A misunderstanding about the scope of work for a consulting company hired by the City of St. Martinville caused a bit of confusion at Monday’s City Council meeting when consultants addressed the council about the past year of work.

La Louisianne Consulting was hired by the city last year to engage primarily in finding capital outlay opportunities for St. Martinville and to begin work on a new Master Plan that will set the tone for the future of St. Martinville development.

Vice-President Dustin Cravins said his consulting group had been hard at work with the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, who have signed on to help with the development of the Master Plan over the past few months.

“We’ve been working and meeting with folks at UL,” Cravins said. “We’ve been engaging in multiple meetings and we think the partnership is going to bear fruit.

“UL was the driving force in the solar project in New Iberia, and we just see having (UL) involved here as they are in New Iberia makes all the sense in the world.”

Councilman Mike Fusilier said that when the agreement was made to contract with La Louisianne for a Master Plan, he was under the impression that the consulting firm would be the one to create the plan themselves.

“I was under the assumption that y’all would be the one doing the Master Plan,” Fusilier said. “That seems to be what we’re paying UL to do.”

Councilwoman Carol Frederick agreed, saying the proposal received by the council had verbiage that seemed to indicate La Louisianne would be leading the work on the Master Plan.

“Paying y’all $72,000 and UL $74,000, that’s a lot of money,” Frederick said. “The verbiage makes it sound like y’all are the ones doing it, not them.”

Cravins disagreed, saying that the intention was always to bring in a larger group that would have the resources to craft the Master Plan.

“We’ve done all the things we’ve said we would do as it related to the Master Plan, and we are in the infancy of that process,” he said. “A Master Plan is quite the undertaking, it’s not something a small consulting company could do.”

Mayor Jason Willis agreed, and said the intention was always to have La Louisianne communicate the vision of the Master Plan to the experts who would be creating the Master Plan.

“A consulting firm doesn’t have the expertise to do a Master Plan. It takes a lot of architecture work, design work and bid work,” Willis said. “They help us find the money and to hook us up to people at UL.”

Cravins also pointed to the other work the company has done for St. Martinville in the past year, which included securing more than $1 million for work on Main Street and city infrastructure as well as the creation of the Christmas on the Bayou event held several months ago.

“Those are really lofty things individually that we’ve done in less than a year,” he said. “I think we’ve been very aggressive and hard at work.”