YOUR COMMUNITY NEWSPAPER LAROSE, LA thelafourchegazette.com
Wednesday, May 2, 2018
SERVING: MATHEWS • GHEENS • LOCKPORT • VALENTINE • LAROSE CUT OFF • GALLIANO • GOLDEN MEADOW • LEEVILLE • GRAND ISLE
Major Gulf oil project moves forward
Raceland voters elect School Board member
By Keith Magill Executive Editor
By Keith Magill Executive Editor
Voters in the Raceland area elected a new School Board member today, while two communities in Lafourche and one in Terrebonne renewed fire-protection property taxes. Here is a rundown, according to complete but unofficial results from the Louisiana Secretary of State’s Office: School Board: Democrat Raymond Toups defeated Republican Chris Lagarde in the runoff for the Lafourche School Board’s District 8 seat. District voters cast 192 votes (55 percent) for Toups and 154 (45 percent) for Lagarde. Nine percent of the district’s 3,839 voters cast ballots. The seat opened in May after board member Ronald Pere resigned, saying he was moving outside of the Racelandarea district. He had been on the board for 10 years. Toups is serving as the interim board member. Both candidates said during a March forum that they would support reducing the School Board’s 15-member size, a proposal the board majority has debated but rejected several times over the past few years. See Results Page 3-A
MEETINGS
WEDNESDAY, MAY 2
LAFOURCHE PARISH SCHOOL BOARD Regular Meeting 7:00 p.m. 805 E. 7th St. - Thibodaux LAFOURCHE FIRE DISTRICT. #9 6:30 p.m. Gheens Community Ctr. 1428 Hwy. 654 - Gheens
THURSDAY, MAY 3 BAYOU FELLOWSHIP 7:00 p.m. E. 93rd St. - Galliano
G.M. ROTARY CLUB 7:00 p.m. Old Parish Library - LA 1 Golden Meadow
INSIDE
Arrests.........................8-A Calendar of Events.....2-A
Classifieds....................6-A
Legals..........................8-A Lottery.........................2-A News In Brief..............7-A
VOLUME 52 NUMBER 34
Lady of the Sea Hospital will hold their annual Safety Circus this Saturday, May 5, from 9 a.m. to noon at the Cut Off Youth Center. The event features games and prizes, hot dogs and drinks, face painting, finger printing, and an assortment of safety stations designed to inform and educate on child safety. Pictured above is Lafourche Parish Sheriff’s Office Explorer Lt. Kara Hensley fingerprinting and ID’ing one of the participants at last year’s event. Over 80 kids participated. Pictured to the left is Lafourche Parish Sheriff’s Officers with the D.A.R.E. program.
Parish transportation plans still in early stages Buster Avera, Contributing Writer
The Lafourche Parish Transportation Plan is still in its “draft” stage, requiring a specific set of action items, but the plan is essentially complete as it was unveiled at Thursday’s public Planning Commission meeting in Mathews. Prepared by the South Central Planning and Development Commission (SCPDC) and funded by Louisiana’s Department of Transportation and Lafourche Parish Government, the plan’s goal is to identify “multi-modal” transportation projects, look for funding sources and develop a recommended action plan in a 20-year outlook. SCPDC’s Joshua Manning gave a plan update to the Planning Commission at the Mathews Government Complex. Lafourche Parish’s Comprehensive Resiliency Plan, adopted in 2014, called for the creation of a parish-wide master transporta-
tion plan which includes all of the parish’s incorporated and unincorporated areas. Parish government has deemed the transportation plan as essential because transportation demands continue to grow in the region while federal and state dollars toward infrastructure projects continue to shrink. As the latest census data shows, in Lafourche Parish 2.3% of workers aged 16 and older have no vehicle available to them. Consequentially, the plan also incorporated a transit feasibility study as well as a bicycle and pedestrian study. To gather information for the plan, SCPDC used various forms of data collection including workshops, public meetings, consultations, online forms, emails and phone calls to get feedback on the public’s transportation needs. See Plans Page 3-A
Shell Offshore has decided to move forward with a major new oil development in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico. The Vito project will produce oil from a field in 4,000 feet of water about 150 miles southeast of New Orleans, the company says. The project is significant for several reasons: It is the first new oil development sanctioned this year in the Gulf. It comes amid an offshore oil bust, sparked initially by a global crude glut and resulting decline in prices, that has lasted nearly four years, stripping roughly 16,000 jobs from Houma-Thibodaux’s oil-based economy. Shell says efficiencies, including a redesign of Vito’s above-surface production platform, have driven down the project’s break-even cost to about $35 a barrel. That’s down by about 70 percent since Shell conceived the project. It’s also down significantly from $60 or $70 a barrel economists and analysts have widely touted as the break-even oil price in the deepwater Gulf over the past several years. “With a lower-cost developmental approach, the Vito project is a very competitive and attractive opportunity industry-wide,” Andy Brown, Shell Upstream director, said in a news release last week. “Our ability to advance this world-class resource is a testament to the skill and ingenuity of our development, engineering and drilling teams.” Vito, Shell’s 11th deepwater project in the Gulf, is scheduled to begin producing oil in 2021. At its peak, the project will produce about 100,000 barrels of oil per day. Total recoverable oil is estimated at 300 million barrels over several decades. Shell owns 63 percent and Statoil USA owns the other 37 percent.
Pictured is an artist’s rendering showing the Vito production platform. See Project Page 3-A
The Knights of Columbus Council 9000 in Golden Meadow will be holding their 29th Annual Kajun Coon crawfish boil fundraiser at Our Lady of Prompt Succor Church LaSalette Center in Golden Meadow on Saturday, May 12, at 6:30 p.m. The public is invited to enjoy all the boiled crawfish and cold beer they can consume, and tickets are only $25 per person. Ticket sales will be limited to 400 tickets available. Tickets must be purchased by May 7th. For more information or for tickets, contact any KC Council 9000 member or call Dale Terrebonne at (985) 475-7780 or (985) 691-7768, or call Mike Callais at (985) 677-6453.
Obituaries............6-A/7-A
Memorials...................6-A
Class f
2018
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