Cooper has plan to fund St. Tammany needs without new taxes

St. Tammany Parish is facing a dilemma that other parts of the state have been dealing with: the parish needs money to continue investigating in infrastructure as the area grows, but residents don't want new or higher taxes.

Now, St. Tammany Parish President Mike Cooper is looking for ways to work around the anti-tax sentiment.

"We're going to ask the public to rededicate an existing sales tax without raising sales taxes and providing more services," Cooper told WWL's Tommy Tucker.

According to Cooper, the parish is required by state law to fund the sheriff's office, the parish jail, the district attorney's office, and district court judges' salaries. In 2018, voters refused to renew a tax that funded those agencies. That's why Cooper wants voters to divert money from an existing tax to cover those costs and the costs of road and bridge projects.

"It is a win-win situation to where we can fund our obligations without asking the public to pay more taxes, and that's what they've been asking us to do," Cooper said. "We're finding a way to rededicate an existing sales tax at the same level while continuing to provide for road, bridge, and drainage infrastructure and pay for the state-mandated, unfunded liabilities that we have with these state agencies."

Cooper told WWL's Tommy Tucker that this is another way the parish government can prove that it's using the citizens' tax dollars responsibly.

"They want us to use what we have coming in to fund all of our needs," Cooper said. "We are efficiently using our funding to manage parish government, but these are agencies outside of parish government that we need to fund, and we want to be able to do that."

Cooper says if the tax rededication is put on the ballot, voters will be asked to renew the tax and to rededicate its revenues to the state mandates and infrastructure needs the parish wants to fund.