1. Mandeville Mayor Eddie Price seemed to be the center of attention for most of the 2008 year. It all started when word of an investigation surrounding Mandeville quickly spread. When the Louisiana Legislative Auditor’s report was released in August, the Mandeville hype picked up steam as the report alleged thousands of taxpayer dollars were misused by Price and his staff during supposed out of state and even out of country business outings. The uproar escalated further when several weeks later it was released that Price was stopped on the Causeway for driving his city-issued SUV through a tollgate. The Causeway police officers involved in the stop and its aftermath, including the police chief, lost their jobs for giving Price preferential treatment by letting him go without being issued a citation or sobriety test. Soon after, another incident where Mandeville police officers were involved surfaced alleging Price was again driving while apparently intoxicated through the city several years ago.
State and federal officials quickly took an interest in the dealings, and their investigations are still ongoing. All of the hype culminated when several Mandeville residents began an effort to recall the mayor from office. Those efforts are also ongoing.
  
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It also stated $2,300 was spent on gifts for Price.
In early December, Buell announced his retirement which will take affect Jan. 1. Federal and state investigations are also under way into the Mandeville Police Department
3. Outrage boiled in St. Tammany Parish this fall when property assessments surged — some as high as 160 percent — and doubled, even tripled, property taxes virtually overnight.
But one woman, Pamela Cryer from in Old Mandeville, even claimed a much higher note: her taxes surged 700 percent from $453 a year to $3,500 before they were reversed by Assessor Patricia Schwartz Core’s office.
Like Cryer, the new property values, based on fair market value six months prior and six months after Jan. 1, 2007, sent droves of concerned residents to file appeals. Meanwhile the backlash grew so loud — the largest in recent memory — the state Tax Commission sent a time of 12 inspectors, five times its normal manpower, to investigate.
What it found vindicated Core: The property values were actually under assessed by a percentage point or two, said Charles Abels, Commission Administrator. Certification of the rolls however, won’t be complete until next week, meaning bills won’t arrive until late mid to January.
4. Children and grownups alike frolicked in several inches of snow this December as a record amount — at least 5 inches — blanketed St. Tammany in what became a once in a lifetime event for many.
During the past 40 years, snow has peppered St. Tammany a handful of times, including once in 2004 on Christmas Day. But nothing compared to the Friday, Dec. 11, storm of 2008 that severed power to at least 5,000 homes, closed schools and businesses and dominated news talks shows and television stations.
“This is just so uncommon,” Sheriff Jack Strain said at the time. “In my 42 years, I’ve seen four measurable snow events and this by far exceeds them all. It truly looked like a postcard from the north.”
In Folsom, where the state’s largest co-share of nursery crops are harvested, many farmers took a beating. LSU AgCenter estimated statewide the industry lost $5 million to $10 million, more damage than from hurricanes Gustav and Ike combined.
5. The arrests of a janitor in March on charges of raping students at the Abney Elementary School in Slidell sent shock waves through the parish.
Dino Schwertz, 41, of Slidell faces 13 charges that include nine counts of aggravated rape and four counts of indecent behavior with a juvenile.
According to Slidell police officials, one 10-year-old student told his mother that another student raped him in the school bathroom. However, after questioning, both students accused Schwertz of raping each of them three times each back in September 2007.
After the March 8 arrest of Schwertz was made public, an 8-year-old and and an 11-year-old came forward with sexual abuse complaints against Schwertz. Then on May 22, three more students, two boys and a girl, came to Slidell police headquarters alleging the former janitor had molested and raped them.
At the time of the alleged attacks, Schwertz was working as a part-time janitor at Abney. He was later given a full-time position at Northshore High School, where he was arrested.
According to police and St. Tammany School Board Superintendent Gayle Sloan, a background check on Schwertz had not turned up any past sex crimes. However, he had been arrested for passing bad checks and for violating a restraining order several years back.
Schwertz was denied bail and is still sitting in the St. Tammany Parish Jail waiting for his trial.
5. The story of an 11-foot alligator attacking an 11-year-old Slidell boy captured the parish’s attention in July.
The boy, Devin Funck, was swimming with friends at Crystal Lake located behind the Kingspoint subdivision in east Slidell when the alligator attacked. Funck managed to beat on the alligator’s nose, but not before the reptile took off the boy’s arm at the shoulder.
Devin managed to get back to shore and would have bled to death if not for the quick feet of several St. Tammany Sheriff deputies, who carried the boy for almost a mile along the top of a narrow levee to a waiting ambulance.
It took officials another hour to find the alligator, known as Big Ben to residents around the lake. Deputies and U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials managed to kill the huge reptile, recover Devin’s arm and take it to Ocshner Hospital in New Orleans. However, due to the extensive damage to the arm, it could not be reattached.
But Devin Funck turned out to be one tough kid. He was out of the hospital several months after the attack, playing video games.
Residents of St. Tammany Parish showed their concern for Devin by holding fundraisers to raise the money for an expensive state-of-the-art prosthetic arm. Despite his handicap, Devin is back in school, waiting for his new arm, and just being a normal child.
