A district court judge has ordered the city-parish to pay more than $17 million after 4 acres of a Pentecostal group’s campus were taken in 2020 as part of a planned expansion at Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport.
Judge Eboni Johnson Rose ruled on Aug. 26 that the city-parish’s original payment of just over $175,500 focused only on the acreage while ignoring the fact that the expansion would cut off access from the campus to Plank Road.
Located in the 8000 block of Plank Road, the Saintsville campus functions as the Louisiana headquarters for the Church of God in Christ and represents “one of the larger edifices erected by a Black church in the State,” Judge Johnson Rose said in her ruling…