Corporate welfare law to cost public extra million

When the media are not trying to get their hands into taxpayers’ wallets by using government, they are refusing to step up and take responsibility for their actions that cost the people additional money.

As noted previously, state law requires that state and local governing authorities must choose a publication of certain longevity and frequency as an official journal to publish hard copy of certain documents, and use taxpayer dollars to compensate – even though there is no good reason preventing this notification from being done by Internet-only firms, or just having government do it, such as, for example, at the state level have the Public Service Commission put on its web site all of its minutes. Certainly members of the public would find it much easier to go to the PSC site and find these notices that having to discover out what is the official journal where they live and then scour editions of it to find this information.

Such a revised law could have prevented what appears to be a million-dollar mistake caused by the present law.

Entergy’s two subsidiaries operating in Louisiana wanted to conduct a bond sale in July, but found it pushed back three months at that cost because it did not follow the law in making sure the official journals in every area in which it operates published notice of the intent, because it got an outdated list of these from the Louisiana Press Association.

Now this additional cost, in a PSC decision today, either will be borne by Entergy shareholders or by ratepayers. The LPA likely will avoid all responsibility because it can point to R.S. 43:150 and say Entergy should have gone to the Secretary of State to get a listing, and that its provision merely was a courtesy.

Which especially is reprehensible because bills have come up in the past few years to change the law in this regard, and with spurious arguments such changes were bitterly fought, successfully, by the LPA because it wanted to keep the corporate welfare to its members going. So now not only does the LPA continue to ensure its members can keep picking the pockets of taxpayers for something wasteful, it now foists additional costs on the public because a corporation was foolish enough to believe the LPA actually would provide what it said it would.

This provides yet another example of the asinine nature of this law and of a special interest working for its own members’ enrichment and against the people and taxpayers. Let’s hope a new Legislature stands up to these fat cats and dumps the physical printing requirement of official documents.