7. Most St. Tammany residents were remembering the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in their vehicles, heading out of town as Hurricane Gustav made its way toward the state’s southeast coast. On Sept. 1 the storm made landfall, sending a surge of water across Lake Pontchartrain and into the lower portions of the parish, flooding hundreds of homes. Gustav’s winds were minimal compared to Katrina, but power was lost to more than 50,000 residents.
It wasn’t but a week later when another strong hurricane, Ike, skirted Louisiana’s southern shores sending more water into the lower portions of the parish re-flooding areas like Carr Drive in Slidell and the Mandeville Lakefront. The bout of storms also engorged rivers throughout the parish. Damage estimates from the two storms are still pending. Parish cleanup efforts are still under way, but most of the debris has been cleaned up.
8. Local residents called foul in June when state lawmakers, including six of nine in St. Tammany Parish, approved their own 120 percent pay raise, their first raise in 28 years.
The pay raise from about $17,000 to $37,500 would have made Louisiana legislators the highest paid in the South and the 14th highest paid in the country, according to data from the National Conference of State Legislatures. The bill gained final approval in the House and Senate by slim margins.
Those who voted in favor included State Reps. Greg Cromer of Slidell, Tim Burns of Mandeville, John Schroder of Covington, Scott Simon of Abita Springs and Sens. A.G. Crowe of Slidell and Ben Nevers of Bogalusa. Meanwhile Sens. Jack Donahue of Mandeville and Julie Quinn of Metairie voted no, while Rep. Kevin Pearson abstained.
After an amended version went back to the Senate from the House, Crowe voted against the pay raise.
Once the bill passed, Crowe and Donahue refused the raise while Nevers and Quinn accepted. On the House side, Pearson and Schroder refused the raise, and Cromer, Burns and Simon accepted.
However, it was all for naught. Gov. Bobby Jindal, who first said he would not veto or interfere with a raise, agreed with voters and eventually vetoed the measure.
“I clearly made a mistake by telling the Legislature that I would allow them to handle their own affairs,” Jindal said. “As with all mistakes, you can either correct them or compound them. I am choosing to correct my mistake now.”
9. The 2008 election was historic on several fronts, the least not being the election of Democrat Sen. Barack Obama as the first African-American President in U.S. history.
But St. Tammany Parish bucked the national trend to set its own historical precedents.
Obama won nationally, but in Louisiana and St. Tammany Parish specifically, Sen. John McCain garnered the most votes. Even though Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Democrat, won re-election to the U.S. Senate, she lost the vote count in St. Tammany Parish to State Treasurer and Republican John Kennedy. In the parish, Kennedy got double the number of votes won by Landrieu.
The area also handily re-elected freshman Republican Congressman Steve Scalise over Democrat Jim Harlan. Scalise got 68 percent of the vote compared to Harlan’s 32 percent.
Louisiana in general and St. Tammany Parish in particular continued to elect GOP candidates despite the national trend to vote for Democrats. Republican Greg Guidry was elected as associate justice on the Louisiana Supreme Court, and GOP newcomer Eric Skrmetta easily beat out Democrat John Schwegmann for the District One seat on the Public Services Commission.
In local races, the parish elected five new judges to the 22nd Judicial District Court that covers both St. Tammany and Washington parishes.
Parishwide, voters overwhelmingly approved three property tax renewals for road lighting, Fire Protection District 3 and Sewerage District 6.
However, Covington voters were not in the mood for any new taxes and soundly defeated a tax that would have instituted a step pay plan for the city’s police officers and firefighters. Mayor Candace Watkins had campaigned heavily for the tax, saying fire and police needed the raises in order to keep them from going to other agencies that have higher pay. Watkins’ sales tax increase was opposed by St. Tammany Sheriff Jack Strain and Covington City Council President Matt Faust.
Covington voters, though were in the mood to change parts of the City Charter and approved four of the 11 proposed amendments.
Slidell voters were also in the mood for change and voted in six of seven proposed changes to their City Charter.
The changes included amendments that set forth the process to replace council members, the mayor and chief of police in case of a sudden vacancy. The one charter change that failed would have allowed the council to issue bonds without a general election for projects where the bonds were backed by an existing revenue stream.
10. Shock ripples reverberated throughout the country and even overseas when a quasi Ku Klux Klan chapter murdered a potential recruit in isolated bayous off Pearl River near Sun.
Eight people, including the accused triggerman Raymond Chuck Foster, 44, and his son Shane Foster, both of Bogalusa, were arrested when Cynthia C. Lynch, 43, of Tulsa, Okla., was found shot to death in the overgrown brush.
Lynch, recruited via the Internet to join Foster’s group, had chosen to back out of the initiation ceremony when Foster allegedly pulled the trigger, authorities said. Foster then dumped the body in high brush and tried to remove the .38-caliber bullet with a knife. He fled back into the woods alone, while others also fled into the marsh before later turning themselves in.
The Klan, once prevalent in Washington Parish and parts of St. Tammany Parish, was thought to have withered away. Outside of random graffiti the Klan seemed inactive in the area, authorities said.
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