The 10,356-acre solar project quietly taking shape near Hineston
Treaty Oak Clean Energy — owned by funds tied to Cleco’s co-owner, which also bankrolls a local data center — wants federal approval for a 16-sq-mi solar…
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Bentley Hensel![\"\"](\"https://media.kingfish.la/2026/07/sunstripe-hineston-solar.png\")
\"Did they approve the solar farm?\" is the question we hear most. The honest answer starts with another question: which they? Three levels of government each hold a piece of the decision, and none of them ever takes a single up-or-down vote on whether the project is a good idea.
A utility-scale solar project — one big enough to sell power to the grid, not a rooftop array — doesn't get a permit. It runs a gauntlet: a federal track, a state track, and a local track, plus a years-long wait in line to plug into the grid that isn't a permit at all but stops projects just as effectively. Each track asks a different, narrow question. A project can clear one and still be years from a shovel.
We'll use the proposed Sunstripe Solar project near Hineston — 10,356 acres, the subject of an ongoing Kingfish series — as the running example.
Bentley HenselThe federal government has no general permitting authority over solar farms. It gets involved only when a project would discharge fill into \"waters of the United States\" — wetlands, streams, bayous. That triggers Section 404 of the Clean Water Act (EPA's overview), administered by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The Corps' question is narrow: what does the project do to those waters, is the harm avoided and minimized, is the remainder offset (usually by buying mitigation-bank credits — restoration work paid for elsewhere to make up for wetlands lost here), and — under its \"public interest review\" — do the project's overall effects, weighed across factors like flood hazards, fish and wildlife, economics, and recreation, tip for or against a permit.
The 404 application drags several other federal reviews along with it: an Endangered Species Act screening with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (you can run any site yourself through IPaC); a historic properties check under the National Historic Preservation Act; and a state water quality certification under Section 401, issued by LDEQ, which gets its own public notice and comment window.
Your role: the Corps publishes a public notice with a comment deadline. For Sunstripe, that's permit MVN-2026-00184-WLL, with comments due August 2, 2026. We've written separate guides to reading a public notice and to commenting effectively.
Bentley Hensel![\"\"](\"https://media.kingfish.la/2026/07/how-to-read-a-public-notice-1.png\")
Until 2025, Louisiana had no statewide solar permitting law. Then the Legislature passed Act 279, effective August 1, 2025. Its core rule is blunt: no one may build or operate a solar power generation facility with a footprint of 75 acres or more without a permit from what is now the Louisiana Department of Conservation and Energy.
The act also sets siting standards — setbacks, noise limits, and decommissioning requirements — that apply to large facilities beginning construction after January 1, 2026, unless the site is wholly inside an industrial zone or a state-certified economic development site.
Here's the wrinkle that matters most locally: the law lets any parish that has adopted its own solar ordinance opt out of the state's siting standards. Read that carefully. Opting out removes the state's standards — it does not remove the state permit. A big project in an opt-out parish still needs the Conservation and Energy permit; it simply demonstrates compliance with the parish's rules rather than the state's. The department is still finalizing its implementing rules, so this track is the newest and least tested of the three.
Louisiana parishes can regulate solar directly, and Rapides Parish did — quietly, and before the state acted.
On June 9, 2025, the Police Jury unanimously adopted a Solar Farm Ordinance (official minutes) requiring, before any construction: a parish solar farm permit reviewed by the planning commission; a company-hosted public meeting at least 21 days before the commission takes it up; third-party economic impact, wildlife, and drainage studies; a decommissioning guarantee with a $500,000 floor; recorded land leases; setbacks of 100 feet from roads and property lines and 500 feet from occupied homes, businesses, and churches; and fees — $10,000 to apply, plus a permit fee of one percent of total construction cost.
![\"\"](\"https://kingfish.la/og/meetings/rapides-parish-police-jury-2025-06-09.png\")
Then, on December 8, 2025, the jury opted out of Act 279's statewide siting standards (official minutes), making its own ordinance the controlling siting rule inside Rapides Parish.
![\"\"](\"https://kingfish.la/og/meetings/rapides-parish-police-jury-2025-12-08.png\")
One consequence worth understanding: a project that straddles a parish line — as Sunstripe's maps suggest it does, crossing into Vernon Parish — could face two different rulebooks, the Rapides ordinance on one side and the state standards on the other, depending on what Vernon has or hasn't adopted. We're checking.
None of the above lets a project sell a single electron. For that, it needs permission to connect to the regional grid, run by an operator called MISO, and MISO's interconnection queue is a study process that takes years. Sunstripe's entry (queue number J3479) was filed back in 2023 and, per MISO's own schedule, can't reach a signed connection agreement before late 2027. The queue is why \"the permit was approved\" and \"power is flowing\" can be years apart.
