Democrats prefer preservation over responsibility in session

As if we needed any more proof of the inability of Louisiana’s current gubernatorial administration’s and its Legislature’s leadership to serve the people of the state, the recently-concluded special session delivered it in abundance.

The biggest priority, of course, was not even part of the special session call: trimming the low-value programs from state government and thoroughly reviewing personnel distribution to cut a bloated state bureaucracy (this had better be part of the regular session starting in five weeks). The next biggest priority was levee governance reform, followed by consolidation of Orleans government to save money and improve the city’s ability to bounce back from the recent hurricane disasters.

State Sen. Walter Boasso got the southeastern regional levee board consolidation and professionalization off to a good start at the session’s beginning, with a nice pep talk by Gov. Kathleen Blanco. However, Boasso then began to run into legislative critics who wanted to protect political fiefdoms that their local levee districts represented to them and/or who felt too much political pressure from local interests (backbones often being in short supply among Louisiana’s legislators) to stick with his plan. For awhile, any sort of reform looked as if it would founder.

Blanco seemed disinterested in salvaging the enterprise until the waning days of the session, with legislators saying she did not even bother to contact them until late. But what really seemed to turn the tide to produce any reform at all was federal relief coordinator Donald Powell lecturing the Legislature that reform had to come or the federal government would look much more dimly at providing any sort of relief. In the end, a watered-down bill that will improve somewhat the situation made it out.

Will politics prevail in Shreveport ambulance decision?

What seemed to be just a routine bureaucratic decision, even on the surface an attempt to introduce more efficiency, instead has enraged certain Shreveport citizens and has sent the Mayor Keith Hightower in search of money he already has spent on monuments to himself and to government.

Recently, Shreveport Fire Chief Kelvin Cochran proposed to move a paramedic unit from Fire Station 19 on Ellerbe Road to Fire Station 9 on St. Vincent Avenue. A cursory overview of the situation at first could support Cochran’s decision: the area around #9 had over 1,500 calls that resulted in medical transport in 2004 while the area around #19 had around 500. The former station does not currently have a unit stationed there so by relocating response times would be cut around that station, but would increase substantially in the area around #19.

However, reaction to the proposed move proved so negative that Cochran put it off. The burgeoning population in the southeastern part of Shreveport would argue response times would become unacceptable with units having to travel such a distance in life-threatening situations. Nor would relocation of a unit to Fire Station 20, somewhat further to the east, help much because it would have to cross rail lines which could have trains holding up help at a crucial moment.

The outcry also provoked Hightower into promising the purchase and staffing of a ninth ambulance, which will costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and hundreds of thousands more annually to staff and run it – this at a time where the city is so strapped for funds, thanks to Hightower’s and his Democrat City Council allies’ huge commitments in building and running a convention center and hotel, that it has to cut the city grants to nonprofits organizations and has allowed a huge infrastructure backlog to accumulate.

But is this extra purchase necessary, or is the realignment even necessary? Presumably, ambulance transport with specialized personnel becomes necessary in serious, especially life-or-death, situations. Medical units should not be sent out unless that standard is met. And a quick look at relevant statistics makes one question whether calls for service around #9 meet this criterion relative to the need around #19.

For one thing, theoretically a greater population is served in the area around #19. In its range are census tracts 239.1, 239.2, and 240 that in 2000 had 18,789 people. Tracts 233, 237, and 238 are served by #9, totaling 16,169. Further, the population around #19 has a higher median age – 36.4 years compared to the area served by #9 of 34.2, meaning there are more elderly people who are more likely to need emergency medical services.

One could argue the relatively poorer area around #9, with a median household income of $22,112 annually, might not have private transportation as readily available as the area around #19, with its median household income of $59,223 per annum. But that’s only slightly true; the former averages three persons per vehicle and the other two persons per vehicle. That is, why does an area with one-third less private transportation still manage to have three times the number of transports than the other?

Or, to put it another way, in the #9 area, there was one transport of a presumably serious medical condition for less than every 11 residents while #19 had such a transport for one out of every almost 38 residents. How could there be, on a per capita basis, 3.5 times more serious cases in one part of town than another?

The answer, of course, is there can’t be and that the residents around #9 very likely are making numerous calls and then subsequently using emergency services for non-emergency reasons way out of proportion to those around #19. This is something the city should commit to investigating before any money is spent on new ambulance services or any relocation is done. Apparently, the city is making very hesitant, tentative steps to do this, even if only to provide political cover.

