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/comment-on-the-sunstripe-permit/", "url": "https://kingfish.la/comment-on-the-sunstripe-permit/", "title": "Comment on the Sunstripe Solar permit before the August 2 deadline", "summary": "The only public comment window on the 10,356-acre Sunstripe Solar project closes August 2, 2026. Here's the permit number, the address, and how to weigh in.", "content_html": "Right now, there is exactly one public process open on the 10,356-acre Sunstripe Solar project near Hineston — a 16-square-mile buildout on the Rapides–Vernon parish line — and it closes soon. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is taking comments on the project's federal wetlands permit until August 2, 2026. After that, this window is gone. The bigger local moments — the parish-mandated community meeting, the planning commission review, the police jury votes — are all still ahead, but this is the one that's live today.
You don't need to be an expert, and you don't need to oppose the project. By law, the Corps has to consider what you send.
Three ways to comment:
A comment is evidence, not a vote — five hundred identical postcards count as one argument made five hundred times. What carries weight is specific, local, firsthand knowledge tied to the factors the Corps must weigh: flood hazards, water quality, fish and wildlife, and the rest. The road that floods, the well you drink from, the creek the transmission line would cross.
We've written the full playbook in two evergreen guides:
For how this permit fits into the three other approvals the project still needs, see How a solar project gets permitted in Louisiana.
Part of Kingfish's coverage of the Sunstripe Solar project.
Spot an error? Receipts welcome: tips@kingfish.la.
", "date_published": "2026-07-29T16:06:15.000Z", "date_modified": "2026-07-29T16:06:15.000Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Bentley Hensel", "url": "https://kingfish.la/author/bentley" } ], "tags": [ "News", "Series Sunstripe Solar", "Public Notice", "Briefs" ], "image": "https://media.kingfish.la/2026/07/comment-on-the-sunstripe-permit.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/england-airpark-permits/", "url": "https://kingfish.la/england-airpark-permits/", "title": "England Airpark to require protest permits — though no incident prompted it, director says", "summary": "The England Authority's director says no incident prompted its proposed permit rules for protests at the airport — the nation's top deportation-flight hub. A sheriff's office request did; the text posts Wednesday, with a vote in August.", "content_html": "The England Authority is advancing new rules that would require permits for protests and other \"expressive assemblies\" on its property — land that includes England Airpark and Alexandria International Airport (AEX), home to the nation's busiest hub for federal deportation flights.
The proposal grew out of a request from the sheriff's office to clarify some of the Authority's existing ordinances — not from any protest or disturbance, Executive Director Ralph Hennessy told The Kingfish Project in a written response Monday afternoon. \"There haven't been any issues here that prompted the need,\" he wrote.
The Rapides Parish Sheriff's Office provides security at England Airpark under contract with the Authority. Hennessy did not say what the office asked to have clarified or which ordinances were involved.
The Kingfish Project has requested comment from Sheriff Mark Wood's office and will update this story with any response.
Demonstrations connected to airpark property have already occurred. Last August, a group gathered outside AEX to protest the ICE staging facility at the airport, KALB reported, and the Rapides Parish Journal, which first reported the proposal, cited immigration enforcement and data center development as examples of activities that draw crowds.
Hennessy said the full text will be attached to the board's meeting agenda, which the Authority will post Wednesday. The ordinance will be introduced at the board's Thursday, July 23, session and voted on at the August board meeting, he said.
The Admin/Legal Committee reviewed a draft of the ordinance at a noon meeting on July 16. Hennessy said the committee took no vote and made recommendations that will be incorporated before the proposal reaches the board. According to the Journal, the draft provides for content-neutral regulation of demonstrations, protests, rallies, vigils, picketing, and other expressive assemblies on Authority property, sets permit procedures for certain planned demonstrations, and addresses spontaneous ones.
The committee consists of Myron Lawson Jr., chair; Charlie Weems, vice chair; and Steve Mansour. Authority Chairman Oday Lavergne serves as an executive official member. The Kingfish Project put its four questions to the three members and Lavergne as well; Hennessy answered for the Authority within the hour, and the others did not respond individually.
