ABBEVILLE — The Acadiana Regional Juvenile Justice District’s goal is to build a facility to house incarcerated juveniles from nine parishes, including Vermilion Parish.
However, Vermilion Parish’s police jury recently decided to vote to opt out of the district, sending a removal bill to the Louisiana legislature.
Chad Vallo, the police jury’s president, says the jury decided to opt out due to financial reasons. He points to concerns about how much it will cost Vermilion Parish residents to construct the facility and maintain it.
He says, "How do you justify $10 million a year and then another $3 million a year after that?"
The facility would be paid for by the residents of the parishes included in the district through a sales tax. Vermilion Parish residents would pay the amount specified by Vallo. Their portion would be used to house 13 juveniles.
“Residents would be stuck with paying this tax even if they were unanimously against it,” Vallo said.
Currently, juveniles convicted of crimes in Vermilion Parish are sent to a detention center in Jackson Parish, and they have four beds available for Vermilion Parish juveniles.
The police jury’s removal from the district will not be official until the Louisiana Legislature votes to approve it on June 1, 2026.
If the state legislature passes the bill that allows Vermilion Parish to be removed from the district on June 1, residents will still be able to vote for the sales tax on June 29, but their vote will no longer count.
Kaplan’s City Judge, F. Stanton Hardee III, said “Let the people vote. There’s nothing more democratic than letting the people vote. Let the people vote for or against the tax.”
He said that juveniles in the center “would learn job skills and they would work to get their high school diploma, which is something positive that they do not have right now.”
Richard Putnam, III, Abbeville’s City Judge, said, “My personal priority would be to take some action and to try to stop what we’ve got going on in the streets with juveniles.”
He said he wants them to receive an education during their incarceration. “We stick them in a detention center without teaching them anything, and we’re teaching them how to be prisoners,” said Judge Putnam.
Vallo said the police jury discussed other options for juveniles.
“Maybe there could be something we could add there or even something in the City of Abbeville that we could possibly use for that,” he said.
