The Current

Mayor-President Monique Boulet’s administration secured $50 million in federal and state funding for an interchange at Kaliste Saloom Road and U.S. 90.

The project would transform 2.2 miles of Kaliste Saloom and 3.5 miles of U.S. 90 into an elevated interchange to improve safety and reduce congestion, according to a Lafayette Consolidated Government announcement. The interchange is considered to be part of the larger Interstate 49 Connector project.

Of the funding, $28 million comes from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Nationally Significant Multimodal Freight and Highway Project program, also known as the Infrastructure for Rebuilding America, or INFRA, program.

The Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development is providing $21.5 million to the interchange, an increase from the $20 million the department initially said it would commit. On the federal side, funding came in $2 million short of LCG requests.

Locally, LCG would provide $500,000 in match funding. The funds will be utilized to complete final engineering and preconstruction work for the interchange. No timelines have been provided so far.

Read more at thecurrentla.com/2026/lafayette-gets-50-million-for-hwy-90-kaliste-saloom-interchange/

Check out who’s playing around Lafayette this weekend.

“Who are your people?,” here in South Louisiana, is a question at least as relevant as your job title. Who your grandparents are, what parish you’re from and who you are related to matters.

But as elders pass on and traditions change, it is becoming more challenging to preserve the history of local family lineages and the places they’ve called home, especially in cultures that relied on oral histories and minimal documentation, like Louisiana Creoles.

Fixing that has been part of the effort behind Grand Coteau’s Creole Culture Day, which is taking place for the fifth time on Saturday at Town Hall Park in Grand Coteau. It’s a free community festival that offers an immersive cultural experience with the goal of celebrating, documenting and preserving authentic Creole heritage, language and history.

Today, at the festival and beyond, Creole descendants and community members are working to document and digitize those who are still perpetuating and upholding Creole traditions and practices like speaking Kouri-Vini, participating in the boucherie, Juré to Zydeco and creating indigenous art work.

The festival begins at dawn with a traditional boucherie. Community members get together and everyone has a hand in the process of taking a hog from the field and, eventually, to the plate. The process includes slaughtering, scraping, cleaning, deboning and cooking. Same goes for the chickens, which are made into fricasse. All the food produced from the boucherie, which includes cracklin, boudin, ribs, roast, and pork chops, is distributed to the community free of charge.

Historically, the boucherie was a vital way of life that allowed families to share meat and survive the winter, says Arceneaux.

It aligns deeply with the history of slavery and West African culinary contributions. Its development into Louisiana’s unique Creole foodways was directly shaped by the survival strategies, labor and culinary innovations of enslaved people.

“It was way deeper than just butchering the hog. This was a way of life,” Arceneaux explains. “That’s how they kept that alive.”

Read more at thecurrentla.com/2026/grand-coteau-celebrates-creole-culture-from-dawn-to-dusk/

Is there a way for Cameron Parish to maintain control of industrial development within its own borders?

That seemed to be the central question in front of the Cameron Parish Police Jury last week, as its members queried District Attorney Tom Barrett over a proposal to bring back a long-defunct industrial board to handle tax exemptions for at least one large-scale industrial project in the parish.

Normally, such decisions would first make their way to the local Industrial Tax Exemption Program committee, where representatives of local taxing authorities would decide which level of exemption they thought appropriate in exchange for promised economic development.

But Gov. Jeff Landry has increasingly defanged that program in favor of consolidating power in his office and administration — and companies know it. In Cameron Parish, this has now raised the question: How much power do locals have over the taxes levied on major industrial developments to support services in the surrounding parish?

Earlier this year, the operators of Commonwealth LNG, a large LNG export facility under construction on the banks of the Calcasieu Ship Channel, asked parish officials and members of the ITEP committee to reduce the taxable value of its assets from 20% to 7%, according to Barrett, who has played a central role in the parish’s negotiations with Commonwealth.

While there is no record of a public meeting in which this request was discussed — any such meeting would have been subject to state open meetings law — Barrett says the parish and committee communicated to Commonwealth that they were “not receptive to the idea.”

That’s when, Barrett told The Current in a text message, “Commonwealth started their campaign to get [the] governor to agree with their position.”

According to Barrett, representatives from the governor’s office asked him to “discuss a compromise.”

Since taking office in 2024, Landry has sought to centralize power over large-scale economic development in the state, including by limiting local control over the state’s standard tax exemption program.

Read more at thecurrentla.com/2026/when-industry-knocks-what-say-do-coastal-communities-get/

Until she joined her school’s Future Farmers of America debate team this year, land loss on Louisiana’s coast seemed like a far-away issue for Rose Fontenot.

“I honestly did not know all of the land that was being lost until this topic came up,” she says. “Since we don’t live as far down, it’s not really as big of an issue to us as it might be for [people] down south.”