As of publication, based on our reporting:
\n\n| Track | Status |
|---|---|
| Federal 404 (Army Corps) | Public comment open now — closes Aug. 2, 2026 |
| State 401 water certification (LDEQ) | No application we can find on record |
| State solar permit (Conservation & Energy) | No permit we can find on record |
| Rapides Parish solar permit | No application on file, per our reporting; the required public meeting has not been held |
| Vernon Parish | Rules status unconfirmed — we're checking |
| MISO interconnection | Mid-study; agreement no earlier than late 2027 |
That table is the whole point of this explainer: right now, the only public process underway for a sixteen-square-mile project is a federal comment window that most neighbors don't know exists. The bigger public moments — the parish-mandated community meeting, the planning commission review, the police jury votes, the LDEQ notice — are all still ahead. When each one opens, we'll tell you.
This explainer is part of Kingfish's coverage of the Sunstripe Solar project. Related: How to read a public notice · How to comment on a federal permit · What is ITEP?
Not legal advice — process guidance for citizens. Spot an error? Receipts welcome: tips@kingfish.la.
", "date_published": "2026-07-29T16:06:25.000Z", "date_modified": "2026-07-29T16:06:25.000Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Bentley Hensel", "url": "https://kingfish.la/author/bentley" } ], "tags": [ "Explainers", "Public Notice", "Series Sunstripe Solar", "energy", "Rapides Parish Police Jury", "LDEQ", "Solar" ], "image": "https://media.kingfish.la/2026/07/how-solar-projects-get-permitted-in-louisiana.png", "_license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" }, { "id": "https://kingfish.la/how-to-comment-on-a-federal-permit/", "url": "https://kingfish.la/how-to-comment-on-a-federal-permit/", "title": "How to comment on a federal permit (and why it actually works)", "summary": "You don't need a lawyer to comment on a federal permit — and the agency is legally required to consider what you send. Here's how to write one that counts.", "content_html": "You don't need a lawyer, an organization, or credentials to comment on a federal permit. A letter from someone who lives on the road counts, and the government is legally required to consider it. This guide is the evergreen how-to: what a comment does, what makes one count, and the mechanics of sending it.
Looking for a permit that's open right now? Check out the Army Corps of Engineers' public-notices page for an open comment window near you. This guide uses the Corps' wetlands permits as its running example, but the skill transfers to other federal permits.
First, we need to manage expectations: a comment is not a vote. The agency will not tally support against opposition and go with the majority. Five hundred identical postcards register as one argument made five hundred times.
Here's what a comment is: evidence. By law, everything submitted goes into the administrative record, and the agency must consider it in deciding whether to issue the permit, issue it with conditions, or deny it. Comments shape whether the agency conducts a deeper environmental review, whether it holds a public hearing, and what questions it asks the applicant to answer — the Corps can forward your comment to the company and require a response. Years later, if a permit is ever challenged, the record you helped build is what a court reviews.
Most permits are eventually issued, but the conditions attached to them — buffers, monitoring, drainage requirements, timing restrictions — are where comments most often leave fingerprints. Conditions are power.
Be specific, and be local. The single most valuable thing you possess is firsthand knowledge of a place the reviewers have likely never stood in. The road that floods every March. The well everyone on your stretch drinks from. The creek where you've watched the water rise since 1998. The deer lease, the school bus route, the culvert that already backs up. An agency can discount an opinion; it cannot easily discount geography reported by the person who lives on it.
Tie your point to the official factors. Every Corps notice lists the things the agency must weigh — conservation, economics, flood hazards, fish and wildlife values, water quality, safety, recreation, and the needs of the people. That list is the menu. A comment that says \"under the flood hazards factor, here is what I have observed on this drainage\" is a comment the agency has no lawful way to wave off. (Our guide to reading a notice shows where to find the list.)
Bentley HenselAsk answerable questions. Questions go into the record and demand responses. Has the agency verified the wetland boundaries along the route? What happens to runoff from hundreds of newly graded acres in a hard rain? Was an alternative studied that avoids the stream crossing? A sharp question can do more work than a page of objections.
Facts beat adjectives. \"This is a terrible idea\" carries no weight. \"The notice reports 18.5 acres of forested wetland impact along a line that crosses the creek my property drains into,\" carries plenty, and you don't have to oppose a project to comment. Supporting with conditions, or neither supporting nor opposing but demanding answers, are both legitimate and often more effective.
Two numbers govern everything: the permit number printed at the top of the notice, and the comment deadline. Put the permit number on whatever you send, and get it in before the deadline. A Corps notice gives you three ways in and names the people to reach:
Different agencies, different front doors — but the pattern holds: the notice always tells you the number, the deadline, and who to send it to. When a specific window is open, we spell out the exact address and deadline in a dated action alert.
