INDReporter

Council denies Dixie Cab appeal

Appeal hearing reveals little good-faith effort by owner in clearing fines going back to 2008.

File Photo by Robin May

The owner of Dixie Cab has just a few days to pay Lafayette Consolidated Government $56,000 — or to negotiate a settlement — over roughly nine years of unpaid SafeSpeed and SafeLight tickets his company has accrued. The City-Parish Council on Tuesday overwhelmingly rejected owner Salah Yousef’s appeal. As it stands, Yousef will lose his permit to operate the cab company on Sunday.

According to an account in The Advertiser, Yousef appeared to have some support among council members early into his appeal, but that support began to fall away when it was revealed that he hadn’t made any payments on outstanding speeding fines since 2008, and that he had collected about $4,200 from his contract cab drivers but never used the money to settle the fines. The Advertiser reports that Yousef claimed he never forked over the $4,200 because he was waiting to negotiate a settlement.

Read The Advertiser’s full account here.