Acadiana’s community-minded residents will gather Thursday, April 1, at the City Club at River Ranch for insight on the best practices for urban land use from keynote speaker Carol Coletta, president and CEO of CEOs for Cities and host/producer of the nationally syndicated public radio show Smart City. Coletta’s address, part of The Independent Weekly Lecture Series, comes at a critical time for Lafayette Parish as it embarks on its first-ever comprehensive land use plan.
Coletta is one of the world’s top experts on urban issues. “We’ve had Carol on our ‘wish list’ for many years,” says Ind Co-Publisher Cherry Fisher May. “Her formula is simple: courage plus creativity and connectivity yields success. Lafayette’s strength is creativity, and we are making progress on connectivity. As we develop a blueprint for growth, the courage part may be the toughest for us.”
Coletta’s impressive résumé begins in Memphis, where she was president of the urban design consulting firm Coletta & Company. She later served as executive director of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, a partnership of the National Endowment for the Arts, the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the American Architectural Foundation. Additionally, she is a former Knight Fellow in Community Building at the University of Miami School of Architecture, received the Lambda Alpha International 2009 International Journalism Award, was named one of the world’s 50 most important urban experts by a leading European think tank and was recognized last year as one of the top 50 urban thinkers of all time by readers of PLANetizen.com.
Presenting sponsor for the lecture series is IberiaBank. The luncheon begins at 11:45 a.m. Tickets are $40 per person or $350 for a table of eight. Additional information, including a ticket order form, is available online at www.theind.com, or contact Cherry Fisher May at
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or (337) 769-8603 by phone.
There will soon be a whole lot of shakin’ going on at Benny’s Sportshack Supplement Depot, a new concept by Opelousas native Benny Nele. Located at 2002 Johnston St., the supplement shop, smoothie bar and café, featuring hot off the press paninis and wraps, plans to open in late May.
Philip deMahy Sr., a once respected New Iberia ad exec, was sentenced May 2 to spend the next two years (he faced up to 100 years) in a state penitentiary after state and federal investigators found dozens of images depicting children engaged in lewd sexual acts on his personal computer.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
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