An

Open Letter to Mr. Jerry Reaux Chairman of the Board, the Independent tabloid Dear Mr. Reaux: For the past several months your tabloid has each and every week disparaged me and my Parc Lafayette project. It has claimed to have exposed me as a tax dodger who does not pay my fair share of property tax. Your editor, Walter Pierce, refuses to print my letters containing the facts. I will summarize them here: every buyer of vacant property in Louisiana over 3 acres in size AUTOMATICALLY gets mailed an ag use tax form (I was not in on any open secret as Walter and Heather reported) by the parish assessor. When I received my form, I had my financial assistant call the assessors office to see if we qualified. She spoke to Mr. Comeaux himself, who told her that we qualified as long as we bailed and sold one bale of hay. She recorded this conversation in her daily work diary. We actually cut and baled all 13.5 acres twice. If we did not produce enough hay for Walters satisfaction, perhaps it is because we had 18 eighty year old oak trees on the property. Would Walter be more happy if we cut the oak trees down in order to grow more hay? In any case I had a meeting with Mr. Comeaux last week and he confirmed that we complied with both the intent and the letter of the law. In 2010, I or my companies paid a total of $636,206.06 in Louisiana property tax, $438,501.34 in Lafayette parish alone. Once Parc Lafayette is complete this amount will be in excess of $1,000,000 per year. Your tabloid, the Independent, pays nothing in property tax, nothing in sales tax, and nothing in income tax. Mr. Reaux, I value my reputation as an ethical businessman and citizen. I love Lafayette. In the past few years I have built or improved over $46 million of apartments in Lafayette. I provide quality housing for thousands of Lafayette citizens. All of my employees have full health insurance and retirement plans something unheard of in the apartment management industryand my employees are paid generously. I value the hard work that they have put into helping me build my company, and in helping to build Lafayette. Your tabloid, on the other hand, week after week tears people and their reputations apart. Why are you doing this to Lafayette? Mr. Reaux, maybe you are too removed from the daily operation of your tabloid to realize what is taking place under your good name. Please allow me to enlighten you: 1. Your staff writer, Heather Miller (according to your masthead she is the only staff writer at your paper) has speeded on I-49 in order to do a story on speed traps and has intentionally trespassed on property in order to do the story on property tax.

She appears to be right out of college. Perhaps she doesnt realize that freedom of the press does not mean that the press is above the law. 2. Your managing editor, Walter Pierce, a young man with overt socialist sympathies (The rich won long ago. Uncle.), week after week destroys the reputations of successful Lafayette business leaders. One of his online reports about me (your attorneys word for the blog that Walter exercises editorial control over and approve(s) each comment submitted before it appears before the Inds reading public) contained 33 phrases using profanity (my favorite being corrupt sicko theiving (sic) MoFo. It also contained several attempts to incite violence against me, including bust his gonads, he definately (sic) has children, knock his ass out, I will backhand his face, get harvest tagsyear round open season...bag em and sell em, and I have a score of men following this coullion Stewarts every move. When he craps well know. Does this language really belong in the Independents reports? If Walter really hates wealth and capitalism so much that he encourages violence against successful citizens, then I suggest you buy him a one way ticket to North Korea where he will undoubtedly be much happier. Walter has also refused to publish my letters to the Independent that explain why I used the ag tax category, and that correct several of the Independents factual errors. In fact, the very first article and editorial that Walter and Heather wrote contain at least nine major factual errors. But Walter refuses to publish any of my correspondence, so your readers are totally in the dark as to what actually happened. 3. Your publisher, Cherry May Fisher, as Im sure you are aware, was arrested for DWI. Not only did your paper not report this, but Ms. May lied to the Advertiser last week when she said All I got was a ticket. (No, Cherry, you were arrested. Thats why they took you down to the police station and took your mugshot.) How can you endorse a publisher who drinks and drives and then lies about it to Lafayettes major newspaper? Additionally, Cherry and her husband (and Independent co-publisher) Steve May are partners in several River Ranch businesses with River Ranch developer Robert Daigle. These businesses will be negatively affected if Parc Lafayette is successful, not to mention the fact that Mr. Daigle has repeatedly tried to buy the Parc Lafayette land. How can you endorse publishers that fail to mention this huge conflict of interest while they try each and every week to bring down Parc Lafayette? 4. Leslie Turk, your editorial director, called me a liar in one of her pieces. Yet she failed to disclose that she is the live-in girlfriend of the architect and part-owner of several commercial River Ranch buildings. This architect has solicited me for work several times and I have turned him down because I had heard very negative comments about his work from the contractors who built his Main Street project.

This architect has also called some of the Parc Lafayette tenants and tried to convince them not to move to Parc Lafayette. Mr. Reaux, I understand you have an excellent reputation. Until your paper started its smear campaign against me I enjoyed an excellent reputation as well. I realize I was an easy target because of the recent TIF proposal (a full accounting of that disaster is forthcoming), but I truly believe the only thing your tabloid can accuse me of is being politically nave. A lifetime of building a reputationFatima high school valedictorian, LSU magna cum laude, top of my Tulane Medical School class, Chief Resident at the University of Washington Medical Center, etc.was ruined with just one of your tabloids reports. Mr. Reaux, I have received dozens of calls of support from prominent Lafayette business owners, land owners, and government officials who are sick and tired of your tabloids weekly attacks on successful citizens. It has to stop. Mr. Reaux, I am asking you to have your tabloid issue a public apology to me and to any others that your muckraking journal have unfairly targeted. I am also asking that you see to it that your tabloid publish all potential conflicts of interest prior to exposing any future victims of your investigative journalism. Finally, I am asking that you seek the resignations of Heather Miller, Walter Pierce, Cherry and Steve Fisher May, and Leslie Turk. If the power of your position as Chairman of the Board is insufficient for you to secure these resignations then I would respectfully ask that you resign your position as a sign that you are not going to support yellow, gutter, muckraking tabloids in Lafayette. Sincerely, Glenn Stewart