INDReporter

C’est what: 3.2 percent turnout?

That’s an embarrassingly low level of civic participation, Lafayette Parish, but you’ve done much worse.

Fewer than 4,700 voters in Lafayette Parish — 3.2 percent of the parish’s 146,000 registered voters — turned out for Saturday’s vote on a pair of tax propositions. That’s abysmally low.

“It’s rough. [The parish] spent $143,000 on Saturday,” says Lafayette Clerk of Court Louis Perret, noting the cost of election-day staff, poll workers, transporting voting machines and tabulating results. Perret adds that turnout is low “invariably for the small millage renewals for off elections” like Saturday’s vote.

But believe it or not, Saturday’s poor participation rate was far from the lowest for Lafayette Parish. Perret ticked off several — 2 percent in 2003 for a city-wide vote on renewing a millage that covers maintenance of city-owned buildings, 2.3 percent for the 2011 vote on renewing the mosquito abatement millage — that were even lower. The worst in Perret’s memory was the paltry 1.1 percent of registered voters who voted on the proposition to renew the millage for the Teche-Vermilion Freshwater District.

The Teche-Vermilion what? Yeah, we know.