City-Parish President Joey Durel unveiled another arrow in Lafayette's quiver: cutting off fire dispatch services.
The city of Lafayette is ratcheting up the pressure on the Broussard to drop its lawsuit challenging Lafayette's annexation of Vieux Chene Golf Course in south Lafayette Parish. City-Parish President Joey Durel unveiled this morning during his weekly "Lafayette Live" segment on KPEL's "Mornings with Ken and Bernie" program another arrow in Lafayette's quiver: cutting off fire dispatch services to Broussard, which Durel says will have a considerable impact on fire insurance rates for residents and businesses in Broussard.
Following is a transcript of Durel's comments regarding the issue:
Broussard's government, as you know, has decided to sue Lafayette over an annexation - something that did no harm to Broussard. So we made it clear a year or so ago that we would, you know, if that's the kind of relationship we had, the city of Lafayette would no longer provide services for the city government of Broussard.
So, their fire department has been notified - a long time ago, but again a couple of months ago - that April 30th would be the last day that we would provide that dispatch. In other words, when somebody calls right now one of our firemen actually handles the dispatch; that's every critical to the fire rating of a community.
So, the consequences of that is going to be that very likely insurance rates in the city of Broussard will double on all businesses and homes. It's unfortunate; we surely don't want to do that but, again, we can't maintain a relationship with a government that's hostile to the city of Lafayette government.
And so, we have begged, have asked, have pleaded with the government of Broussard to make the decision as to what do they think is most important: is the lawsuit more important than the services we provide? And it's been clear that their decision is they would rather sue the city of Lafayette over annexing its own golf course over the services the city provides. So, it's a decision that the city government of Broussard has made, not us.
We've given them the choice: you can either have the services by just letting us have our annexation without us all spending ridiculous legal fees, or you can continue the lawsuit and lose the services, and they have chosen to give up the services.