By ROBIN SHANNON
L’Observateur

LAPLACE — Parish leaders said Tuesday that the president of a St. John Parish volunteer fire department was asked to resign from his post amid allegations that he forwarded a racially charged e-mail message throughout the parish and to members of the West Bank Fire Department.

Parish President Bill Hubbard said when learned about the e-mail and its contents he asked LaPlace Volunteer Fire Department President Frank Fagot to step down from his position. Hubbard said he also terminated a $30,000 annual contract that the parish has with Fagot’s LaPlace shipping business.

Hubbard said Fagot, who denied purposely forwarding the disparaging message to anyone, resigned as president on May 27, just a few hours after being questioned by parish officials.

“This was just so offensive,” Hubbard said of the e-mail. “We couldn’t stand by and not take swift action on this. We asked him to leave.”

St. John Public Information Officer Buddy Boe said Fagot received no pay and no benefits from the parish as president of the LaPlace Volunteer Fire Department. Since the parish will no longer use Fagot’s company for postage and shipping, Boe said the work would now be done in-house.

The offending message, about 100 words in length, was read aloud at a St. John Parish Council meeting Tuesday night by Division A Councilman-at-Large Dale Wolfe. The e-mail compares African-Americans to “love bugs” and used a racial slur to describe them both.

“It’s an insult,” Wolfe said as he read the message. “It tries to separate whites in the parish from blacks in the parish.”

After Wolfe read the message in its entirety, he invited a spokeswoman for a concerned citizens’ group to come forward and make a statement to parish officials to take immediate action. Wolfe then thanked the administration for already acting on it.

Fagot has since apologized for the e-mail, but asserts that the message, if forwarded from his e-mail address, was done so by accident. Fagot claims that on the date and time that the message was sent, he was attending a Boston Red Sox baseball game and had no access to a computer or cellular device capable of sending e-mail. Fagot provided a ticket stub from the game to L’Observateur.

Robert Taylor, president of the St. John chapter of the NAACP, said after the meeting that there is no excuse for an e-mail of that kind to be sent in this day and age.

“We are in the 21st century now,” Taylor said. “There’s just no place for this kind of hate.”

Taylor said he was glad that Fagot was asked to resign, but said it was merely a “slap on the wrist.”

“I think he deserved to be fired,” said Taylor. “He is in a leadership position, and this sort of behavior should not be tolerated from anyone in that sort of position.”