On Monday, The Kingfish Project also filed two public records requests with the Authority by email. The first seeks every draft of the proposed ordinance — including the original electronic files, whose properties and revision histories identify who wrote and edited them — along with communications about the proposal among Authority officials and with outside parties, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the data center developer Applied Digital, and other public bodies, a category that covers any written request from the sheriff's office.
The second seeks the Authority's security incident logs and reports from July 1, 2023, to the present, including every report involving a protest, demonstration, or other assembly — records that would test Hennessy's statement that no incidents prompted the rule. The Kingfish Project will publish both requests in full.
Louisiana's Public Records Law requires a custodian to produce available records immediately, and in all cases to provide a written determination or a time estimate within five business days — silence past that point is a legal denial (La. R.S. 44:32(D), 44:35(A)). For requests filed Monday, that window closes July 27, four days after the board's July 23 session. Wednesday's agenda posting will make the current text public, but it does not address the drafts, communications, or incident records the requests seek.
The England Authority is a political subdivision of the state, and its property is public property. Courts have long allowed governments to impose content-neutral rules on the time, place, and manner of assemblies on public land. They have struck down permit systems that give officials discretion over who may gather, including in Shuttlesworth v. City of Birmingham (1969) and Forsyth County v. Nationalist Movement (1992). Whether the England proposal contains such discretion can be judged once the text posts with Wednesday's agenda.
The proposal arrives amid heightened national attention to Authority property. The Alexandria Staging Facility, a 400-bed ICE detention site operated on the airport tarmac by GEO Group since 2014, has become the country's top hub for deportation flights, and Human Rights First's ICE Flight Monitor counted more than 4,400 immigration enforcement flights in and out of AEX in 2025, the Associated Press reported. In late June, ICE signed a contract for a new 528-bed holding facility for families and children at the former air base, according to the AP; Hennessy confirmed the contract in that reporting. ICE describes the new site as a staging area rather than a detention center.
The board's monthly session is scheduled for Thursday, July 23, with the proposed ordinance due to appear on the agenda that the Authority posts on Wednesday. The Kingfish Project will publish the text and any records produced in response to its requests.
", "date_published": "2026-07-20T23:33:49.000Z", "date_modified": "2026-07-21T02:25:09.000Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Bentley Hensel", "url": "https://kingfish.la/author/bentley" } ], "tags": [ "News", "England Authority", "First Amendment", "Immigration" ], "image": "https://media.kingfish.la/2026/07/eeidd-permits_kingfish-news-piece-1.png", "_license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" }, { "id": "https://kingfish.la/about-sunstripe-solar/", "url": "https://kingfish.la/about-sunstripe-solar/", "title": "The 10,356-acre solar project quietly taking shape near Hineston", "summary": "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 buildout on Rapides/Vernon timberland. No public announcement. The only comment window closes Aug. 2.", "content_html": "A Texas company wants to build one of the largest solar projects in Louisiana history on timberland around Hineston, and the first formal public notice of any kind appeared eleven days ago — in a federal permit filing most people will never see.
The project is called Sunstripe. The developer is Treaty Oak Clean Energy, LLC of Austin, Texas, working through a subsidiary named TO LA Solar 1, LLC. On July 13, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' New Orleans District published a public notice — permit application MVN-2026-00184-WLL — asking for comments on the company's request to build:
That's 10,356 acres in total — about 16 square miles, an area roughly 60 percent the size of the city of Alexandria. The project site is centered at 2307 LA Highway 121 in the Hineston community, in the pine country where Rapides Parish meets Vernon Parish. The notice and its 47 pages of maps and drawings are public. Kingfish found no press release, no news coverage, and no public announcement of the project anywhere before that notice appeared.
The Corps notice covers one narrow question: whether Treaty Oak may disturb federally protected wetlands and streams. Under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act, anyone who wants to fill, clear, or build in \"waters of the United States\" — including forested wetlands — needs a permit from the Corps first.
