News

There is a is a new face overseeing the Boys & Girls Club in Abbeville, albeit a familiar one.
Kimberly Bessard is the new director of the local club, which is located at A.A. Comeaux Park. She has been with the club for several years.
Bessard recently attended an Abbeville City Council meeting to introduce herself to local officials. Councilwoman Terry Broussard invited Bessard to the meeting.
“I was born and raised here,” Bessard said proudly.

Each year, the Vermilion Parish Tourist Commission (VPTC) compiles tourism figures from several sources and compares these numbers to previous years to measure the success of their marketing efforts to grow tourism in the parish. After being down for a couple of years, tourism began to slowly pick up in 2021 and has continued that trend in 2022.
“Having all of our major festivals return in 2022 and hosting several large tournaments at AA Comeaux and Quality Sports Authority helped our tourism industry recover during last year,” stated Alison Miller, VPTC Executive Director.

NEW IBERIA — In his 33 years of farming sugarcane, Ricky Gonsoulin had never had as good of a crop as the one he saw growing in his fields in 2022. And in 33 years, he had never lost so much as a stalk of sugarcane to a freeze.
But that unlikely scenario came to pass in late December when an arctic blast sent temperatures below freezing for three days across Louisiana. At his farm near New Iberia, Gonsoulin spent Christmas waiting for his cane to thaw so he could survey the damage and get back to work harvesting whatever remained.