You can request a public hearing. Put it in writing, inside the comment window, and state your specific reasons — the regulations call this stating your interest \"with particularity.\" The Corps grants hearing requests unless it determines the issues raised are insubstantial. A community that wants a night to question a project in person must request it in writing.
You can ask for more time. Extension requests must be specific and submitted before the deadline; the Corps can extend the window, generally by up to 30 additional days. If a five-page notice about a project covering thousands of acres surfaced in your community with days to spare, saying exactly that is a legitimate basis.
Everything you submit — including your name, address, and phone number — becomes part of a public record that can be released under the Freedom of Information Act. That's not a reason to stay silent; it's a reason to write as if the whole parish might read it. Which, if we're doing our job, it might.
We're deliberately not giving you a form letter — form letters are the weakest kind of comment. But a strong one usually runs like this, and a page is plenty:
Once you can do this, you can do it anywhere the public gets a window: LDEQ's notices for state environmental permits, the Public Service Commission's dockets on utility matters, and the three minutes at the microphone every police jury meeting owes you. Agencies count on those windows passing quietly. They don't have to.
This explainer is part of Kingfish's coverage of the Sunstripe Solar project. Related: How to read a public notice
Spot an error? Receipts welcome: tips@kingfish.la.
", "date_published": "2026-07-28T12:20:25.000Z", "date_modified": "2026-07-28T12:20:25.000Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Bentley Hensel", "url": "https://kingfish.la/author/bentley" } ], "tags": [ "Explainers", "Public Notice", "Series Sunstripe Solar" ], "image": "https://media.kingfish.la/2026/07/how-to-comment-on-a-federal-permit-1.png", "_license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" }, { "id": "https://kingfish.la/how-to-read-a-public-notice/", "url": "https://kingfish.la/how-to-read-a-public-notice/", "title": "How to read a public notice", "summary": "The most consequential documents in government are written to be skipped: dense, gray, and buried where almost no one looks. But every one of them starts a clock. Here's how to read a public notice like a reporter.", "content_html": "A public notice is a government agency saying, in its stiffest voice: someone has asked us to approve something, and the law requires us to tell you before we decide. It is not the approval. It is your invitation — usually your only one — to get on the record before the decision gets made.
The catch is that notices are written by and for specialists. The information a neighbor actually needs is in there, but it's scattered, hedged, and wrapped in boilerplate. This guide walks the anatomy of a notice — using the Army Corps of Engineers' wetlands notices, the kind common across central Louisiana, as the model — section by section, so the next one you see, you can read in five minutes flat.
Nobody mails you these. You have to know the watering holes:
The header block: applicant, agent, dates. The applicant is who wants the thing — often a single-purpose LLC formed just for the project, which may be a subsidiary of a larger company. The agent is the consultant paid to shepherd the application. Both matter: the applicant tells you who benefits; the agent tells you who to expect answering questions. Then do one piece of arithmetic immediately: expiration date minus publication date = your window. These are legal minimums — often as little as 15 or 20 days — not courtesy invitations.
The permit number. Write it down. That string — a code like MVN-2025-01234-XYZ — is the key that unlocks everything else: your comment must reference it, your records request will cite it, and searching it will surface documents the notice never mentions.
The location. Notices give an address and, usually, coordinates. Paste the coordinates into any mapping app, look at what's actually there, and then check the notice's claims against the applicant's own drawings. That check pays off: in one solar notice we examined, the text said the project was \"within Rapides Parish\" while the attached drawings were titled \"Rapides and Vernon Parishes,\" with the parish line running straight through the site.
The description of work. The one paragraph most people read. It gives you the sizes and pieces — the acreages, the structures, the miles of pipe or line. Read it twice, because every number here is a fact you can hold the applicant to later.
The mitigation section. What gets destroyed, and what's offered in trade. A notice might report, say, 18.5 acres of forested wetland impact, offset by purchasing credits from a mitigation bank — a site somewhere else where wetlands were restored and \"credits\" are sold to developers who destroy them elsewhere. Whether a credit two watersheds away truly replaces a cypress swamp near you is a fair question, and this section is where you'd raise it.
The \"boilerplate\" that isn't. Every notice carries near-identical paragraphs about endangered species, historic properties, and water quality certification. Skim them anyway, because the variables inside are load-bearing. When a notice says a project \"may affect\" a listed species — the Louisiana pinesnake, say — that means a consultation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is now legally in motion. The water-quality paragraph tells you that a second agency's process, with a second comment window, is coming at LDEQ.
The fine-print confession. Corps notices include a line stating the information came from the applicant and hasn't been verified. The notice is telling you its own limits: this is the company's account, published so the public can test it. That's your job description, right there in the document.
The evaluation section. This dry paragraph is secretly the most useful one. It lists the factors the agency must weigh — conservation, economics, flood hazards, fish and wildlife, water quality, recreation, safety, and more. That list is the menu of legally valid things to comment about. A comment tied to a listed factor cannot be waved off as irrelevant.