According to the notice, the solar panels themselves are sited to avoid jurisdictional wetlands entirely. The impacts come from the 9-mile transmission line — what the industry calls a \"gen-tie,\" the private power line that carries electricity from a plant to the grid. Building it would permanently convert 18.5 acres of forested wetlands to lower-growing cover: 8.53 acres of cypress/tupelo swamp, 5.03 acres of bottomland hardwoods, 2.86 acres of pine savanna, and 2.02 acres of pine plantation, plus about a hundredth of an acre of permanent fill where poles go in. The line crosses the upper Calcasieu River. Treaty Oak proposes to offset the damage by purchasing credits from a wetlands mitigation bank — in plain terms, paying for restoration work somewhere else in the watershed.
The Corps' initial wildlife screening found the project \"may affect\" two federally protected species: the Louisiana pinesnake — one of the rarest snakes in North America, native to the longleaf pine woods of west-central Louisiana and East Texas — and the northern long-eared bat. On July 21, the Corps confirmed to Kingfish that it has reached out to the Fish and Wildlife Service for consultation under Section 7 of the Endangered Species Act, and that its preliminary \"may affect\" finding covers the pinesnake, the northern long-eared bat, and critical habitat. The company's own maps show the Phase 2 site sitting against the Kisatchie National Forest boundary, with Cooters Bog — a natural area known for its carnivorous pitcher plants — and mapped pitcher plant habitat flagged at the site's southwestern edge.
Two caveats worth knowing. First, the Corps itself states that the information in the notice was furnished by the applicant and has not been independently verified. Second, there's a geography discrepancy: the notice text says the project is \"within Rapides Parish,\" but the applicant's own engineering drawings are titled \"Rapides and Vernon Parishes,\" and the maps show the parish line running through both solar sites. Kingfish asked the Corps to clarify. On July 21 it answered that the project site does span both Rapides and Vernon parishes, but the areas \"with potential impacts regulated under Section 404 are within Rapides Parish,\" which is why the Corps lists its permitting review under that parish. That resolves which parish governs the federal review — but not which set of local rules applies to Phase 2, a question taken up further down.
Treaty Oak is an independent power producer — a company that builds power plants and sells the electricity — and a portfolio company of Macquarie Asset Management, the giant Australian investment manager, with a reported 17.3-gigawatt development pipeline across the U.S.
Sunstripe would be Treaty Oak's third and by far largest Louisiana project. In October 2025 the company announced power purchase agreements with Meta for the 185-megawatt Beekman project in Morehouse Parish and the 200-megawatt Hollis Creek project in Sabine Parish — deals Meta's energy chief tied directly to powering its AI data center in Richland Parish. Treaty Oak closed roughly $809 million in combined financing and started construction on both in early 2026, targeting operation in late 2027. Dashiell, the high-voltage contractor on those projects, is the same firm whose name appears on Sunstripe's transmission drawings.
\"Our commitment in Louisiana extends well beyond these two projects,\" Treaty Oak CEO Chris Elrod told POWER magazine in November. Sunstripe appears to be what he meant.
The Macquarie connection is where central Louisiana readers should pay attention, because funds managed by Macquarie Asset Management currently sit on three sides of the region's energy map:
Two fairness points. Different Macquarie-managed funds, with different investors, hold these different stakes — a shared manager is not the same thing as a single owner, and the Cleco stake is on its way out the door. And nothing in the public record says who will buy Sunstripe's power, or that it has anything to do with Delta Forge. Treaty Oak's interconnection request predates any public word of the data center by more than two years. Kingfish has asked Treaty Oak, Cleco, Macquarie, and Applied Digital directly.