Yet if the city does this rational thing, it needs to prepare itself for the inevitable complaints that leaders of a majority-black city are buckling under to the demands of mostly wealthy, mainly white neighborhoods (the area served by #9 is about 80 percent black; the area served around #19 is about 80 percent white). Irony would abound in that case: the proportion of tax dollars paid to support that service (and actual dollars – the poor usually pay nothing out of pocket for an ambulance ride) by those who would suffer from the switch far exceeds that of those who use it more than thrice as much.

Democrat "super-precinct" plan degrades election integrity

Some odd politics seem to be at play in considering two sets of bills, HB 12 and SB 16 which allows people who registered to vote without providing positive identification between the last presidential election and the declaration of emergency as a result of Hurricane Rita, and HB 14 and SB 22 which would set up regional voting centers in registrars’ office in ten large-population parishes.

Of the sets, which would last until Jul. 16, the former which would enable almost 15,000 people statewide, nearly 2,000 in Orleans Parish, to cast votes without ever being positively identified by election officials, would seem to contain the greatest opportunity for voting fraud to occur. Yet opponents, almost exclusively legislative Republicans, have let these pieces of legislation go largely unchallenged. Instead, they have fought strenuously the latter pair which, at first glance, would seem to address a less-important issue than ballot security.

Yet consider: regarding election accessibility, Democrats statewide have a vested interest in making the state go beyond any state or federal requirement, written in the constitution or law or intimated by the judiciary, because they believe likely Democrat voters disproportionately were scattered from Orleans Parish. Their goal, from Gov. Kathleen Blanco to Secretary of State Al Ater and on down, is to create a structure that can funnel as many likely Democrat voters as possible to a polling place, any polling place, that will accept them – and get the government to pay for it.

A typical get-out-the-vote effort would entail transporting geographically-dispersed people to geographically-dispersed precincts, normally an expensive process. But under current conditions, with many refugees concentrated, the creation of, in essence, 10 super-precincts that will accept anybody, could dramatically reduce the costs of organizations dedicated to hauling voters to them (and keep in mind Democrat Ater is spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to find these individuals which the state is not obligated to do, either).

Republicans consistently have pointed out that existing legal and infrastructural mechanisms exist to accommodate the unusual circumstances presented, and so their objections to additional cost and unnecessary complication are legitimate (contrary to the feeble assertions of Blanco that anyone against these bills are deliberately trying to keep Orleanians from voting). Even Democrat attempts to argue that the absentee ballot process wouldn’t be good because of people moving constantly around temporary addresses is largely mooted because it is so easy to get a ballot sent almost immediately through Internet contact with Ater’s office!

In short, both Republicans and Democrats know that there is just limited upside in watering down ballot security in order to create more eligible voters. The real payoff comes from creating a mechanism that improves Democrats’ ability to direct existing voters in their direction. Republicans cannot be faulted for objecting to a plan that does nothing to create more ballot accessibility or democracy but does cost the state more in terms of money credibility. Democrats can be faulted for being disingenuous by saying mistakenly that this plan actually does increase accessibility, and then to have the nerve to argue opponents of it are against voting rights.

And that’s why it’s a bigger issue, because even as they loudly proclaim they are making elections better, with this Democrats actually are eroding the integrity of the process by trying to use government to try to convey advantage to their candidates.

Crybaby Black Caucus discourages assistance

In my previous posting, I averred how the actions of many Louisiana politicians were akin to spoiled children. Today, the Legislative Black Caucus in the House put an exclamation point on that fact.

The first bill discussed this afternoon was HB 14, which in its original form would have created for future election regional voting centers in populous parishes where people registered in any parish could vote. It later got amended so that people registering to vote in an area affected by a declared emergency after the declaration could not use this method, and then an expiration date of July 16, 2006 was attached. This is the same date as for HB 12 which allows people who registered to vote prior to the emergency declaration for Hurricane Rita but after the last presidential election who have not provided positive identification not otherwise called to military service to vote by mail, passed only days earlier by the same chamber.

In an unusual moment of good sense, the House defeated the amended bill, with Republicans holding fast against it joined by some white Democrats (the debate can be read here). Not long afterwards, during debate on an entirely unrelated bill, the head of the Caucus, Rep. Cedric Richmond, made a motion to adjourn the entire session. After his motion was defeated 24-77 with all votes cast by members of the Caucus, its members (except for the Speaker pro tem Rep. Yvonne Dorsey) left the chamber and did not participate in further votes.

