Under new ownership: James Drumgole, pastor of Living Word Church of Baton Rouge, says he hopes to begin offering services in the former Chapelwood Church of God on North Sherwood Forest Drive in the coming months. Living Word Church, which has a location at 1564 Nicholson Drive, recently purchased the Chapelwood property at 3730 N. Sherwood Forest Drive for $750,000, according to sale documents. The seller was Chapelwood Church of God, represented by Tommy Glen Kirby. The 11,480-square-foot church is located on nearly eight acres of land, according to a property listing, and it includes an 11,175-square-foot gymnasium.
The budget battle: Louisiana’s education superintendent is asking lawmakers to add money to his budget for standardized testing next year. The Associated Press reports Superintendent John White says Gov. Bobby Jindal’s proposal to strip $23 million from his agency’s main office operations would damage the state’s ability to measure student performance. White told the House Appropriations Committee today that Jindal’s spending plan for the upcoming fiscal year so deeply cuts his agency that he would violate state and federal student testing requirements. Read the full story.
Time tested: Oil companies say they can clean up offshore spills far faster today than five years ago when BP’s Macondo well blew out 45 miles off the coast of Louisiana, spawning the nation’s worst offshore oil spill. As The Associated Press reports, it took BP and the industry’s best containment technology 87 days to contain the deep-water blowout. The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion and spill on April 20, 2010, resulted in as much as 172 million gallons of oil getting into the Gulf of Mexico. Don Armijo, CEO of the Marine Well Containment Co.—a consortium developing containment technology that was formed after the Deepwater Horizon explosion—today touted technological advances made by the industry since the BP spill during a luncheon in New Orleans.
