The Livingston Parish Infrastructure Committee meeting held on October 28, 2026 began with a Road Classification Criteria Manual Update and finished with updates for the Livingston Parish Road Program.
Robert Dugas, DPW Director, explained that he and his team have continued to work on the criteria manual, which has six draft chapters out of twelve completed so far.
Dugas expressed that a draft form of the criteria will most likely be available at the end of the month, noting “we’re on track, [but] we still have another six chapters to go through.”
“There’s no one-size-fits-all within Livingston Parish because we’re so urban on the west and so rural on the east,” Dugas added, “so we’re trying to make that happy medium.”
The parish’s Drainage Criteria Manual will also receive revisions “in the next month or so,” once all of the different revisions are compiled for review, Dugas noted.
“This criteria will be more than anything the parish has ever had,” Dugas said, emphasizing that it takes time to properly classify, index, and revise manuals such as these even with weekly meetings being held to work on them.
Livingston Parish Councilman Ricky Goff noted that Duff Road is a “perfect example” of a road that will benefit from the road classification criteria manual. “It’s ridiculously undersized… Everything is dangerous. It’s a problem, it’s got lots of traffic… we have a problem there and this will prevent that from happening in the future.”
Dugas explained for clarification that each classification of road under the manual will have a certain setback to save property for potential sidewalks on future roads based upon their classification.
Following this, Dugas gave updates on the Livingston Parish Road Program.
Projects 1 through 8 have been awarded and 1 through 5 have started construction. Project 9 will be discussed at the next council meeting. Six different contractors are working on the projects and every project has a DOTD certified inspector overseeing it.
Of the five projects started, 1 is at 94% complete, 2 is at 37% complete, 3 is at 7% complete, 4 is at 8.5% complete, and 5 is at 10% complete.
Each project costs an average of $5 million dollars, and 256 roads were originally approved to be included in the parish road program.
Some roads were taken out, however, as they can be fixed through simpler means.
“We said…these roads we’re gonna put off and do some preservation on and we added roads, so there’s actually more roads that have been added to the 256 roads,” Dugas noted. “We should end up doing close to 280 roads.”
As such, some roads that were not on the original list for the projects are set to have work done on them to improve them.
“Those roads that were not done… we have a separate list cause the plan is to go in next year and set a budget and just go in and do preservation on them,” Dugas added.
Dugas explained that “all twelve [projects] will be done before the end of July next year, or they will be paid in liquidated damages, one of the two.”
Councilman Goff also asked for an update on the progress being made on Duff Road to which Dugas and his associate noted that the road has certain problems that need to be addressed first including the railroad crossing and the road being a narrow type with a lack of shoulder making routing for the road “tricky.”
Dugas noted that progress has been made to begin creating a plan to address these issues while also looking into grant funding, as Goff recommended, for when the time comes to improve the road itself.
“We’re gonna aggressively go after fixing it… and see if we can do something with that curve… and then try and come up with another plan, maybe just to push the ditches back and get the width that we need moving further North,” Councilman Goff added.
Dugas’ associate noted that they are looking to have an internal deadline of the first or second week of December to compile everything the state can and can’t offer before getting into planning for the road improvement projects.