Two of them have now answered, and both drew a line between themselves and Sunstripe. Applied Digital, in a July 22 statement attributed to Nick Phillips, its executive vice president of external affairs, said \"there is no connection between Applied Digital and the potential solar facility,\" while allowing that \"it's possible that both companies may have had dealings with a common investor at some point in time.\" The company said it has no renewable-energy or power-purchase agreement — including a virtual PPA or renewable-attribute purchase — tied to Cleco's system or to any specific Louisiana generation project, and that it had no role in or awareness of Cleco's transmission or generation planning in the Boyce/Hineston area when it sited Delta Forge. It confirmed Delta Forge is designed for a 430-megawatt peak load and is expected to be served under a \"large-load contract with Cleco.\"
Cleco, for its part, said the Hineston project in the MISO queue \"is not a Cleco project,\" that Cleco \"did not submit the interconnection request,\" and that under federal open-access rules it \"cannot comment on non-Cleco transmission projects.\" Both responses are consistent with the public record as we have it; neither is independently verifiable, and both come from parties with an interest in the answer.
Sunstripe has been in the works far longer than eleven days. Records from MISO — the multi-state grid operator Louisiana belongs to — show project J3479: a 200-megawatt solar project at a point of interconnection called \"Hineston,\" in Rapides Parish, with Cleco Power LLC as the transmission owner. The request was filed in MISO's 2023 study cycle, meaning by that spring. MISO's rules require an applicant to document control of the project land when it applies — so Treaty Oak had Hineston-area acreage locked up by 2023, two years before anyone in parish government voted on a solar ordinance.
The queue entry lists a February 2027 in-service date. That date is not going to happen. MISO's own current schedule shows Sunstripe's study cycle — 23 projects totaling 4,676 megawatts across MISO's southern region — still in the middle of its second study phase, with the interconnection agreements (the contracts that actually let a plant plug in) not projected to be signed until August 2027 at the earliest, a date that slipped by 15 days in the last month alone. Realistically, that puts construction and first power in 2028 or later.
One more detail: 200 megawatts accounts for roughly one of Sunstripe's two phases. The engineering drawings for \"Sunstripe II\" list a facility of about 224 megawatts on its own. Kingfish has not identified a second interconnection request, and the project's total planned capacity has not been disclosed.
The federal wetlands permit is the only public process running right now. It is not the biggest hurdle. There are three layers:
1. The Corps — the Section 404 permit described above, plus a state water quality certification from LDEQ that \"may be required.\" The Corps told Kingfish on July 21 that if LDEQ determines a certification is required for this project, \"this certification must be obtained before USACE can render its permit decision\" — meaning the state agency holds an effective veto over the timing of the federal permit. As of this week, Kingfish could find no LDEQ file opened for the project.
2. The State of Louisiana. Act 279 of 2025 made it illegal to build or operate any solar facility of 75 acres or more without a permit from the state — now the Department of Conservation and Energy. The law also wrote statewide siting standards (setbacks, noise limits, decommissioning security) for large solar farms, applying to projects that start construction after Jan. 1, 2026 — with one big exception, which brings us to:
3. Rapides Parish. On June 9, 2025, the Rapides Parish Police Jury unanimously adopted a Solar Farm Ordinance drafted by the Rapides Area Planning Commission (official minutes). Then on Dec. 8, the jury voted to opt out of the state's siting standards — a move Act 279 allows for parishes with their own ordinances (official minutes). The practical effect: in Rapides Parish, the parish's rules — not the state's — govern where and how Sunstripe can be built. The state permit is still required either way.
The parish ordinance has real teeth. Before construction, a solar developer must:
The ordinance also reserves the jury's right to accept, reject, or modify any industrial tax exemption (ITEP) — Louisiana's program that can wipe out most of a project's property taxes for years — while explicitly leaving the door open to a PILOT, a negotiated payment in lieu of taxes. As of a July 17 search, no ITEP filing for Treaty Oak, TO LA Solar, or any Sunstripe-related entity appears in Louisiana Economic Development's project database for Rapides or Vernon parish.
And Vernon Parish? The maps show Phase 2 crossing the line. Kingfish could not locate a Vernon Parish solar ordinance or Act 279 opt-out as of publication — if none exists, the state's siting standards would govern the Vernon side, meaning one project could be built under two different sets of rules depending on which side of the parish line a panel sits. We've asked the Vernon Parish Police Jury.
As of publication, Kingfish found no record that Treaty Oak has applied for either the parish permit or the state permit. We've asked the planning commission, the state, and the company.
