Citizens and Parish employees voiced their concerns at the Dec. 16 Parish Council meeting regarding the reluctance of several Council members to pass an ordinance adopting the budget for the fiscal year beginning January 1, 2025, and ending December 31, 2025, and for Capital Budgets, and making appropriations for each department, project, and account. Council members Bill Allen, Bobby Braxton and Marty Cheatwood voted against the item, which was re-introduced at the end of the meeting and passed.

The first word heard on the livestream after the initial vote was cast was, “Stupid.”

Another audience member added later in the meeting, “If it was left up to me we would secede from Natchitoches Parish and we would form our own parish on the other side of Red River and not worry about y’all at all. Y’all don’t care about us at all.”

The audience asked why the three Council members were holding up the approval of the budget and if they was doing it on purpose because a prior request by the Council for $90,000 for “professional services” was denied. None of the Council members could seem to adequately explain what they wanted to use the money on. There was some software the Council wanted to purchase for $50,000, but they were advised that not only did the software not meet the ADA compliance the Parish is required to meet by 2027, but software isn’t considered a professional service in the first place.

Instead of the “blank check” that the Council wanted, it was advised to create a line item, but not under “miscellaneous” as Allen suggested.

It was discussed that another reason the Council members are holding up the approval of the budget is the simple fact that a Charter Amendment Proposition was voted down by Natchitoches Parish residents at the Dec. 7 election with 73 percent of voters against it.
It was put on the ballot to “provide that the Council may, by ordinance approved by a majority vote, authorize the hiring of employees as may be necessary to assist the Council in carrying out its duties and responsibilities and fix the salaries of all such employees, which such employees shall serve at the pleasure of the Council.”

Allen explained that the inability of the Council to operate a Summer Youth program, which had been operated by the Parish Council/Police Jury in the past, led to Salter advising him that the Council could take the matter back to the voters to change the Home Rule Charter, which Salter denied ever advising Allen to do. Allen then contacted a law firm in New Orleans to get the proposition written. Allen claims he told the law firm the language they wrote in the document didn’t make sense (the wording was misleading). The proposition was just to be able to hire a person to run the summer program and nothing else.

But for others, “At the discretion of the Council” has a more open-ended, ambiguous meaning.

Yet the Council unanimously approved spending $10,000 to put the proposition on the ballot. Despite claiming that he knew the wording on the proposition was incorrect “when I first saw it,” Allen was quoted as saying at a prior Council meeting that it was “nobody’s business what the proposition was for and that after it was passed, then the Council would tell people what it was for.”

“So you’re gonna hold up millions in grants just because you didn’t get a summer program or over $90,000,” one audience member questioned Allen.

At the end of the day the Parish needs to be transparent and a good steward of its money and not risk losing funding that would benefit its constituents over “sour grapes.”

Under the previous administration, the Parish of Natchitoches was awarded $7.4 million in ARPA funding, which was meant to be used for certain things like water improvements or broadband expansion.

The Parish wanted to budget $1.7 million to help three local water systems (Sandy Point, Bellwood and Water Works District #2) meet their required matches to receive water sector funding from the state. Somehow, the Parish over obligated itself (only $1.5 million was budgeted) on its commitment to the matching funds, which have already had resolutions passed by the Council committing the Parish to this support.

The Council was warned by one of its department heads in past months that if all three water systems received funding, the Parish would experience a shortfall that it would have to fund by moving monies from the General Fund to the ARPA Fund.

All three water systems received funding.

Residents of Goldonna were at the meeting to voice their concerns to their Council member, Marty Cheatwood, over the uncertainty of the future of the $4 million that was allocated for capital outlay, which was not budgeted in 2024. The Home Rule Charter states that if the Council doesn’t ratify its budget by the end of the year, it automatically reverts to the previous year’s budget. This money can’t be spent until a 2025 budget has been approved. There was also concern that if this process takes too long, the state might decide to redirect the funds.

When an audience member asked Cheatwood why he voted against approving the budget, he told the audience to ask the Parish Government for true transparency about where money for equipment came from; equipment that wasn’t needed.

The money, however, was in the budget and the Parish President is allowed to move money among line items within funds and did so to buy equipment to do work on roads in the parish.

“We’re holding up the budget because he [Parish President John Salter] spent money to buy equipment to work on our roads with?,” one audience member asked. “They can’t fix these roads with a shovel.”

Allen addressed the crowd. “It’s being perceived that we’re not trying to go forward, but we are trying to go forward, but you have to have working capital to go forward.”

But when asked to tell the audience what would happen to the money [the $90,000 the Council had requested], there was no answer from the Council.

There’s no way to get the 2025 budget passed before the end of the year because there’s a required holdover between the introduction of and the action taken on the item and the earliest this can happen is around Jan. 13-14 as the Council meeting will have to be moved due to the MLK Day holiday that falls on Jan. 20.

If the Council can get the budget passed in January, the damage will be minimal. However, the longer this situation goes unresolved, the more damage there will be.

One audience perhaps said it best. “I don’t want to see the Council playing like a bunch of kids.”