BATON ROUGE - An ordinance to create a formula for the proposed City of St. George to pay a share of city-parish employee retirement pensions was again delayed Wednesday night by the metro council.
 
The item, originally put on the agenda in July, was deferred last month as well. It will now be brought back up October 9, just three days before the election.
 
"It's a very complicated process," St. George spokesman Andrew Murrell said. "We've always said at St. George we wanted to pay our fair share, and we're working with CPERS toward that goal."
 
CPERS, the City-Parish Employees' Retirement System, is determining how much St. George would pay should voters approve incorporation.
 
"If any new municipality is allowed to withdraw and doesn't take their fair share of that debt, it's gonna be left to the remaining employers, which the city-parish is by far the largest," CPERS general counsel Denise Akers said.
 
St. George officials and the city-parish are working with CPERS on language in the proposed ordinance.
 
"Anytime you have an ordinance, a law, a statute, there's verbiage that needs to be defined," Murrell said. "You don't want anything that's vague, ambiguous, unclear. You don't want anything that's gonna lead any party to litigation."
 
With a month to go until the election, city-parish leaders are focused on informing the public about the effect of the possible incorporation.
 
"The mayor's been adamant that she wants voters to have information to make a good, sound, financial decision in terms of what they're doing," Chief Administrative Officer, Darryl Gissel said.