Levee reform actions show Louisiana still needs tough love

It’s only taken about five months, but Louisiana’s mainstream media finally is catching on to the full ramifications of the fact that the state must accept tough love from the federal government in order to weather the effects of the hurricane disasters, with a salutary side effect that this could kickstart political reform so desperately needed. If only the state’s political elites would do the same.

This isn’t to argue that the light bulb suddenly came on, nor that it went from totally dark to incredibly bright. A gradualism has marked the process. On levee governance reform, the state’s mainstream media got on the bandwagon early, far before Gov. Kathleen Blanco. But on other matters, it has been just as far behind the curve as the more important elected officials.

Perhaps the best example is the so-called Baker bill, a questionable plan which would have created a huge new federal bureaucracy which would transfer tens of billions of dollars to those with property interests in Louisiana which the federal government could well never see again. Blanco basically made it her recovery plan (even as the federal government points out there’s really no plan at all). Louisiana’s media and politicians have been united in supporting it, but it was rejected by the White House which brought near-universal scorn from the state’s media and politicians (see this typical media response). But the thing is, a good part of the country rightly agrees with that decision (see this typical response), viewing the legislation as another giveaway not requiring the state show some sign that it plans to do its utmost to exhaust all remedies and resources.

Stuck on stupid XIV: The right way or the Louisiana way

Tell us something we don’t know: failure of government at all levels led to a poorer response to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that should have been, according to a report to be released by the U.S. House of Representatives.

Until the report officially is released on Wednesday, look for the mainstream media to spin the report as unfavorably as possible for Pres. George W. Bush’s administration (it likely will be harder to do so when the details are known to all). But that partisan attempt misses the larger point: government as an institution is inherently flawed in its ability to respond quickly and adequately to sudden, large needs because it is government, made inefficient by the lack of a profit motive and by the realities of bureaucratic necessities of impartiality and effectiveness before efficiency.

That understood, theoretically government that is closer to the people – state and local – should be the most responsive of the sluggish bunch because it is the most immediate and least impersonal. Thus, where reform is most urgent is at the state and local levels; reform should occur at all levels, but where it will have the biggest impact is at the lower levels.

To accomplish this, it’s necessary to promote efficiency within government operations and in the organization of government. This is why it is important to have less government at the lowest levels, both in terms of structure and power. And with the latest Louisiana legislative special session half over, it appears from it that lesson at best has been only half-learned.

Part of the problem with the flooding that occurred was because of a fragmented levee governance system. Yet it seems only incomplete consolidation is going to occur, leaving a system still too decentralized to operate at its best and without safeguards to assure the maximal amount of professionalism and minimizing the effect of politicization in flood control. No other state in the country allows its flood control system to be fragmented even to the degree that the legislation that would combine a few, but not most, southeastern Louisiana levee districts, does.

The same is true with making other Orleans governments more efficient. No major city in the country has its property assessment not unified as New Orleans does, yet legislation to unify it was killed. Only the legislation that combines the civil and criminal judicial systems there looks like it will succeed (ironically, it is the only feature that actually is not the only of its kind in America: some states do set up different civil and criminal courts tracks).

Yes, the report makes clear that leadership such as Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s failed in the days before and after Katrina hit. But real leadership occurs way before any disaster happens, in the creation of government institutions best able to mitigate and respond to the effects of a disaster. And (even as the federal government strongly points the state in the right direction) it seems in this session Louisiana’s leaders are failing its citizens on that score as well, stuck on stupid yet again.

Disingenuous support tampering with election law

From all the blather about displaced Louisianans being able to vote, you’d think that a simple upholding of ballot security makes for a police state, and that not relaxing voting standards is a greater threat to democracy than the inevitable fraud that would result from doing so.

Some legislation proposed in the special session would allow people whose names are on rolls but who never have positively identified themselves to a registrar would let them vote without identity verifiable by a Louisiana election official. Other bills would allow voting at polling places practically anywhere other than a home parish where verifiable records for any voter would be absent. Elections held under these conditions just beg to be stolen.

Complainers moan about “evacuees in Avoyelles Parish won't have a say in what's going on” or “give [evacuees] the right to vote” or “We want to see that evacuees have a chance to vote.” OK, here’s how you do that: click here and then fill out this form. The law already provides ample opportunity for any person outside his precinct on election day to vote, so long as that person can be positively identified.

