COVID-19 means St. Martin Parish Council must continue to be frugal, creative

ST. MARTINVILLE — It was a very different meeting for the St. Martin Parish Council Thursday evening.

In keeping with the executive orders Gov. John Bel Edwards issued last month, the council restricted access to the meeting to only 10 people. Five council members attended in person, with four logging in online. Parish President Chester Cedars sat at a table that was brought in so he could address all of the council members, both virtually and physically.

The reason for the restrictions — the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak — was also the subject of most of Cedar’s comments to the council.

“We’re not going to depend on the federal government to bail us out,” Cedars said. “Our tax base is significantly down. We budgeted $975,000. I seriously doubt we will see that.”

Instead, Cedars said that he and his administration were planning to do what they have always done — work frugally, work creatively, and work to dig the parish out of the fiscal hole left after floods, disease, low oil prices and the ongoing pain of interstate construction has dogged the parish’s growth in recent years.

“We’re not just talking about 2020,” Cedars said. “We’re talking about 2021 and beyond.”

He said that the administration should have a better idea of its fiscal picture by mid June, but interim steps are already being taken to tighten the financial belt.

“We have told our engineers working on our $1.5 million road maintenance project to hold off,” Cedars said. “We’ve suspended a lot of capital purchases. We had some large equipment that had been approved, that is on hold.”

He also said that the parish will have to fight to get access to any of the $1.8 billion allocated to Louisiana under the $2.2 trillion CARES Act.

“The money is dispersed to the state, and to any government entity with a population of 500,000 or more,” Cedars said. “Well, we don’t have any of those in Louisiana.”

He said that he is writing a letter to Edwards voicing his concerns. Several other parish presidents will be doing the same.

He also extolled the local merchants and businesses for their efforts to halt the spread of COVID-19 through their conscientious actions during the stay-at-home order.

“Our local grocers, our local merchants, I could not be more proud of them,” Cedars said.

He was not as obliging toward the parish’s national retail chains, however.

“Don’t get me started on the big-box stores,” Cedars said. “I would have shut them all down. And you can quote me on that.”

District 5 Councilman Chris Tauzin said one of the local grocery stores in his district went out of its way to help those who were quarantined or who could not get out during the stay-at-home order.

“They would deliver groceries to the people who could not go outside,” Tauzin said.

“That’s because they know who we are,” said Council Chairman Dean LeBlanc.