The comments section. Deadline, addresses, your right to request a public hearing, and a warning worth taking seriously: everything you submit — including your name and address — becomes part of a public record releasable under federal law. Know that before you write.
Public notices are designed for insiders. Reading them is a learnable skill, and every person in a parish who learns it makes the next quiet project a little less quiet.
Spot an error? Receipts welcome: tips@kingfish.la.
", "date_published": "2026-07-27T18:58:48.000Z", "date_modified": "2026-07-27T18:58:48.000Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Bentley Hensel", "url": "https://kingfish.la/author/bentley" } ], "tags": [ "Explainers", "Public Notice", "Series Sunstripe Solar" ], "image": "https://media.kingfish.la/2026/07/how-to-read-a-public-notice-1.png", "_license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" }, { "id": "https://kingfish.la/what-is-a-pilot/", "url": "https://kingfish.la/what-is-a-pilot/", "title": "What is a PILOT? The tax deal you've never voted on", "summary": "Sometimes a billion-dollar facility never shows up on the tax rolls at all — because on paper, a public board owns it. Instead of a tax bill, the company writes negotiated checks. That's a PILOT, and central Louisiana is about to hear the term a lot.", "content_html": "If ITEP is Louisiana's famous tax break — the one with a state database, a fixed percentage, and decades of public argument — the PILOT is its quieter cousin. Fewer rules. Less paperwork in public view. And, done a certain way, a bigger break than ITEP could ever grant.
PILOT stands for Payment In Lieu Of Taxes. The name says it plainly: instead of paying property taxes the normal way, a company pays a negotiated amount — sometimes more than nothing, usually less than the full bill — under a contract with a local public body.
Louisiana law — the industrial development board statutes, La. R.S. 51:1151 and following — lets parishes and municipalities create nonprofit public corporations whose whole purpose is financing industrial projects. Here's the standard play, step by step:
When bonds are involved, the deal generally needs sign-off from the State Bond Commission, whose monthly agendas are public and are one of the best early-warning systems for PILOT deals anywhere in the state.
| ITEP | PILOT | |
|---|---|---|
| Who grants it | State Board of Commerce & Industry + governor, with a parish board hearing | Local industrial development board and parish bodies |
| How much | Fixed by rule: up to 80% off, up to 10 years | Whatever's negotiated — can exceed or undercut ITEP |
| How long | 5 years + 5-year renewal | Any term the contract sets — can run decades |
| Where to find it | State's FastLane database | Local minutes, lease agreements, Bond Commission agendas |
| Public's role | Parish board public hearing required | Whatever local process the bodies choose to hold |
The practical difference: ITEP is a program with statewide rules you can look up. A PILOT is a contract, and every one is different. That cuts both ways. A well-negotiated PILOT can deliver a community-guaranteed payment on day one — something ITEP's exemption never does. A badly negotiated one can quietly give away more than ITEP ever could, for longer, with fewer people noticing.
Two live projects put PILOTs on the local map.
First, the Applied Digital data center project near Boyce — the $3.6 billion Delta Forge campus — is taking the PILOT route rather than ITEP. Its deal runs through the England Authority, which, in February 2026, created a special subdistrict around the 672-acre site that Applied Digital had bought that December. Under an early term sheet, the company's payments fall over time — starting near $27.4 million and dropping to about $19.4 million by year 25, KALB found in a review of the documents. A declining schedule on a growing facility is exactly the kind of thing the checklist below is built to catch.
Second, the proposed Sunstripe Solar project — 10,356 acres near Hineston — hasn't declared its intentions. But the Rapides Parish Police Jury anticipated the question: Section 26-13 of the parish's Solar Farm Ordinance reserves the jury's right to accept, reject, or modify any ITEP request — and then states, in the same breath, that the ordinance \"does not limit the use of a PILOT.\" The door is open. As of mid-July, no ITEP filing for the project appears in the state database, which makes the PILOT question a live one.
When a PILOT lands on a local agenda — and one eventually will — these are the questions that separate a good deal from an expensive one. We'll be asking them; you can too.
PILOTs rarely announce themselves. They surface in: industrial development board and police jury agendas and minutes (Kingfish archives Rapides Parish's here); State Bond Commission monthly agendas; and the conveyance records at the clerk of court, where the title transfers and leases that make the structure work have to be recorded. If you see a public board suddenly \"acquiring\" an industrial property, it will never operate — that's usually not a purchase. That's a PILOT being born.