In the spirit of receipts over rhetoric, here is what we don't know: who owns and leased the 10,000-plus acres; who will buy the power; the project's total capacity and price tag; whether Treaty Oak will seek a tax exemption, a PILOT, or neither; whether Delta Forge or any data center figures in the plan; whether the required Vernon Parish rules even exist; and when — or whether — the parish and state applications will be filed.
The Army Corps answered on July 21, and Kingfish has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the complete application file — the permit application, the wetland delineation report, the alternatives analysis, and the compensatory mitigation plan. We will publish the rest of the answers, and the records, as they come.
Any member of the public can comment on the federal permit. The Corps says comments are used to decide whether to issue, modify, condition, or deny the permit, and to determine whether a public hearing is needed.
Every source for this story is public: the Corps public notice and full drawing set; MISO's interconnection queue and study schedule; the Rapides Parish Police Jury minutes of June 9, 2025 and Dec. 8, 2025, archived with agendas at kingfish.la; Act 279 of 2025 and the state's solar permitting guidance; Applied Digital's FY2025 annual report and press releases; and company announcements from Treaty Oak, Macquarie, and Cleco.
We keep our stories honest by updating them in the open and telling you what changed. This is the running log for this piece.
July 22, 2026 — The Corps answered our questions. On July 21, Ricky Boyett, chief of public affairs for the Corps' New Orleans District, responded to the four questions Kingfish filed on July 17. We updated four passages above to reflect his answers. In short:
July 22, 2026 — Applied Digital and Cleco responded. Both distanced themselves from Sunstripe. Applied Digital said \"there is no connection between Applied Digital and the potential solar facility,\" while allowing the two companies \"may have had dealings with a common investor at some point in time,\" and said it holds no power-purchase agreement tied to any specific Louisiana generation project.
Cleco said the Hineston project \"is not a Cleco project,\" that it did not submit the interconnection request, and that federal open-access rules bar it from commenting on non-Cleco transmission. Both statements are folded into \"Who is behind Treaty Oak\" above.
Rapides Area Planning Commission director Matt Johns responded and agreed to discuss the local permitting process by phone; we'll report what we learn. As of this update, Treaty Oak, Macquarie, the Louisiana Department of Conservation and Energy, and the Vernon Parish Police Jury had not responded.
Kingfish contacted every company and agency named in this story with detailed questions. The Army Corps of Engineers responded on July 21; those answers are folded in above and logged in the Updates section. Responses from the other parties will be added as they arrive.
Corrections and tips: tips@kingfish.la.
", "date_published": "2026-07-18T02:05:45.000Z", "date_modified": "2026-07-22T19:17:01.000Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Bentley Hensel", "url": "https://kingfish.la/author/bentley" } ], "tags": [ "News", "Investigations", "Series Sunstripe Solar", "Treaty Oak", "Rapides Parish Police Jury", "Cleco", "Macquarie", "energy", "Records" ], "image": "https://media.kingfish.la/2026/07/sunstripe-hineston-solar.png", "_license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" }, { "id": "https://kingfish.la/the-deduct-box/", "url": "https://kingfish.la/the-deduct-box/", "title": "The Deduct Box", "summary": "Huey kept a locked strongbox at the Roosevelt Hotel, filled with a cut of other people's paychecks. We keep one too. Ours is filled with something the people in power owe you: information.", "content_html": "The Kingfish Project takes a data-centered approach to the news. I've spent a long career as a senior data and DevOps engineer — I know ball when it comes to data — and I built this newsroom the way I build production systems: collect everything, structure everything, connect everything, and let the stories fall out of the records.
The Deduct Box is our answer to a government that would prefer the great people of Louisiana not look too closely. It's an intelligence platform for the public interest: a permanent, searchable, cross-referenced archive of what central Louisiana's public bodies do, say, spend, and sign — built almost entirely on open-source tools, running on hardware we own, stitched together with a tremendous amount of custom code that we'll be opening up ourselves.
Huey P. Long ran his machine out of a strongbox at the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans. Into it went the \"deducts\" — a slice of the paycheck of nearly every state employee who owed a job to the machine. It was crooked as a cypress root, and Huey would have told you to your face that it got done what Louisiana needed done.
