[StBernard] Citizens Rally at Civic Center Today 4:30pm

[Westley Annis]

This was posted by Cavignac on the SBP forum on nola.com:

Noboats: For clarification, NO part of any work done by the HSD is connected
in any way to whatever the MF is doing. You are correct, thousands had to be
spent on the listed studies which are required to access CDBG funding. This
includes approximately $60,000 we had to pay to the Land Bank in order to
mitigate the acre or so of wetlands identified in our assessment. This was a
lengthy process and they wouldn't even let us drive a pick-up truck on the
site until the mitigation was complete. Our studies were only conducted on
the HSD-owned portion of the tract.

To answer your other question, after trying and unfortunately failing (once
due to a vote of the HRQL and once from another source) to secure TWO other
sites for the hospital which we felt were better, we accepted the MF
donation of land only AFTER we completed some rather heated negotiations
with them that insured the Hospital project remained free of any outside
future influence.


JY