", "date_published": "2026-07-22T13:18:00.000Z", "date_modified": "2026-07-22T13:18:00.000Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Bentley Hensel", "url": "https://kingfish.la/author/bentley" } ], "tags": [ "Explainers", "Taxes", "PILOT" ], "image": "https://media.kingfish.la/2026/07/what-is-a-pilot.png", "_license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" }, { "id": "https://kingfish.la/what-is-itep/", "url": "https://kingfish.la/what-is-itep/", "title": "What is ITEP? Louisiana's biggest tax break, explained", "summary": "A state board in Baton Rouge can excuse a factory, or any business, from most of its local property taxes for a decade. The money never touches the state budget. It comes out of your parish, your schools, and your sheriff's office.", "content_html": "Property taxes in Louisiana are local money. They fund the school district, the sheriff, the fire district, the library, the roads. The state doesn't collect them.
But for almost 90 years, the state has had the power to give them away.
That power is the Industrial Tax Exemption Program — ITEP — and if you follow big projects in this parish, you will run into the acronym constantly. This explainer covers what it is, how it changed in 2024, who decides, who pays, and how to look any application up yourself.
ITEP is written into the Louisiana Constitution — Article VII, Section 21(F). It authorizes the Board of Commerce and Industry, with the governor's sign-off, to grant a \"manufacturing establishment\" a contract exempting its new capital investment — buildings, machinery, equipment — from ad valorem property taxes. Contracts run five years, renewable for five more.
Two features make Louisiana's version unusual among states. First, the decision is made at the state level, but the cost lands entirely at the local level — the state is spending someone else's money. Second, for roughly 80 years, the locals whose money it was had no say at all. Exemptions were near-automatic, at 100 percent.
Before 2016: automatic and total. For decades, exemptions were routinely granted at 100 percent with no local input. Research by the church-and-community coalition Together Louisiana found that in one year local governments across sixty parishes were forgoing about $1.9 billion annually, with public schools the hardest hit — roughly $720 million in 2017, a meaningful share of all school funding.
2016–2024: locals get a vote. Gov. John Bel Edwards' 2016 executive order cut the exemption to 80 percent, added job-creation requirements, and — the big one — required each local taxing body (the police jury, school board, sheriff) to approve or reject its own share. Locals mostly said yes: about 96 percent of projects won at least partial approval. But the reform mattered anyway — one analysis cited by the Louisiana Illuminator put the added local revenue at roughly $260 million per year. An attempt to write local control into the constitution failed in the state Senate in 2022, which left the whole arrangement resting on executive orders — changeable by the next governor. Which brings us to:
2024–present: the Landry rules. On February 21, 2024, Gov. Jeff Landry signed Executive Order JML 24-23, which governs ITEP advances filed since that date. The current rules:
Whether that consolidated local vote is a meaningful check or a formality is one of the open questions of the current era — and one Kingfish will be watching in real time if a big application lands here.
Kingfish is covering the proposed Sunstripe Solar project — 10,356 acres near Hineston — and the question of whether its developer will seek ITEP is one of the biggest unanswered questions about the project's local impact.
Two facts so far. First, as of a mid-July search of the state's FastLane database, no ITEP filing exists for Treaty Oak Clean Energy, TO LA Solar 1, or any Sunstripe-related entity in Rapides or Vernon parish. Second, Rapides Parish saw this question coming: Section 26-13 of the parish's Solar Farm Ordinance, adopted in June 2025, explicitly reserves the Police Jury's right \"to accept, reject, or request modification\" of any ITEP for a solar project — while leaving the door open to a negotiated alternative called a PILOT. (We've explained PILOTs separately; the short version is that it's a substitute deal, not an exemption.)
How much money is actually at stake depends on assessed values and local millage rates, and we won't pretend to know those numbers before an application exists. When one does, we'll run the math and show our work.
Supporters — including the state's major business lobby, on whose stage the 2024 order was signed — argue ITEP is Louisiana's most important tool for landing capital-intensive industry, and that without it projects go to Texas or Mississippi. Critics — led by Together Louisiana, whose research drove the 2016 reforms — argue the program hands out money that belongs to schools and local services, often for investments that would have happened anyway, and that no one at the state level has ever seriously tested that question.
Both sides agree on one thing: the dollars are enormous. Which is exactly why every application deserves a public paper trail — and why we'll link one every time.
", "date_published": "2026-07-21T12:25:41.000Z", "date_modified": "2026-07-21T12:25:41.000Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Bentley Hensel", "url": "https://kingfish.la/author/bentley" } ], "tags": [ "Explainers", "Taxes", "ITEP" ], "image": "https://media.kingfish.la/2026/07/what-is-itep.png", "_license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" }, { "id": "https://kingfish.la/how-louisianas-public-records-law-works/", "url": "https://kingfish.la/how-louisianas-public-records-law-works/", "title": "How Louisiana's public records law works", "summary": "Louisiana's Public Records Law gives any person of the age of majority the right to inspect and copy the records of state and local government, backed by the state constitution.", "content_html": "If you want to know what your government is doing, the public records law is the tool. Louisiana's is strong; it is rooted in the state constitution, and you do not need a lawyer or a reason to use it. This is a working guide for filing your own request.
