Joey Durel and Lafayette Complacency

It appears that City/Parish President Joey Durel will be handed a second term without a contested election. Using his first term as a guide, even his supporters are going to regret this.

Durel's first term has been characterized by cronyism, war on first responders, a failure to provide community leadership, and isolating Lafayette in the Legislature by repeatedly selling out the long-term interests of other communities for what were falsely believed to be Lafayette's short-term interests.

The tacit approval that the leadership of the community gives Durel despite these lapses indicates a sense of smugness that is not conducive to the continued progress of the community.

Here are examples of each of Durel's failures:

Cronyism: Early in his term, Durel worked hard to convince the Parish Council to change the rules for the hiring of police chiefs in the City of Lafayette. At Durel's insistence, the rules were changed to drop a series of requirements that would otherwise have prevented a lifelong friend from being named chief. The council waived the rules; Durel's pal Randy Hundley was named chief. That sad saga is still playing itself out in the criminal courts.

Had Durel worked as hard to get a proposed parish road tax passed in 2006 as he did to get Hundley named chief, we might actually have a chance for better traffic conditions in the parish. Given the opportunity, Durel worked hard for his friend, but was a slacker when it came to acting on behalf of the public good in the form of the road tax.

Making government work for his friends has been the hallmark of Durel's first term. Nowhere is that more pronounced than the 'welfare for developers' approach to public resources that Durel espouses and defends.

According to public information, Consolidated Government invests more than $3,000 in infrastructure for every lot in every subdivision that developers produce. Despite embracing the warm and fuzzy "smart growth" mantra, Durel staunchly refuses to make his developer friends pick up the tab for the public works that make their ventures so lucrative.

Development impact fees have proven to be effective tools to defray the infrastructure costs imposed by new developments in other communities. Durel will have none of it. Instead, Durel prefers to have Consolidated Government (i.e., the rest of us) absorb those costs and cut other services as a means to protect the bankbooks of his developer friends.

Durel is rewarded in full for his loyalty with campaign contributions (and other amenities) but the community as a whole pays the price through diminished infrastructure investments in other segments of the parish.

War on First Responders: Durel used his 2007 "State of the Parish" dog and pony show to talk about the importance of law enforcement in his administration. Yes, this is after the Hundley matter had come to light! Still, there stood Durel laying down the law and order gauntlet for anyone willing to spend $25 to hear him.

Funny thing is that while Durel was delivering those comments, his administration was continuing to stiff Lafayette police and firefighters over millions in back pay they are owed for money illegally withheld from them. The suit has been hanging out there for eight years, half of those years on Durel's watch.

So, Durel manipulates the hiring process to get a crony appointed police chief while stiffing policemen (and firefighters) on money the Louisiana Supreme Court says they are owed. Meanwhile, out of the other side of his mouth, Durel is championing his commitment to law and order. Sweet.

No doubt the money needed to pay the police and firefighters is a significant chunk of change, but how much is city/parish government subsidizing developers each year? Maybe police and firefighters would have a better shot at getting paid if they called themselves 'developers' instead of 'public servants'?

Failure to Lead: The top elected official represents everyone in the district, whether they like it or not — including those who didn't support the election of that official.

Durel as city/parish president has never gotten this. He won election in 2003 by about 4 percent of the vote. He was elected by the Southside. He has governed as though he is president of the Southside, not the entire parish. Nowhere is that more evident than on the matter of race relations. Durel's greatest failure as city/parish president has been in the area of race relations.

Durel fiddled while the Martin Luther King street naming fiasco burned through the council and, in the process, the community. He let it smolder and consume what precious little good will existed between whites and blacks in Lafayette until that issue arose. In a startling lack of leadership, Durel spent no political capital among council members trying to get them to move (for the good of the community) beyond the petty grudges they held against each other.

This episode demonstrated that Durel has not grown into the office; instead, he's proven that you can take the boy out of the Southside, but you can't take the Southside out of the boy.

The reason this matters is that Lafayette has put its dollars where Richard Florida's words have been. Florida is the author of "The Rise of the Creative Class," which holds that communities that will flourish in this century are those that can attract the innovators who are driving the new economy. In Florida's formula, in order to succeed communities will have to have what he calls "the three Ts": talent, technology and tolerance.

