The Lafayette Parish Sheriff's Office is looking for Lafayette Consolidated Government to pay $1.75 million for salaries at the Lafayette Parish Correctional Center by dipping into the dwindling fund balance of Lafayette's courthouse complex fund.

The change would dip into the courthouse complex's $5 million fund balance, which is down from $9.8 million last year, LCG's Chief Financial Officer Lorrie Toups said at a budget meeting Monday. The current budget, which hasn't been amended to include LPSO's $1.75 million, is already set to use $2.4 million from the fund.

In a letter to the council members explaining the request, Lafayette Parish Sheriff Mark Garber included a legal opinion that cited the state's laws and attorney general opinions that he claimed require LCG to provide the $1.75 million increase to pay for salary positions.

The $1.75 million request is an addition to the $2 million budgeted this year by LCG to pay services and maintenance at the jail. LPSO Warden Paula Smith requested the money to pay 38 positions in the coming year, including mental health professionals, maintenance and food service deputies, which oversee inmate workers, and the jail's chaplain.

"The maintenance deputies are providing services strictly to LPCC. Those are the maintenance deputies that are repairing your plumbing, your cells, your locks, your basic maintenance of the entire building," Smith said. "The food service deputies are cooking as well as overseeing an inmate population that prepares the food for all the inmate population."

A half-cent sales tax to fund law enforcement in Lafayette Parish, which was estimated to collect some $25 million annually, was shot down by voters in December despite warnings from Garber that it would mean housing inmates outside the parish jail, which would ultimately be more expensive.

On Monday, Toups wrote in a letter to Lafayette's city-parish council that more has been spent so far this year on housing prisoners outside the jail than those inside it.

"So far this year, we have issued checks for over $569,000 housing prisoners outside LPCC and $450,000 housing prisoners inside LPCC. Another $139,000 transporting prisoners," she wrote. "At this time, we have used all of the budget in this line-item and do not have funds to pay any more invoices."

Council members Bruce Conque and Jay Castille laid the blame for the sheriff's request for more funding on Mayor-President Joel Robideaux, who announced his opposition to the sheriff's sales tax in October, two months before it was put to a vote.

"I would just remind the public that, when this council proposed an increase in property taxes for the corrections center, they rejected our proposal," Conque said. "At the time we had no support from those that we needed for support because we were told, 'No problem, we have plenty of budget moving forward.' Here we are today. We don't have plenty of money moving forward."

"The next parish council, which I'm not going to be a part of, thank goodness, they're going to have some issues," Castille said. "This is going to be the first one to slap them in the face right here."

Chief Administrative Officer Lowell Duhon defended Robideaux by pointing out that the sheriff's request for increased funding was introduced to the mayor in April and said he wasn't aware until then that it would amount to $1.75 million in additional funding.

Castille proposed an amendment to approve Garber's $1.75 million request, which would have been automatically added to the proposed budget had Council member Jared Bellard not objected to the amendment. Bellard's move buys the council three weeks to consider the request and to gather more information from the sheriff's office and the administration.

The $1.75 million increase will go to a full vote of the council on Sept. 5, after which it could be vetoed by Robideaux, which would require a six-member majority of the council to override.

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