BATON ROUGE - The old Rosenwald firehouse has not housed firefighters in more than 15 years.It was abandoned for a few years before becoming the home of the Scotlandville Alumni Association which was operating under a Cooperative Endeavor agreement with the city and now at least one council member wants the CEA terminated.Chauna Banks was the council member that the Alumni Association says did not hear about the possible termination from Banks and someone else."Someone from the alumni association who is a lawyer) to date we have not been notified of any particular violations whatsoever so we think we are squarely inside of our CEA and we are still kind of baffled why Councilwoman Banks wants to terminate" Janice Montague Myles, who is a part of the association, said.Banks said the association was to take immediate possession of the building and assess what it needs and also said the purpose of the CEA was not just to restore the outside of the building"The entire reason behind it and what I was excited about was that it was for the betterment of the entire Scotlandville community and here we are ten years later and it has not passed," Banks said.The Alumni Association told WBRZ that Banks has not toured the building and has only seen the outside. Councilwoman Banks said that is not true and the reason she wants to take the property back is because it is not being used as a community center like promised."We could have gotten anybody to renovate the city and could have kept renovating the whole purpose of it going to Scotlandville is to become a stakeholder in the community that was put to full use," Banks said.The Alumni Association said they have been using the building for community events and Chairman Kendrick Nwafor wants to continue doing so."Whether the camps we held in the community, whether that's the community clean-ups we have done. All of this has been going on for ten years. Work has been done I would implore people to find out the work rather than not be aware of the work and claiming the work has not been done," Nwafor said.Myles said while the association does admit having the building for ten years they have had setbacks when it comes to fully restoring the building."We have had the 2016 flood, we have had COVID all these things, I would think out of the 10 years, four of those years were lost to things like that," Myles said.Banks argued that the association had more than enough time to complete restoration."The flood didn't come till 2016, so that's almost two years, show me where a program took place renovation took place show me that, and then if you think about COVID didn't stop any buildings from being built, it didn't stop any buildings from being rebuilt it did not stop any buildings from being restored, and we're talking about 10 years," Banks said.The Metro Council is set to vote on whether the CEA will be terminated on Wednesday.Permalink| Comments