Now, she and a small group of Southside High School students are bringing the issue even further inland.

After winning first place at the Louisiana FFA Convention in June for their presentation on coastal land loss and the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion project, the students are heading to Indianapolis in October to compete during the annual FFA Convention & Expo.

In Indianapolis, each student will play the role of a different party involved in coastal land loss — an oyster farmer, a shrimper or a local mayor. Each will present their assigned, memorized segment for a few minutes on stage — then, they need to be prepared to answer 7 minutes of questions from a panel of judges.

As part of their preparation process, they spent months presenting to businesses, organizations, leaders across South Louisiana, including state representative Josh Carlson, geoscience and ecology faculty at UL and, full disclosure, The Current.

This is the first year the school is participating in the competition, and it was a daunting task, says Amy Mire, their teacher. “Especially when you first tell them, ‘Okay, I need you to memorize all these lines and research all this information and go present to people you’ve never met before,’” she says. But even so, seven students agreed to participate.

“We just spent a lot of time researching anything and everything that a judge could possibly ask them,” says Mire.

Read more at thecurrentla.com/2026/southside-ffa-students-bring-coastal-preservation-to-the-midwest/

Louisiana officials have been slow to identify and punish violations of federal climate laws in the Lake Charles area, according to environmental groups.

In response, the state Department of Environmental Quality called the assessment too broad and said it doesn’t take into account the agency’s recent steps to provide more timely accountability.

The review was a joint effort from the Environmental Integrity Project, a Washington, D.C.-based climate policy watchdog organization, and Micah 6:8 Mission, a community group focused on air and water pollution in Southwest Louisiana. They shared their findings last week with LDEQ Secretary Courtney Burdette.

The groups reviewed documents covering how state officials responded to violations of the Clean Air Act at 23 facilities from January 2021 through August 2026. The comprehensive federal law sets allowable limits for emissions from industry and automobiles. The Department of Environmental Quality is the lead state agency responsible for enforcing it, with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency providing oversight.

The EIP-Micah 6:8 Mission review found “several serious concerns,” including delays in identifying violations and taking enforcement action, enforcement that doesn’t require corrective measures and a heavy reliance on companies self-reporting their violations. The LDEQ also relies heavily on warning letters rather than taking specific action against companies, according to the findings.

“These problems can allow violations to continue, weaken incentives for facilities to invest in compliance, and reduce the effectiveness of enforcement in preventing future violations,” reads the letter to Burdette.

Read more at thecurrentla.com/2026/groups-criticize-state-for-late-lenient-pollution-enforcement-in-lake-charles/

The Downtown Development Authority is asking the city council to amend an ordinance to limit how late people can carry open drinks in Downtown Lafayette.

In a letter to Mayor-President Monique Boulet, DDA CEO Kevin Blanchard suggested a ban on open containers after 9 p.m., amending the current cutoff of midnight. The concern comes from what Blanchard views as a growing “tailgating” culture, where people bring their own alcohol from home, leading to “criminal behavior”, fights and increased litter.

In the Friday letter, Blanchard is also asking the council to pause issuing permits for new bars in Downtown, citing what he believes has become an increasingly lax process. The request comes in response to the city zoning commission’s approval of a newly proposed bar at the corner of Jefferson and Cypress Street.

A longstanding moratorium on new bars Downtown means bars must obtain a conditional use permit if they anticipate alcohol to make up a majority of their sales.

The letter references a recent Downtown brawl that gained significant traction on social media, which Blanchard attributes to adding too many bars in the downtown area and spreading police presence too thin as those new bars open.

The approval that triggered the DDA’s request was for a permit for Plush Syndicate, which seeks to open a bar located at the former Bliss Cocktail Lounge. Blanchard also submitted to defer the board’s decision.

LCG staff recommended the approval of the application and require the business to adhere to:
No person under 21
No external speakers and windows and doors must be closed at all times
Maximum occupancy is estimated to be 325 — based on previous occupancy of Bliss Cocktail Lounge
Owner must adhere to a private security plan and coordinate with police
Open containers cannot leave the site at any time
Have two off-duty police officers present every night the business is open

Read more at thecurrentla.com/2026/downtown-authority-asks-for-tighter-restrictions-on-open-containers/

ONLY PREMIUM AND VIP tickets left!

VIPs meet and mingle with David Begnaud before the show along with food and drink from local partners, get premium seating and walk the step-and-repeat!

PREMIUM ticket holders walk the step-and-repeat and get premium seating, close the stage!

We’d love for you to join us for this years Under Current Awards to celebrate our honorees (The Wavemakers) and participate as the live studio audience for their interviews with David Begnaud!

Hosted by Do Good Crew and The Current
AT Acadiana Center for the Arts
Sunday, October 4

Tickets available at https://thecurrentla.com/undercurrent-awards-2026/