Ours runs the inversion. We don't take a dime from anybody. We deduct information from public officials — the disclosures, votes, minutes, contracts, budgets, and filings they owe the people as a condition of the power they asked for — to force the future Louisiana deserves.
When you run for office, accept an appointment, or take a government job, you enter a position of public trust. Nobody drafts you into it. It's a choice, made freely, based on the job or responsibility you went looking for — and transparency is the price printed on the tag.
I know, because I've paid it. When I ran for Congress in 2024, I knew I would lose. I ran to make a point about transparency and openness, and that meant filing a personal financial disclosure. It's all sitting on a federal server for anyone to read: what I earned, what I held, my entire financial life at the start of 2024.
Was that fun? No. Was it necessary — good for the government and for the political system that any voter could see exactly what financial influences sat behind a would-be congressman? Absolutely.
The Deduct Box runs on the same principle. Every record in it exists because somebody chose a public role. This isn't about party, and it isn't personal — the box reads one official's ethics filing exactly the way it reads the next one's. If an official wants that level of privacy back, private life is hiring.
A few of the rooms:
The Library. The document corpus, built on OpenAleph and Elasticsearch: every agenda, minute book, contract, and filing we scrape, request, or receive — OCR'd, entity-extracted, and searchable in one place, with the connections between people, companies, and payments stored as data instead of trapped in PDFs.
The Roosevelt. Object storage (SeaweedFS), where the original files live untouched — named for the hotel where the real box sat.
Round Robin. A graph database mapping who's connected to whom: officials, boards, LLCs, contracts, donors. It's named for the document that fifteen state senators signed in 1929 pledging to acquit Huey before the impeachment evidence was even heard. Loyalty maps decided Louisiana's fate then. They still do.
Win or Lose. The collection engine, named for Huey's oil company: a scheduler and a growing stable of adapters that pull records from public bodies on their own clock, so nothing depends on a human remembering to check a website.
The Advance. A structured record of public meetings across the region — what's on the agenda, when and where, and what actually happened — feeding the meeting coverage on this site so you can show up too.
Pot Likker. The meeting-video pipeline: transcription and speaker attribution, so what an official says on the record in a public meeting becomes searchable text with a name attached. Permanently.
Alice. Our in-house AI — self-hosted, built and maintained on our own hardware. She reads what's in the box so we can ask better questions. Alice is built and maintained by Bentley; she also runs his household and keeps his personal life somewhat in check.
Underneath it all sits the unglamorous plumbing — databases, queues, identity and access infrastructure — that keeps the box locked until something in it is ready to be public.
The box is built to grow. Coming next: cross-referencing officials' financial disclosures against their votes, contracts, and public statements. When a disclosed holding shows up next to an agenda item, that's a question we'll ask out loud. And when the market turns, and a man's votes start drifting toward the money — when he suddenly can't lift his truck quite as high as he'd like — the records will tell us where to start asking.
Also on the road: screening vendors, contractors, and counterparties against sanctions and politically-exposed-persons watchlists; graph analysis that can walk the path from a campaign donation to a contract award and show its work; and the Sound Truck — a public intake app for tips, photos, and documents, joining the channels we already run (email, Signal, SecureDrop, and the web form). Huey drove his sound truck to the people. We're parking ours where you can reach it.
We spend our days demanding transparency from public bodies, so here's ours: every service in the Deduct Box reports its status publicly, live, at status.deduct.kingfish.la. If the box goes dark, you'll see it the same moment we do.
Until Louisiana's public officials truly represent the people — and are truly open to them — the Kingfish Project will keep expanding and sharpening what the Deduct Box collects, connects, and can see. They chose the office. We choose to watch.
Every record a king.
