The Lafayette Parish Council on Monday approved a $400,000 emergency appropriation to remove concrete panels from the condemned Buchanan Street parking garage.
The action follows Mayor-President Josh Guillory’s March 6 emergency declaration, which found an “imminent threat” to life and property in the downtown area bounded by Buchanan Street, West Main Street, Jefferson Street and Convent Street. The declaration followed a Feb. 28 report by Huval and Associates finding advanced-to-severe corrosion in many of the latches that connect the panels to the garage.
There are more than 100 panels attached to the six-story garage, each weighing multiple tons, said Frederick Trahan, a city-parish engineering supervisor.
“There is an excess of a million pounds of panels hanging on that structure right now, by some very corroded clips,” Trahan told council members Monday.
Huval previously recommended removing the panels in a 2018 structural assessment that promptly led to the shuttering of the garage, which services the Lafayette Parish courthouse and other nearby local government buildings. But the focus at that time was on structural integrity, and the report did not include a close examination of how the panels were attached, Trahan said.
“The emphasis was on the columns, the beams and the slabs. (It was) secondary that you have to remove the panels,” Trahan said.
Yet Council Chairman Kevin Naquin accused parish officials of “kicking the can down the road.” Without singling anyone out, Naquin said elected leaders had been too willing to trade property tax revenue for popularity in a conservative parish.
The threat posed by the garage is especially concerning since it borders one of the primary stages of the five-day Festival International, which annually draws hundreds of thousands of people to downtown Lafayette over the last weekend in April. Guillory said his goal is to have all the panels removed in time for the festival.
Naquin framed the garage as a proxy for the top challenge facing the new, five-member Parish Council: a multilayered fiscal crisis. Shortfalls in dedicated property tax funds, especially those for criminal justice, are putting pressure on the parish’s general fund, the balance of which is close to zero dollars.
The $400,000 emergency appropriation will come from a property tax fund that is split between the courthouse and the Lafayette Parish jail. That fund does have a modest surplus, but it is disproportionately consumed by the jail and is rapidly depleting as the jail’s needs increase.
The surplus in the courthouse-jail fund is expected to drop from $9 million to as little as $2.5 million this year if all the budgeted capital projects are completed, although Chief Financial Officer Lorrie Toups said Monday that scenario is highly unlikely. Still, the emergency panel removal is one more hit on one of the few remaining surpluses in parish accounts.
“When that well runs dry, you can call an emergency meeting but it’s not going to be to shut down a parking garage. It’s going to be because you have no money to operate. You have to close more than a parking garage,” Naquin said.
Council members also queried the administration concerning future plans for the garage. Trahan, the engineering supervisor, said he thinks the structure is still salvageable with repairs that would cost about $2.2 million. That estimate is an increase over a previous estimate of $1.7 million, and Trahan said that corrosion has increased 10 to 15 percent over the past two years.
Guillory said there are three options: demolition, repair and reuse as a garage or another solicitation for private redevelopment proposals. Guillory canceled a redevelopment effort by his predecessor, Joel Robideaux, whose “request for proposals” last year drew four responses — all of which the new administration deemed to be unviable.
“Maybe with just a little bit of cleanup we can put it back in commerce, we can put it back in use. Maybe the next question is should we demolish it, or should we look to the private sector,” Guillory said. “We don’t know those answers. But we do know this, no matter what option we go with, we have to remove the panels.”
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