Louisiana news briefs

Investor group pays $3.4B for Cleco
PINEVILLE (AP) — An investment group led by Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets will buy the Louisiana power company Cleco for $3.4 billion.
The group will pay $55.37 in cash for each share of Cleco, which owns the regulated electric utility Cleco Power. That amounts to a 15 percent premium on the stock’s closing price of $48.27 on Friday, the last trading day before the deal was announced.
The buyer group includes British Columbia Investment Management Corp.
The deal, expected to close in the second half of next year, is valued at about $4.7 billion when $1.3 billion in debt is included.
Cleco Corp., based in Pineville, Louisiana, will continue to operate as an independent company under local management. The company also said there will be no change in utility rates or employment levels.
The company generates and sells electricity mostly in Louisiana, where it has about 284,000 customers. Cleco also supplies wholesale power in Mississippi.
Cleco’s stock has climbed 3.5 percent so far this year, a slightly better gain than the 2 percent growth registered by the Standard & Poor’s 500 index.

Federal offshore oil lease sale
set for March
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Oil and gas leases for 40 million acres off the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama will be offered by the federal government in a March sale at the Superdome in New Orleans, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said Friday.
The sale will include approximately 7,611 blocks, covering 40.5 million acres, located from three to 230 nautical miles offshore.
The water depths range from nine to more than 11,000 feet.
The bid deadline for interested companies is March 17. The opening of bids are set for a day later.
BOEM said the sale was part of the Obama administration’s plan to expand safe energy production.
The sale could result in the production of 460 to 894 million barrels of oil and 1.9 to 3.9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, the bureau said.
Last March, high bids totaled $850.8 million when central Gulf of Mexico tracts were offered in New Orleans. A central Gulf lease sale a year earlier drew $1.2 billion in high bids.
In August of last year, a western Gulf lease sale drew $102.4 million in high bids for tracts off the Texas coast.

Feds nix Road Home relief; state on hook for $522M
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — New Orleans must return hundreds of millions of dollars paid in home elevation grants after Hurricane Katrina, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development says.
The department wants names of nearly 18,000 homeowners who never raised their homes after getting the Road Home elevation grants. A letter sent Oct. 1 as asking how much total grant money those people got, saying the agency will review Louisiana’s response and “identify repayment plan terms.”
The grants in question totaled $522.2 million, according to state officials.
The Louisiana Office of Community Development, which manages the Road Home program, does not have any immediate plans to renew its effort to make the homeowners pay back the grants, a spokesman said.
Office director Pat Forbes said he hopes Louisiana’s congressional delegation will intervene.

Lafayette school boss hit for ‘black mafia’ remark
LAFAYETTE (AP) — The former head of Lafeyette’s NAACP branch is attacking parish school Superintendent Pat Cooper for saying earlier this month that a “black mafia” influences how African Americans vote in parish school board elections.
Patricia Colbert-Cormier, a 49-year teacher with the Lafayette Parish School System, said she was offended by Cooper’s remarks at Oct. 2 luncheon honoring women in business.
“He said, ‘There are some — I like to call them the black mafia — who have a hold on the black community,’ “ Colbert-Cormier told said. “Quite a few people were offended by it, both black and white.”
She accused Cooper of politicizing the event in touting Tehmi Chassion’s District 4 opponent, who is a black woman, and by promoting three incumbents — Kermit Bouillion, Shelton Cobb and Mark Cockerham — who have been his allies during his conflicted tenure as superintendent.
Cooper declined in the courtroom Friday morning to elaborate on what he meant by “black mafia” or offer further explanation of the comments he made at the luncheon.
But he didn’t deny using the phrase.

Tulane professor awarded grants
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Tulane University associated professor Yu-Ping Wang has been awarded two grants totaling nearly $3.7 million from the National Institutes of Health.
Wang is an associate professor of biomedical engineering and biostatistics and bioinformatics.
The university says he will use the money over the next five years to develop statistical approaches to diagnosing and preventing osteoporosis and computational tools for identifying schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and other mental illnesses.
From The Associated Press.