", "date_published": "2026-07-17T18:43:06.000Z", "date_modified": "2026-07-17T18:43:06.000Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Bentley Hensel", "url": "https://kingfish.la/author/bentley" } ], "tags": [ "About Us" ], "image": "https://media.kingfish.la/2026/07/the_deduct_box.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/how-to-read-the-kingfish-project/", "url": "https://kingfish.la/how-to-read-the-kingfish-project/", "title": "How to read The Kingfish Project", "summary": "The Kingfish Project publishes six kinds of pages — Investigations, Records, Meetings, Explainers, Briefs, and Documents — built on one rule: every claim links to a document you can check yourself. ", "content_html": "The Kingfish Project is an accountability journalism newsroom covering central Louisiana. The name is Huey Long turned inside-out: Long earned the nickname \"the Kingfish\" by paying ferociously close attention to Louisiana power and bending it to his will. This outlet pays the same close attention and points the light the other way — at the institutions, not from them. The founding manifesto is titled \"Every Man a King.\"
This page explains how the site is built and how to use it, so you can find what you need and check the work yourself.
Everything here runs on a single principle: claims link to documents. If we say a board voted a certain way, spent a certain amount, or made a certain promise, the sentence carries a link to the record that proves it. Requests are tracked publicly. Meetings get permanent pages that we keep updating. And you can verify the underlying documents yourself. You should not have to take our word for anything — that is the whole idea.
Investigations are the long-form accountability reporting, organized as series or cases rather than one-off articles. An investigation is a hub: a running body of work on a single subject that grows as we learn more, with the individual stories, records, and documents that feed it linked in one place.
Records are the heart of the operation. Every public records request we file gets its own living page — one page per request — tracked in the open. Each carries a status badge so you can see exactly where it stands: pending, partial, fulfilled, denied, appealed. As an agency responds, we update the page. You can watch a request move through the system in real time, including when it stalls. A denied request is not a dead end; it is part of the record.
Meetings get one living page per public meeting. Before the meeting, the page holds the agenda. After, it holds the video, a transcript, and a plain-language summary of what happened. Because it is one canonical page that updates, you always have a single place to go for a given meeting rather than chasing scattered notices.
Explainers are evergreen, plain-language guides to the institutions of central Louisiana — what an entity is, who controls it, and what powers it holds. The pieces you may have read on the England Authority, the police jury system, and the public records law are explainers. They are meant to stay useful and to be linked from news coverage that assumes you already know the basics.
Briefs are short quick hits between the big stories — a single development, a document worth flagging, a heads-up on something coming. They include a weekly Records Desk roundup of what we filed, what came back, and what changed.
Documents are the primary sources themselves: the PDFs behind the reporting. Each is cryptographically signed and carries a verification page, so you can confirm that a document is authentic and has not been altered since we published it. If a file's signature checks out, you know you are looking at exactly what we published, byte for byte.
Most news asks you to trust the reporter. This outlet is built so you do not have to. When a request is tracked in the open, you can see whether an agency is cooperating or stonewalling. When a meeting has a canonical page, the record does not disappear when the livestream ends. When a document is signed, it cannot be quietly swapped later. And when every claim links to its source, the reporting is checkable line by line.
That is the standard central Louisiana power should be held to, and it is the standard we hold ourselves to. Every man a king.
", "date_published": "2026-07-16T21:49:41.000Z", "date_modified": "2026-07-17T22:25:06.000Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Bentley Hensel", "url": "https://kingfish.la/author/bentley" } ], "tags": [ "About Us" ], "image": "https://media.kingfish.la/2026/07/how-to-read-kingfish.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
Huey Long gave Louisiana its paved roads, its free schoolbooks, its charity hospitals, and a capitol tall enough to see the future from. He also gave it a lesson the state has never quite unlearned: that a man who promises to deliver for the forgotten can ask, in return, that you not look too hard at how he does it.
They called him the Kingfish. He delivered. And he built the machine that delivered in the part of the room the light didn't reach.
We took his name on purpose — not to praise the machine, but to turn his own talent back on him. Long understood Louisiana power better than anyone before or since: where it pools, who it answers to, how it moves a deal through a back room before the public has finished reading the headline. The Kingfish Project means to pay that same close attention to Louisiana power. The difference is the direction we point the light.