The right starts in the Louisiana Constitution. Article XII, Section 3 states: \"No person shall be denied the right to observe the deliberations of public bodies and examine public documents, except in cases established by law.\" Courts read that mandate broadly and resolve doubt in favor of access.
The statute that carries it out is the Public Records Law, La. R.S. 44:1 et seq., first enacted in 1940. The Louisiana Supreme Court has instructed that it be construed liberally, with any doubt resolved in favor of the public's right to see.
Any person of the age of majority — 18 or older — may inspect, copy, or reproduce public records (La. R.S. 44:31 and 44:32). You do not have to be a Louisiana resident, a journalist, or a party to anything. The custodian may ask only your age and identification. The custodian may not ask why you want the records, and your purpose does not affect your right to get them. (One narrow exception: an incarcerated person who has exhausted appeals may request only records related to post-conviction relief.)
The definition in La. R.S. 44:1(A)(2)(a) is deliberately sweeping. It covers \"all books, records, writings, accounts … recordings, memoranda, and papers … or any other documentary materials, regardless of physical form or characteristics,\" that are used, in use, or kept for use in conducting public business. That includes emails, text messages, and digital databases. Public business conducted on a private phone or personal email account remains a public record; an official cannot evade disclosure by using a personal device.
Two limits are worth knowing. An agency has no duty to create a record that does not already exist, and it does not have to compile information into a new format it does not already keep.
Louisiana law does not allow a custodian to sit on a request indefinitely. If a record is not in active use, the custodian must promptly present it upon request. If it is in use or stored offsite, the custodian must set a day and hour, within three days, for you to see it (La. R.S. 44:33).
If the custodian questions whether something is a public record at all, the custodian must notify you in writing within three days — exclusive of Saturdays, Sundays, and legal holidays — and cite the legal basis for withholding it (La. R.S. 44:32(D)).
The three-day clock is the practical benchmark. The related five-day clock is the enforcement trigger: under La. R.S. 44:35(A), if five days pass (again excluding weekends and holidays) without a written determination or a reasonable time estimate, you are treated as having been denied and can go to court.
You cannot be charged solely for inspecting or reviewing records during regular business hours (La. R.S. 44:32(C)). Fees apply to copies, and they must be reasonable; state agencies follow a uniform fee schedule set by the commissioner of administration. If you ask to examine records outside regular office hours, you can be required to pay the custodian's reasonable overtime in advance. To keep costs down, ask for records in electronic form.
The right of access is broad, but not unlimited. All exemptions must be grounded in Title 44 or the Constitution (La. R.S. 44:4.1), and courts construe them narrowly. Major categories include:
When a record mixes exempt and non-exempt material, the custodian must redact the exempt part and hand over the rest.
Agencies that would rather not produce records tend to reach for a few familiar moves: claiming no responsive records exist, invoking an exemption without citing the specific statute, giving an open-ended \"we're working on it\" with no time estimate, or quoting an unreasonably high fee. The law answers most of these. A withholding must cite a specific legal basis in writing. A delay must be accompanied by a reasonable estimate of the time required. A no-records response should be tested against what you know the agency does.
If you are denied — outright, or by silence past the deadline — you can file for a writ of mandamus in the district court for the parish where the custodian's office sits (La. R.S. 44:35). The court can order the records produced.
The teeth are in the penalty provisions. Under La. R.S. 44:35(E)(1), if the court finds the custodian arbitrarily or capriciously withheld a record, or unreasonably failed to respond, it may award actual damages and \"civil penalties not to exceed one hundred dollars per day, exclusive of Saturdays, Sundays, and legal public holidays, for each such day of such failure to give notification,\" along with attorney fees and costs. Importantly, no individual is personally liable for these penalties — the public body pays.
Every future records post The Kingfish Project publishes links back to this guide, because the process is the point: the law works when people use it.
", "date_published": "2026-07-16T21:49:47.000Z", "date_modified": "2026-07-17T22:26:19.000Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Bentley Hensel", "url": "https://kingfish.la/author/bentley" } ], "tags": [ "Explainers" ], "image": "https://media.kingfish.la/2026/07/public-records-law.png", "_license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" }, { "id": "https://kingfish.la/what-is-the-rapides-parish-police-jury/", "url": "https://kingfish.la/what-is-the-rapides-parish-police-jury/", "title": "What is the Rapides Parish Police Jury?", "summary": "The Rapides Parish Police Jury is a nine-member elected board that serves as both the legislative and executive branches of government for Rapides Parish. It runs parish roads, drainage, and fire districts, but duties handled by other elected or appointed boards.", "content_html": "Rapides Parish sits in the geographic center of Louisiana, about 1,362 square miles with a population of 130,023 as of the 2020 census. Its parish government is a police jury — one of the parishes that kept the traditional form rather than adopting a home rule charter. Here is how it is built and what it actually controls. Rppj
The Rapides Parish Police Jury has nine members, called jurors, each elected from a single-member district lettered A through I. They serve four-year terms, and each year they elect one of their own as president.
