Early voting for the November election starts on October 18th, and KATC TV-3 is giving you the information you need to cast your ballot in local races.
Today, we're giving you some details about a roads and bridges tax renewal in St. Martin Parish; tomorrow, you'll hear about a drainage tax renewal in that parish.
We'll have election stories like this for you every day through the 17th. If you want details and links about voting and registration, click here.
Here is the video of our interview with Parish President Pete Delcambre, who talked with KATC TV3's Paris Flannigan about the roads and bridges property tax that's up for renewal. Below the video, you can read the transcript.
So you have seven tax propositions on the ballot plus an extra one, but the ones I'm focusing on are roads, bridges, and drainage. Now, what do people need to know about the roads and bridges tax come the November election? Let's start with the roads and bridges tax. What do they need to know?
Well, first, it's on the November 5th election ballot; with roads and bridge, people normally don't realize the the volume of roads parish roads that we have in St. Martin parish. You know, we have 400 miles of parish roads. You can go from, from this area here to Austin, Texas to give you just some kind of, how far this actually is and what we actually have in roads and of course roads in South Louisiana with anything comes maintenance., so this millage is for the maintenance of these roads. You know, we also have 45 bridges in Saint Martin Parish. Every year, we have an engineer come in and take a look at the bridges. If they're compromised in any way, they'll shut the bridge down, and we would have to fix it before they reopen it. In hindsight, three bridges were out within the last two years at approximately about $300,000 per bridge. So you can see that these are very costly items that must be taken care of. We have no we have no control over this, so this is where the these milleage and I don't want to call them a millage, I want to call it a service to where the people realize that, yes, it is a tax, yes, it is called a mill, but it's actually a service being provided to you, and, and this is where your money is going. It's money well spent and money that without this service and the millage is passed, the actual service provider would be greatly curtailed or even cut out, which you really can't have right now.
Now, when I drive into the parish, all this construction, roadwork, and cones is for the parish, correct? What project is that?
Well, actually, we have projects plural. You know, some of which are still state roads are taken care of by the state Department of Transportation. Parish roads are taken care of by the parish. Now, we either have internal monies available or take from the tax or sales tax district to construct roads.The millage that we're talking about is just the actual servicing and maintenance of these roads. So, the taxes aren't necessarily going to be the projects, but they are going to be maintained. Yes, this mileage is for maintenance. We have a separate tax that we actually do a construction match for, but that has nothing to do with this.
This is the maintenance tax.
Yes, ma'am.
And you are decreasing these. Tell people why you're decreasing the mileage
Well, well, actually, what happened was we took a look at it. I sat down with my CFO when this mileage came up, and I went to him about the state of the economy, inflation, and so forth. We sat down and took a look at the money we're making and the services we provide. Could we tighten our belt, so to speak? I did not want to increase the mileage or the taxes going out to the people. Now, what occurred was we had to present this toBaton Rouge in the month of May, and the tax assessor came out with the reassessment of tax of property values in June. So, therefore, with the reassessment of real estate values, if the mileage remains the same, your taxes would go up. But we sat down, and I decreased the rollback for each and every mileage that's on the ballot for St. Martin Parish. Roll them back to where you are not paying not a dollar more than what you paid from before and again, I want to reemphasize these are all renewals of mileage, no new mileage, no new taxes. Delcambre The taxes you're paying are exactly what you would have paid before.
To keep the rate at that level?
Yes, ma'am.
We can do this after the interview, but how much the original tax renewal was compared to this one? If not, we can, I can get a list of those numbers later on.
It's about one point. I think it was 1.667 million. So if I had not rolled back or decreased the mileage, it would have been probably 1.8 or 1.9 million. So if you do that to each mileage, you know, a substantial amount would have had to be, and the people would have had to pay a substantial amount more regarding their taxes.