Of course, the whiners want such positive identification standards dropped, just asking for fraud to contaminate the process. And it’s no accident that radical organizations such as the Industrial Areas Foundation are pushing these measures because they know it will make it easier to stuff the ballot box with the votes of impressionable displaced persons and (from their perspective, “don’t ask, don’t tell”) for dishonest brokers that agree with their leftist agenda to manufacture votes for their preferred candidates.

(The IAF claims it is nonpartisan and nonpolitical. In fact, the organization was founded by Saul Alinsky who advocated massive redistribution of wealth and power in society. It still proudly hawks his seminal tract Rules for Radicals and other like works on its web site. Alinksy, who referred to himself as the “devil’s disciple,” argued that projects to help the needy were insufficient without political activism of those helping and being helped. However, because he saw American government and the free enterprise system as discriminatory and prejudicial, even destructive of the “poor,” he believed the agenda of this political activism by the “poor” and their allies should be to restructure society and government in a socialist direction.)

Were groups like the IAF genuine in their desire to enable the franchise and not interested in promoting an agenda, they would educate people on using the existing workable process. Their failure to do so shows they are more interested in agendas than in democracy or in the people they claim to represent.

Desperate consolidation opponents advance silly arguments

You know you’re on to a good idea when all its opponents can do is to come up with gobbledygook in opposition. State Rep. Jeff Arnold confirmed as such with his inane comments about why Orleans Parish governments should not be consolidated.

Arnold contends that Orleans seven assessors and two judicial systems, while every other parish suffers with just one or each, should be left alone because (1) it has fewer elected officials per capita than any other parish and (2) the cost per citizen to run the assessing in Orleans (by the way, Arnold’s father is one of the seven). (It should be noted that Arnold bases these assertions on 2000 census data of around 482,000, not the revised 2004 estimate of about 462,000, nor the January best estimate of about 156,000.)

Let’s investigate the logic, or rather illogic, behind this thinking. New Orleans/Orleans Parish is essentially a metropolitan government that is just one city and lacking a formal parish government. By contrast, other large-population parishes such as Jefferson or even formal metropolitan government such as in East Baton Rouge have other incorporated areas with their own officials which dilute this average. And when we turn to smaller-populated parishes, economies of scale are lost: rural parishes that struggle to have 10,000 residents often have the same number of police jurors as do parishes with much larger populations.

In other words, on this statistic, New Orleans comes out with a higher number of residents per officials because it happens to have (had) the most people and because of an accident of political geography. And note the illogic behind the presumption: if New Orleans does not have too many, then shouldn’t Arnold be championing consolidation of other parishes’ governments?

The same applies to the argument about per citizen costs being the lowest. Setting up the infrastructure for an assessor costs roughly the same for any parish whether you have 10,000 or 400,000 people. In fact, operating costs may be higher in rural parishes because of the much greater distances assessors must travel to property, and the much larger land holdings that must be evaluated. Where they would not be, it would be as a result of the higher personnel costs exacerbated by the duplication of services times seven, even if having 40 times the number of people dilutes the per resident figure. (And I wonder where is more “efficient” on a per parcel, rather than per person, basis – it’s not people but parcels being assessed). So, again, why this statistic comes out this way is just a function of a denser population packed into a smaller area, not any inherent advantages to having so many officials.

Now compare Orleans’ costs with Harris County, Texas. Even with a larger Houston city council and a five-member Harris County Commission, with its 2 million people, you can bet Harris has fewer elected officials per person than Orleans, and its single appraiser spends less per citizen than Orleans. So what does Arnold want the state to do, go out and kidnap people to boost our population to get better economies of scale in operating local government?

I don’t have the statistics, but I’ll bet if you took total assessing costs per parish and divide them by units assessed, Orleans would fare very poorly – that’s the relevant metric. When dealing with statistics, it’s not enough just to throw out numbers you also must investigate the theory behind it. And Arnold’s pathetic attempt to save his father’s job and patronage opportunities reveals the ridiculous arguments behind it.

Hightower Expo Hall plans may be just more corporate welfare

Part of the collateral damage of the opening of Shreveport’s convention center concerns the fate of the city’s Exposition Hall. The facility has run well short of capacity or breakeven in supporting itself financially for some time. Until the opening of the Convention Center, whether it contributed financially didn’t matter so much because the city needed a location to stage certain events of its own.

