Officials have gone to the negotiating table from the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Office and city of New Iberia to consider several amendments to their dated contract in an effort to establish a clearer set of playing rules and improve cooperation between the two entities at a time of rising costs.

Sheriff Louis Ackal’s administration is pushing for more money from the city to defray its costs and debt, while city officials say they would like to see more accountability on the part of the Sheriff’s Office than has been afforded in the past.

Vague to the point of muddying the waters is how several officials involved in the negotiations characterized the current contract, signed more than four years ago when former Sheriff Sid Hebert and former Mayor Ruth Fontenot were still in power.

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“There are a lot of ambiguities,” said Steve Elledge, the Sheriff’s Office’s lawyer. “It was signed during the previous administration and there’s a lot we don’t understand.”

Mayor Pro Tem Freddie DeCourt called the contract “pitiful.”

“There are no performance indicators,” DeCourt said. “It’s a very vague contract to spend that much money.”

Curry said the city pays the Sheriff’s Office about $3.4 million a year for its services, a figure adjusted annually according to the consumer price index. That amount is up from the original rate of $2.9 million.

City officials said they are counting on clearer language to translate into a more specific scope of services the Sheriff’s Office is obligated to provide and a stricter set of rules to which each side adheres.

Mayor Hilda Curry said she will push to add to the contract a means of recourse for when the Sheriff’s Office fails to provide a service it has promised.

“In the past, if there were two officers patrolling and we were supposed to have 10, we would have no recourse,” Curry said. “There should be some kind of accountability.”

The contract states the city is entitled to receive monthly reports, but there have been times they were not sent, Curry said.

For years, Curry and other city officials have requested maps of district-by-district crime breakdowns.

“I’ve been preaching that for over four years,” DeCourt said. “But it’s a new administration, so I’m being patient until early next year.”

The Sheriff’s Office, meanwhile, is asking for more money, though how much they’re asking for remains unclear. Elledge declined to discuss specifics but said, “It takes more money to run a police department now than it did then,” referring to the contract’s signing in June 2004.

But Curry said it is too early to say whether the city would be willing to spend more money on Sheriff’s Office services.

“They’ve presented some figures showing what it’s costing them to operate,” Curry said. “But there’s no way we can pay what they’re showing.”

Curry said the city will reassess the services it receives from the Sheriff’s Office before deciding whether paying more money is in its best interests.

“After four years, I know what I’d like to see,” Curry said, “but I wanted to give (Ackal) some time to see what he’d like.”

Another change in the works involves the Sheriff’s Office’s use of the 911 Communication Center in front of City Hall. Fontenot and Hebert signed a five-year agreement in 1999 stating there would be no charge for the use of the building. Curry said she would like to see that changed.

The city also plans to increase its compensation to the parish jail for housing city residents. The city pays $22.39 per day for each adult city resident in the parish jail. Curry said this price will increase to $24.39 per day, per person.

“There’s a substantial cost that the city still bears a burden for when it comes to law enforcement issues,” Curry said.