Newspapers up north like to say democracy dies in darkness. Down here we should know it better than anyone, because down here the darkness is a feature. It is warm, and familiar, and it has paid for a lot of bridges.
This spring, the Kingfish's deal got offered again, almost word for word.
A long-neglected stretch of the state — the \"hole in the donut,\" the part that watches investment land everywhere but here — was promised prosperity. Jobs. Tax base. A seat, finally, at the table. The promise came from a governor who told a poor region it had \"lived in abject poverty because of missed economic opportunities,\" and that this time, by will and perseverance, the state would \"deliver for them.\" He waved off the doubters in the same breath: there's \"misinformation\" out there, he said. Trust us.
If that cadence sounds familiar, it should. It is the oldest sales pitch in Louisiana politics, and it works because it is built on something real. The neglect is real. The frustration is real. The hunger for one project, just one, to break the cycle — that is as real as anything in Central Louisiana, and the people who feel it are not fools or cranks. Many of them are our neighbors, and they are right that doing nothing has a cost.
So nothing here is a rebuttal of anyone who wants this region to win. We want it too. This is the part of the conversation that keeps getting left out — not because anyone is lying, but because the facts that would complete it are locked in a drawer.
Every big deal in Louisiana arrives wrapped in reassurances. The water use is minimal. The ratepayers are protected. The company pays its own way. Maybe all of it is true. But notice that nearly every one of those reassurances is a claim made by the people who profit from the deal — and notice how much of the paper that would let you check the claim is the paper you are not allowed to read. Electric service agreements that decide who pays when the bill comes due. Contracts sealed by nondisclosure agreement. Financial structures built, by design, to be hard to follow.
You cannot right-size a concern you are not allowed to measure. That is the whole trick, and it is older than any of us. It is not that the answers are bad. It is that the questions are sealed, and then we are scolded for asking them.
In the weeks ahead we will take these promises one at a time — the projects, the permits, the power bills — and lay the documents next to the talking points so you can do the measuring yourself. That is the work. This is just the reason for it.
Louisiana has, on paper, one of the strongest guarantees of open government in the country. Our state constitution gives every citizen the right to examine public documents — \"except in cases established by law.\" The whole tragedy of the state is hiding in that last clause. The legislature has spent fifty years establishing exceptions, the executive branch claims privilege by reflex, and enforcement means hiring a lawyer and waiting out a public body that knows delay is free. The right is real. The access is theater.
This is not abstract, and it is not an accident that Louisiana wears the reputation it does. We are the state that elected Edwin Edwards four times and then sent him to federal prison; the state whose corruption is a punchline everywhere but here, where it is a way of life. Corruption is not a Louisiana character flaw. It is a Louisiana operating condition, and the condition it requires is darkness. Sunlight is the cheapest anti-corruption tool ever invented — cheaper than an inspector general, cheaper than a special prosecutor, cheaper than a single one of the power plants we are about to build for these deals. States that make their records genuinely easy to get leave less room for the back-room arrangement, because the back room has a window. We left ours bricked over and called it tradition.
We are here to pry the records loose and put them where you can read them. Not to be against progress — to insist that progress survive daylight, the way a good deal can and a bad one can't. When an agency blows a statutory deadline, we will say so. When a contract that shapes your power bill is hidden behind an NDA, we will go get it. When the numbers behind a press release don't add up, we will show the arithmetic.
Huey Long promised every man a king. He meant a benefactor who would take care of you so you wouldn't have to mind the details.
We mean it the other way. Every man a king means every citizen sovereign enough to read the books, check the math, and decide for himself — no benefactor required, no trust extended on faith. The crown is the public record. We just intend to hand it back.
Welcome to The Kingfish Project. Bring a flashlight.
", "date_published": "2026-07-07T20:32:00.000Z", "date_modified": "2026-07-18T02:06:59.000Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Bentley Hensel", "url": "https://kingfish.la/author/bentley" } ], "tags": [ "About Us" ], "image": "https://media.kingfish.la/2026/07/9d65499b-2857-40a8-a086-2a4ccdfdfb5b.png", "_license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" } ] }