Adley urging may cause more waste of taxpayer funds

State Sen. Robert Adley has gone on another fishing expedition, and if history is any guide it will end up being a waste of taxpayer dollars.

Adley became perturbed a couple of months ago over the content of a blog associated with the governor’s Division of Administration that he claimed broke state law by having content favoring issues supported by Gov. Bobby Jindal being financed by state money. The office has presented a detailed defense showing how the relevant statute is not being violated, but Adley has persisted and appears to have gotten the matter to be taken up by the state’s Ethics Board at its next meeting nest week.

The problem is, Adley has a history of making spurious ethics violations charges. In 2007, in a bizarre incident Shreveport demographer and for-hire political consultant Elliot Stonecipher twice on radio said a former state representative, that official’s daughter, a former state senate candidate, and another area political consultant violated ethics laws. Stonecipher had only hearsay evidence. Despite this flimsiness, Adley said he would bring a complaint against the former state Rep. Mike Powell to the Board. And nothing happened, nor has Adley ever issued an apology for publicizing his unfounded suspicions of Powell.


The tactic of lodging ethics complaints seems to be a common one for Adley concerning his political adversaries. Certainly Jindal falls into that category after ensuring Adley’s influence in the Senate has waned dramatically and torpedoing some lackluster bills of his that has driven Adley to the edge of goofiness uncommon even among Louisiana legislators. His tactical wont is all the more humorous/disturbing because Adley himself has a morally questionable relationship as the owner of a gas management company that in the last contract renegotiations won a no-bid contract with an association of state local governments over which he as a senator has power. While the arrangement is not illegal, it seems unlikely were Adley a private citizen such a cozy arrangement ever would have been made.

The Board will determine whether there is any merit to Adley’s latest claim. But the past suggests it’s not so much the merit of his assertions as it is political aims that drives these kinds of actions by him, thus leading to a waste of taxpayer resources utilized by the Board in its having to separate the wheat from the chaff.