Lafayette has invested a great deal developing talent and our technology but, as the King street-naming episode illustrated, tolerance here is in short supply. So, too, was Durel's leadership. A true leader would not have allowed the King thing to spiral out of control before getting involved. Lafayette paid a heavy price for the damage that episode did to our image as a progressive community. As a one-time event it's an aberration; but without a concerted effort to heal the rifts exposed and deepened by that episode long-term damage to our prospects to result.

Isolating Lafayette in the Legislature: The LUS fiber project is Durel's claim to fame. It's important to remember that the plan was waiting for him when he took office. To his credit he embraced the idea and his championing of that project is a big reason that the measure ultimately won voter approval and will be built.

However, Durel has cost Lafayette a considerable amount of money as well as good will across the state through his administration's mishandling of the attempts by BellSouth and Cox to kill this project.

The initial attempt to kill the project came in Baton Rouge where BellSouth and Cox worked to pass a law that would have banned municipalities from getting into the bandwidth business. A delegation from Lafayette supporting the LUS project met with Governor Blanco. She reportedly told them that she would veto any bill that Lafayette felt it could not live with.

The problem came when Durel and his advisors accepted a bill (now law as the "Municipal Fair Competition Act") that not only provided a platform for a series of lawsuits against Lafayette, but also erected barriers that will prevent other Louisiana cities with municipally owned utility systems from launching ventures similar to the LUS fiber project.

Durel and his team decided the terms of the bill were not onerous enough to stop their project. They accepted the terms, in effect burning the bandwidth bridge behind them, leaving other municipalities stranded on the far side of the digital divide.

BellSouth, Cox and their allies then used the provisions in the law accepted by Durel and Company to file a series of lawsuits against the LUS project that ended up costing Lafayette tax payers about $2 million in legal fees.

But, Durel was not finished selling out other communities in the state on bandwidth issues.

In 2006, BellSouth/AT&T was pushing for a statewide video franchise agreement, which would have taken control of rights of way away from municipalities and property owners and handed it to the phone company. While the Louisiana Municipal Association, the Police Jury Association of Louisiana and property owner groups tried to fight this bill, Lafayette sat on the sidelines. Why? Because Durel believed he had reached an agreement with BellSouth/AT&T where Lafayette would not to fight the proposed law in exchange for the phone giant not bringing further lawsuits against the LUS project.

To the surprise of no one outside of the Durel administration, the lawsuits continued, but Lafayette succeeded in earning a fair amount of ill will because of its continued willingness under Durel to sell out other communities in the hope of short-term advantage.

Flash forward to the 2007 session of the Legislature when Durel touted an idea to stimulate road building in fast-growing communities by allowing sales taxes from auto sales to remain in the possession of local governments, rather than going to Baton Rouge.

The legislation ties together key elements of the worst aspects of Durel's first term. On the one hand, Lafayette legislators and Durel say they don't want to play the dirty money games in Baton Rouge; on the other hand, they make a grab for state money to build roads. Even after that defeat, Durel seems no more inclined to do the sales job of winning support for local financing for our own road projects here through either taxes or development fees. Who's going to pay for these roads? Santa Claus is booked through December and I hear the Easter Bunny lost a bundle in sub-prime mortgages.

The failure of the road legislation demonstrated the extent to which Lafayette under Durel has become isolated in the workings of the Legislature. Despite the fact that Lafayette had a resident as the sitting governor and with another resident serving as Commissioner of Administration local government has virtually nothing to show for four years of what should have been an ideal political situation.

It's really pretty astounding that the city/parish president couldn't find a way to work with this governor. Just about every other local government leader has figured out how to get local projects funded in Baton Rouge. Not Durel. A better opportunity for progress will not likely present itself for this community anytime soon.

So, cronyism, government for the benefit of the few, war on first responders, failure to lead the community on issues that go to the heart of our ability to advance, and pursuing a strategy that has squandered political advantage in state government are what Durel has given us in his first term.

That Durel's record is considered 'good enough for Lafayette' and its business community indicates a lack of imagination that does not bode well for the future of the parish. Progress comes from not being willing to settle for 'good enough,' from not being willing to accept the status quo. Smug self-satisfaction is not the hallmark of a community on the rise.

If this parish does, in fact, believe that we can't do any better than we are now, then we won't. Is this as good as it gets? We had better hope not.