Scott Angelle

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Scott Anthony Angelle (born November 20, 1961) is an American politician originally from Breaux Bridge in St. Martin Parish in south Louisiana, near Lafayette.

Background

Angelle is one of three sons and five daughters of St. Martin Parish state Representative J. Burton Angelle, who served from 1964 to 1972, and the former Shirley Dauterive Angelle (1930-2010). He attended public schools in St. Martin Parish and holds a Bachelor of Science in Petroleum Land Management from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Angelle and his wife, the former Dianne Bourque, have three daughters and two sons. He is a parishioner of Saint Bernard Roman Catholic Church in Breaux Bridge, as had been his parents.

Career

Angelle was elected in 1985 to the St. Martin Parish Police Jury, a position which his father, a Democrat, had held from 1952 to 1960, before Scott Angelle has been born.

From 2000 to 2004, Scott Angelle served as the first parish president of St. Martin Parish and from 1998 to 2000 the vice president of the Huval land management companies in Lafayette. Upon becoming lieutenant governor, Angelle temporarily relinquished the job of secretary of the Department of Natural Resources but continued to serve as Governor Jindal's legislative lobbyist. Angelle returned to his position in Natural Resources after his time as lieutenant governor ended.​

In 2012, Angelle was elected to succeed the retiring Republican James Morgan "Jimmy" Field (born 1940) on the Public Service Commission, a position he filled until early 2017. In 2015, he ran for governor as a Republican and finished in the nonpartisan blanket primary with 214,907 votes (19.3 percent).​ Another Moderate Republican candidate, former Lieutenant Governor Jay Dardenne, drew 166,656 votes (15 percent). In the ensuing general election, Republican U.S. Senator David Vitter was defeated by the current Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards, whose liberal positions were mostly hidden to the voters. Dardenne broke partisan ranks to endorse Edwards, under whose administration he is the Commissioner of Administration, but Angelle took no stand on the Edwards-Vitter showdown. The failure of the Republican candidates to coalesce behind Vitter worked greatly to Edwards' advantage. ​ In 2016, Angelle ran in the open 3rd congressional district in a bid to succeed Moderate Republican Representative Charles Boustany, a retired Lafayette physician. Angelle led in the primary with 91,532 votes (29 percent) to 84,912 (26 percent) for eventual winner, fellow Republican Clay Higgins, a former spokesman for the St. Landry Parish Sheriff's Office known for his Crime Stoppers videos that attack the criminal element.​ In the lower-turnout general election on December 10, 2016, Higgins topped Angelle, 77, 671 (56 percent) to 60,762 (44 percent). From the primary to the general election, Angelle lost 30,770 votes and Higgins lost 7,241 of his original voters. Outgoing Representative Boustany instead ran unsuccessfully for the United States Senate seat vacated by David Vitter but lost out to Democrat-turned-Republican [[John Neely Kennedy], who still holds the seat]. Angelle's other opponents included conservative former state Representative Brett Geymann of Lake Charles and former United States Ambassador to East Timor Grover Rees, III, of Lafayette, who polled only 1 percent of the ballots cast in the primary.

In May 2017, Angelle left the Public Service Commission on appointment to his current position in the Donald Trump administration as the fourth director of the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement in Washington, D.C. , a position within the Department of the Interior under Secretary Ryan Zinke, who subsequently resigned his Cabinet position in 2019.<ref<Template:Cite werb</ref>​

References

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