By Claire Taylor
The Advocate, Baton Rouge, La.
LAFAYETTE, La. — Lafayette Parish Sheriff Mark Garber has resurrected a 2019 jail funding lawsuit against the parish that has been dormant since 2022.
Garber’s lawsuit, filed when Joel Robideaux was mayor-president, accuses the parish of not meeting its legal responsibilities to pay certain mandated costs for jail operations.
State law, the lawsuit alleges, requires the parish to provide a jail and pay for its operating costs.
Garber sent a letter in August 2019 to the parish explaining the cost of services it incurred in the previous fiscal year and asking that the parish pay the salaries of some mandated positions associated with the jail, including food service, maintenance, dietician, laundry, education and mental health professionals.
The cost of the 35 positions in 2019 was $1.7 million, the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit alleges the parish owes $525,447 for transportation and $10.7 million in other costs, including for nurses and dentists.
Robideaux in October 2019 asked the council not to fund the $1.7 million Garber was seeking. In a May 2022 reconventional demand,” a response to Garber’s lawsuit, the parish alleged the sheriff’s office was overcharging Lafayette Consolidated Government for sending local prisoners to jails outside Lafayette Parish to free up space in the local jail for state and federal inmates because those agencies pay more.
Garber’s lawsuit remained inactive for about two years under the administration of previous Mayor-President Josh Guillory, who served from January 2020 through December 2023.
Independent of the pending lawsuit, Garber has been pushing for a new jail that parish government would be responsible for building.
Under Guillory, the parish purchased property on Willow Street for a new jail and Guillory negotiated a public-private partnership to build the facility.
Current Mayor-President Monique Boulet canceled that deal.
The cost to build the jail through the public-private partnership “would have used all of the funding that pays for jail/prisoner operations/capital outlay as well as courthouse maintenance and improvements,” Jamie Boudreaux, chief communications officer for LCG, said in an email Thursday.
“It would have been fiscally irresponsible,” Boudreaux said, “to pursue this path to construct a new jail.
That would have left nothing to pay for state-mandated prisoner costs like food and clothing, she said, or to pay for courthouse maintenance.
In April, with new attorneys in place, Garber resurrected the lawsuit, filing a legal response to the parish’s reconventional demand.
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