As of 2026, the jurors are:
The president presides over meetings and serves as head of the parish government.
The jury meets at the Rapides Parish Courthouse, 701 Murray Street, Suite 201, second floor, in the Police Jury Meeting Room in Alexandria. It generally holds a committee meeting on the first Monday of the month and its regular monthly meeting on the second Monday, though dates shift around holidays. Meetings are supposed to be streamed live on the jury's YouTube channel, but their channel has no content.
This is the part residents most often get wrong. The police jury is only one piece of parish government. Louisiana deliberately fragments local power among several independently elected officials, and the jury does not command them.
The police jury runs: parish roads and bridges through its Public Works department; drainage; the parish treasury and budget; sales and use tax collection for the parish and many municipalities (Alexandria collects its own); fire protection districts; Cotile Lake recreation; the courthouse and jail buildings; and workforce and economic development programs. It appoints members to boards and commissions, including seats on the England Authority.
The police jury does not run:
The jury funds facilities and shares some administrative costs for several of these offices, which is why they appear in parish audits as \"component units,\" but it does not direct how they do their jobs.
The Rapides Parish Police Jury adopts an annual appropriated budget on a calendar-year basis and is audited annually. Its General Fund reported about $11.2 million in revenue and $7.8 million in expenses in its most recent audit, with a fund balance of about $8.4 million — roughly $7.7 million of it unrestricted. Across all of its governmental funds, the parish reported about $94.5 million restricted for statutory or bonded-debt purposes. Its Parish Treasurer runs a central accounting, budgeting, and purchasing system.
The jury's meetings are public. Under the Open Meetings Law, the agenda is posted at least 24 hours ahead on the meeting room door and on the jury's website. The public may comment before the jury votes on an action item, but the jury may adopt reasonable rules for how public comment works.
Records are public under La. R.S. 44:1 et seq. and can be requested from the parish custodian. The jury's administrative office is at 701 Murray Street, Suite 201, Alexandria; the mailing address is P.O. Box 1150, Alexandria, LA 71309; the phone is (318) 473-6660.
Accountability box: The Rapides Parish Police Jury
Everywhere else in America, the level of government between the city and the state is a county. Louisiana has parishes, and in most of them the governing body is a police jury. The name throws people off, so start there.
Louisiana was a French and then a Spanish colony, both officially Roman Catholic, and local administration was organized around church parishes — the ecclesiastical districts a priest could reasonably cover. When the United States bought Louisiana in 1803, those parish boundaries were already the map people used.
The territorial legislature divided the Territory of Orleans into 12 counties in 1805, but the counties never fit the way people actually lived, and in 1807, the legislature reorganized the territory into 19 parishes based on the old church boundaries. The name stuck. Louisiana and Alaska are the only two states that do not call their primary divisions counties.
\"Police\" is the other piece that confuses modern readers. It does not mean law enforcement. It comes from the French and Spanish sense of \"police\" as the general administration of a community — roads, order, public works, the ordinary machinery of local government. A \"jury of police\" was a body of citizens charged with running local affairs. The term was formally attached to Louisiana's parish governing bodies in 1811, shortly before statehood, when the jurors became elective rather than appointed.
The origin has a dark side worth stating plainly: among the earliest duties assigned to these bodies was the regulation of slavery, including the capture of people who escaped it. The institution has changed beyond recognition, but honest history includes where it started.
A police jury is unusual in American government because it holds both legislative and executive power. There is no separate elected parish executive. The jurors pass the ordinances, adopt the budget, and run the departments that carry them out. As Dr. Henry Sirgo, a McNeese State University political science professor, told KPLC: \"It's actually more like the British Parliament than it is like the state government or the U.S. government in that we don't have separation of powers.\"
In practice, a police jury's core work is the unglamorous infrastructure of parish life, particularly in the unincorporated areas outside city limits:
The Police Jury Association of Louisiana states that police juries \"exercise over fifty different functions and powers, including road and bridge construction and maintenance, drainage, sewerage, solid waste disposal, fire protection, recreations and parks.\" Modern police juries hold broad authority to act, as long as the action is legal and, where required, approved by the parish's voters.
Not every parish uses a police jury. The 1974 Louisiana Constitution (Article VI) lets a parish write and adopt its own \"home rule charter\" — essentially a local constitution — that can replace the police jury with a different structure. The common alternatives are a council-president system (a separately elected legislative council and parish president), a council-manager system (an elected council that hires a professional manager), and consolidated city-parish government.
