By JAMES A. ROBICHAUX

MORGAN CITY — Mike Loupe, the city’s public works director, described a large cavity that was discovered under Greenwood Drive between Victor II Boulevard and David Drive.

“We don’t have hard ground right there,” Loupe said. He said that the excavator dug as deep as it could before it itself was at risk of being sucked into the hole.

“Right now, you’re looking at almost about 3 feet deep, and we’re still not hitting hard ground,” he said.

Loupe spoke of a few possible solutions, including placing a geogrid at the bottom of the cavity, then putting 2 feet of large rock on top of the geogrid and then one foot of smaller rock — the regular limestone — on top of the large rock.

In other business:

—A proposal to lease sanitation trucks instead of having the city own them was brought up.

“What we are proposing to do is lease trucks rather than purchase trucks. The idea being that at the end of the term, you turn it back in and get another truck,” Mayor Tim Matte said.

Matte said that he spoke to officials in Vidalia, which already has a similar program.

“We think this might be an alternative in improving reliability,” he said. “That’s where I think our failures have been in meeting the needs of customers. We’ve had a lot of breakdown with trucks.”

Under such a system, Matte said, the trucks would always be under warranty.

“We would also propose that we would retain existing vehicles to have a back-up, one of each type,” he said.

—Matte spoke of utility rates and renewing two millage rates.

“The low natural gas prices continue to help us provide very reasonable wholesale rates. The March wholesale rate was approximately 54 mils. Last year’s was 60.92,” he said. “We’ll all benefit from the reduced natural gas prices.”

The first reading of the ordinance of general millage renewal was made. The general millage rate is proposed to remain unchanged.

“Our auditorium millage goes up slightly, goes up by 1 percent,” Matte said. “The reason for that is not that we’re raising taxes there. It’s really that last year, we had reduced the taxes because we had overcollected.”