Parish President Rick Nowlin and Mary Ann Nowlin, Cenla Regional Vice President for La Capitol Federal Credit Union, travelled to Washington, D.C. to meet with a number of members of Louisiana’s Congressional delegation Feb. 27-28.
Mary Ann was attending the Credit Union National Government Affairs Conference. Rick was there to promote federal support for local road improvements.
Although the delegation members have extremely tight schedules, Rick and Mary Ann were able to have individual meetings with Senators John Kennedy and Bill Cassidy and Representatives Ralph Abraham and Garret Graves and a senior staff member of Representative Mike Johnson. They met again in a larger group with these same members plus Representative Clay Higgins.
On the credit union side, Mary Ann thanked them for maintaining the tax-exempt status of credit unions and to support repeal of certain regulations of Dodd-Frank and the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau that are harmful to small banks and credit unions. All of the members with whom they met were supportive of the regulatory reforms. She stressed the importance of recognizing the negative impact of “one size fits all” regulations on community banks and credit unions.
Rick’s objective was to get help for parishes/counties and municipalities in the proposed federal transportation infrastructure bill. He was pleased to receive expressions of support for local government highway needs. Although the final bill to be considered by Congress has not yet been drafted, it appears that it will include funds for local roads.
Rick also understands that local governments will have to meet the same matching fund requirements that state departments of transportation must meet to receive federal funds. That means that Natchitoches Parish would have to contribute part of the cost of its road projects. At present, it doesn’t have the funds needed to participate in the program.
The only way forward for the Parish to make significant progress in road improvements is for it to pass a tax dedicated strictly to roads. If the federal plan is put into law as proposed, the federal dollars committed to Parish roads would multiply the Parish dollars, resulting in far more road work being done in the Parish than if it had to fund the entire cost.
The Nowlins thanked the delegation members with whom they met for taking time from their busy schedules to meet with them. All were very cordial and thanked the Nowlins for providing them with input from the Natchitoches community.
The parish doesn’t care,the state doesn’t care about the roads state wide or
local and that is a main reason La was voted worst state in the country.We have lousy infrastructure and government.
So Alex I guess you don’t believe in simple arithmetic when it comes to the Parish budget. AGAIN when you take the cost to maintain a one mile stretch of road and the amount of taxes generated from the number of residences that live on that road there is simply not enough money to do it. If you want to get angry with someone get angry with the politicians at the state and federal level that continue to take tax money out of the parish and use for crony capitalism. By the way while we are talking truth here money will not miraculously appear for roads if we go back to the Police Jury System.
Thank you. You are correct!
And his commitment to increase the tax burden on all of us, let’s not forget how determined he is to persevere on that.
Rick, thank you for your perseverance and commitment to Natchitoches Parish and our needs to improve our roads.