1st Circuit hears EBR board fights

• By JEREMY HARPER
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: May 1, 2008 - Page: 1B - UPDATED: 12:20 a.m.

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Attorneys for the Central and East Baton Rouge Parish school systems met at a Louisiana appellate court Wednesday to argue two lawsuits involving millions in disputed taxes.

In the larger of the two suits, the breakaway Central system is asking the 1st Circuit Court of Appeal to reverse a lower state court’s ruling that the parish system does not owe the Central system more than $20 million in tax revenue, school buses and property.

District Court Judge Wilson Fields had ruled Central is not entitled to the money because it voluntarily left the parish system.

At the heart of the dispute is a facilities improvement tax approved by voters in 2003. The tax proposition detailed seven schools to be built with the funds, including a new middle school in Central.

But East Baton Rouge Parish school officials halted the middle school project after the Legislature passed a bill allowing voters to create a new school district in Central.

Sheri Morris, an attorney for the Central system, told a three-judge appellate panel the tax proposition created a trust between the school system and voters to build the facilities. That trust could not be altered without another vote of the people, she said.

Jennifer Thomas, an attorney for the parish system, said the proposition gave the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board discretion to alter the projects in the case of unforeseen circumstances.

Morris disagreed, saying the “discretion was not so broad that it allowed elimination of an entire project.”

Serving on the 1st Circuit panel reviewing the case are judges Jefferson Hughes, Vanessa Whipple and Edward “Jimmy” Guidry.

The panel took the case under advisement, but not before Guidry pointedly questioned attorneys on both sides.

Guidry asked Thomas why the parish system removed equipment from the schools in Central before ownership of the buildings was transferred to the new system.

Thomas said the equipment in question was removed for legitimate reasons and represented only a fraction of the total property in the buildings. Some of it was returned, she said.

Guidry asked Morris how the parish school system could give the Central system millions of dollars without violating the state’s constitutional prohibition against donating public property.