According to the Police Jury Association of Louisiana, \"38 of state's 64 parishes operate under the Police Jury form of government. The other 26 parishes operate under a form of home rule charter.\" (Some other sources, including Wikipedia and 64 Parishes, put the split at 41 and 23; the discrepancy appears to turn on how transitional or hybrid parishes are counted.) In general, rural parishes have kept the police jury, and parishes with large cities or fast-growing suburbs have tended to switch — though several parishes with sizable cities, including Rapides (Alexandria), still use it. Wikipedia
Parishes are divided into districts (historically called wards), and each district elects one juror. Board size varies with population, from a handful of members in small rural parishes to fifteen or more in large ones. Jurors serve four-year terms. The jurors elect one of their own as president to preside over meetings and serve as head of parish government.
Louisiana runs these races, like most of its elections, on the open-primary system in odd-numbered years, meaning any voter can vote for any candidate regardless of party.
Accountability box: The police jury
Drive west out of Alexandria and you reach a 4,000-acre spread of runway, warehouse, golf course, and rental housing that most people call England Airpark. The entity that owns and runs it is not the city, the parish, or the airport authority in the way most people picture one. It is the England Economic and Industrial Development District, known locally as the England Authority, and it is one of the most powerful units of government in central Louisiana that voters never elect.
Here is what it is, who controls it, and what it can do.
England Air Force Base closed on December 15, 1992, after the 1991 Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) round put it on the list. The 23d Fighter Wing and its A-10s left for Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina, and central Louisiana faced the loss of its largest employer.
The Louisiana Legislature created the England Economic and Industrial Development District in 1991 to catch what the Air Force left behind. The district's job was to accept title to the base property from the federal government and convert the base into a working civilian economy. The Air Force transferred 2,447 acres to the district by 1995. Today the site includes Alexandria International Airport (AEX), more than a million square feet of occupied commercial and industrial space, the Oakwing Golf Course, and several hundred homes.
The enabling statute is La. R.S. 33:130.351 et seq. The statute creates \"a body politic and corporate of the state which shall exist in perpetuity.\" The district is a political subdivision of the state under Article VI of the Louisiana Constitution, and its territory is all of Rapides Parish.
That \"political subdivision\" status matters. It means the England Authority is not a private company and not a city department. It is its own unit of government, with governmental powers, run by a board that answers to the officials who appoint it rather than to voters directly.
The district is governed by a board of commissioners of ten members. Not one is elected by the public. Under the statute, the seats are filled this way:
Commissioners serve four-year terms and serve without compensation. The board elects its own officers — a chairman, a vice-chairman, and a secretary-treasurer — from among its members. It hires an executive director to run day-to-day operations.
The structure is worth sitting with. A board with the power to tax and to issue public debt is assembled entirely by appointment, with the two largest blocs coming from the parish police jury and the Alexandria mayor's office. The people who hold those seats are accountable to the elected officials who put them there, and only indirectly to the public.
The powers are broad. Under its enabling statutes, the England Authority can:
The district's own auditors summarize it plainly: it \"has power similar to a home rule community,\" can \"issue revenue bonds and general obligation bonds,\" \"has the power of eminent domain and can levy taxes,\" and can \"create sub-districts throughout the parish to accommodate economic development projects.\" Englandairpark
The England Authority is a large operation. For the fiscal year ended June 30, 2024, its audited financial statements report operating revenues of $13,388,723 — most of it lease revenue — and operating expenses of $21,545,166, including $7.7 million in depreciation. Its total net position was $226,370,760, the vast majority of it tied up in capital assets: land, buildings, runways, and infrastructure. The district also received $9,020,150 in federal and state capital grants that year, largely for airport projects. state + 2
Revenue comes from commercial and residential leases, airport landing and facility fees, passenger facility charges, fuel flowage fees, golf course operations at Oakwing, and grants. The independent auditor, Kolder, Slaven & Company, issued an unmodified (\"clean\") opinion for the year ended June 30, 2024, and reported no audit findings. state
The executive director's compensation is a public record. For the year ended June 30, 2024, the executive director received a salary of $199,500 and total compensation and benefits of $260,726. state
As a political subdivision, the England Authority is a \"public body\" under Louisiana's Open Meetings Law (La. R.S. 42:11 et seq.). It must post written notice and an agenda for its meetings at least 24 hours in advance, exclusive of weekends and holidays, and it must keep written minutes. Louisiana
Its records are public under the Louisiana Public Records Law (La. R.S. 44:1 et seq.). Any person of the age of majority can request them. The custodian is the head of the public body or a designated representative; requests can be directed to the district's office at 1611 Arnold Drive, Alexandria, LA 71303, (318) 427-6406. Shreve-lib + 2
Accountability box: The England Authority