
On Nov. 11, Boudreaux was located, taken into custody and transported to the Morgan City Police Department, where he was booked and is currently awaiting judicial proceedings.

Fanny Lee Leonard, 76, a native and resident of Morgan City, died Sunday, Nov. 9, 2025.
She is survived by two children, Monty Gaudet Jr. and Tracey Matthiews; seven grandchildren; 18 great-grandchildren; sister, Poochie Daigle; and brother, U.J. Leonard.
She was preceded in death by her parents and siblings.
Visitation will be Friday from 10 a.m. until services at 2 p.m. at Twin City Funeral Home. Burial will follow in Morgan City Cemetery.
Twin City Funeral Home is in charge of arrangements.

If someone wrote a novel in which the hero lived the life of Edward Avery McIlhenny, it would never be printed. Publishers would say, “This is too far-fetched, nobody could do all of this.” He was eulogized as a man who lived an “almost legendary life.” That was not fiction.
Aside from being a shrewd businessman who ran a handful of enterprises on Avery Island, including the Tabasco company founded by his father, he was a naturalist, explorer, ornithologist, zoologist, herpetologist, game warden, amateur doctor, author, photographer, and humanitarian.
His legacies, in addition to the esteem of practically everyone who knew him, included a sanctuary for 120,000 egrets; an incredible 190-acre garden filled with tens of thousands of camellias and azaleas, thousands of irises, and exotic and colorful plants from around the world; and books on topics as diverse as bamboo culture, Louisiana’s alligators, keeping a pet bear, and Louisiana folk tales.
The Shreveport Journal wrote after his death in August 1949, “In his island kingdom, where he was known as ‘M’sieu Ned,’ he ruled like a prince who endeared himself to all of his subjects.” Much of what he did was driven by a lifelong curiosity about plants and animals.
He was born in 1872, not long after his father, Edmund McIlhenny, began to make Tabasco sauce, and as a boy “began tramping through the surrounding swamplands … [displaying] an interest in ornithology and plant life,” according to one obituary.
He left college while still in his teens to join an ill-fated Arctic expedition led by famed explorer Frederick Cook. The ship struck an iceberg only 10 days after it sailed. It was repaired, but only days after sailing again hit a reef and sank off the coast of Greenland. Everyone was rescued, and the frigid soaking did nothing to dampen Ned’s enthusiasm for studying plants and animals.
When he returned to Avery Island, the 20-year-old began an imaginative experiment to save egrets that were being hunted nearly to extinction.
As a boy he’d heard a story about a raja in India who kept exotic birds in a huge bamboo cage.
The cage rotted away after the raja died, but the birds did not fly away. Ned wondered if the same thing might happen with egrets.
He built a huge wire cage over part of a lake on Avery Island to protect seven young birds he’d captured in the swamps. He kept them until they reached maturity and hatched their young, then he destroyed the cage. However, unlike the raja’s birds, the egrets did not stay. Like other migratory birds, they flew away in the fall. But then they came back to their old nests in the spring to hatch another generation. Migrating egrets have now been nesting at Avery Island each spring for more than a century.
Wanderlust recaptured Ned in 1897, when he organized his own expedition to study birds in Alaska and Siberia. The expedition not only contributed to the understanding of the birds  he studied, but displayed his humanitarian spirit. When 105 men from a whaling fleet were stranded near his base at Port Barrow, Alaska, he housed them all and hunted wild game to feed them.
Ned returned to Avery Island in 1900, married New Orleans socialite Mary Given Matthews, and began to devote much time and energy to wildlife conservation.
He lobbied for laws protecting the ducks, geese, and other birds that migrated each year from Canada, and in 1912 began banding them to help trace their flight patterns. He wrote in 1933 that he’d tagged 23,000 birds by then and was still doing it.
He created wildlife refuges along the Louisiana coast, including the 86,000-acre Rockefeller Refuge, today deemed one of the most important sanctuaries in the world.
And he also began to create perhaps his best-known legacy, the 170-acre Jungle Gardens, where, according to one account, thousands of visitors each year can “feast their eyes on the only stand of Tonkin cane outside of Indochina,”  can see “sacred orange trees from the palace of the [an] Emperor of Japan … given to McIlhenny out of gratitude for … saving [his] son from drowning,” and myriad other plants that “bring the island into a torrent of color” each Spring.
Ned himself was not part of the display. The Kansas City Times story of his fabulous life concluded: “Few tourists saw M’sieu Ned … for his was far too busy a life. But each person who visited the island found it one of the beauty spots of the nation, and found there, too, something of the busy, friendly spirit of the man who ruled over it all.”
That was as true when we last visited the island several years ago as it was when the benevolent baron still looked after it all.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.