But now the city apparently has signaled that it plans to shift those kinds of activities to the Center and has declared the Hall superfluous, by trying to shop it around leased out for purposes of economic development. Not only does this reflect curiously on the city’s financial priorities, but its intended use for economic development itself poses serious questions.

Mayor Keith Hightower wants to lease the Hall for a rock-bottom price for 15 years for two purposes. First, it costs the city about $400,000 annually to maintain the property and is used but around 25 percent of the time according to city officials. By having a private concern pick up the maintenance tab, the city saves hundreds of thousands of dollars. Second, he wants to rent it out for use it as a movie production stage to complement the heightened interest in Shreveport as a film location, and perhaps to extend this interest to keep productions displaced from shooting in New Orleans to stick around here or to come back.

(There’s an interesting discrepancy here, because Shreveport’s 2005 budget claimed the Hall was used 58 percent of the time in 2004. This may be due to the fact that a number of users have their rental fees waived, and that may have been what was meant by the 25 percent figure, paying users. It’s hard to believe usage plunged that much in 2005. In any event, rental fees for all city structures, not just the Hall, accounted for only around $300,000 annually the past few years. Also, the 2005 budget notes a number of capital improvements needed for the Hall, totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars more in future expenditures.)

The financial consideration is a bit shortsighted. It seems curious that an administration that plans to blow $150 million on a dubious convention center and exceptionally dubious publicly-owned hotel, and tens of millions more on a sludge conversion contract that ended up financially benefiting Hightower allies, can be so concerned about a less than $400,000 or so yearly drain on the city’s coffers (unless it’s to cover losses stemming from the hotel that taxpayers will have to pick up).

Those users of the Hall who pay also have complained, since many do not have gatherings of the size to make renting the Center cost effective. Some have threatened for their meetings to head over to Bossier City which has taken a less penny-wise, pound-foolish approach by retaining its Civic Center even as its CenturyTel Center loses money.

Simultaneously, the idea to lease out the Hall for stage purposes also seems rather half-baked. Primarily, as a local industry insider recently pointed out, that kind of work typically is not done on location except for smaller, independent makers. Still, the idea might have merit if there were more of an infrastructure to entice major studios to haul non-local actors to Shreveport to do the inside work, as long as they are there for location work.

In fact, that may be on the horizon. Bossier Parish Community College is implementing a program to train workers for the film industry. Certainly this would increase chances of more productions coming this way that want the use of stage facilities (provided the state continues its corporate welfare for the film industry, which actually drains the state treasury more than it indirectly brings in). Shreveport even could offer, as part of the lease, to allow BPCC to use this envisioned one for its educational purposes.

However, at best this constitutes only a short-term solution. BPCC will not want to spread inefficiently its resources geographically and no doubt should move to have its own production facilities built as quickly as it can. And then the contemplated Shreveport complex would have state-subsidized competition that likely would make it a losing proposition that no lessee concerned about making a profit along these lines would want to touch and the city is back to square one.

Balancing the desires of smaller organizations that use the Hall against a doubtful plan which, if anything, would turn into Shreveport’s own version of corporate welfare (with some interest hitting the jackpot with essentially a free building), Hightower needs to scrap this idea.

Even the best get seduced by the trappings of power

Maybe radio talk show host Moon Griffon has a point when he says don’t vote for any legislator facing term limits in one Louisiana legislative chamber if trying to get elected to the other in 2007. His idea is that even the best politicians, if they stay too long in Baton Rouge, become seduced by the trappings of power in state government and they need to go home after as many as 12 years. Ironically, he’s become personally involved in a case that proves his point.

For a conservative like Moon, Republican state Rep. Ernie Alexander on the surface would seem to be a great legislator. In the 2005 regular legislative session, he ranked the highest (70/100) of all 144 on my Louisiana Legislature Log’s voting record list. Indeed, Alexander has been a guest on Griffon’s program many times. But when Moon began publicizing state Rep. Blade Morrish’s voting record (he scored 56/100), a friend of Alexander’s who is one of those term-limited House members looking to win a Senate seat, Alexander took umbrage.

He sent a letter to Griffon basically stating that candidate advertisements being run on Griffon’s show, combined with Griffon’s negative tone towards the records of other putative candidates running for the same offices, meant that Griffon’s might be yanked by broadcasters:

If the general managers of the stations on the Moon Griffon network understood what the facts are … they would have to make the decision to remove your program from the station lineup or become a willing participant in any lawsuits or FCC investigations that could follow.

Except that this summation, incredibly enough made by a former general manager of radio stations, is almost totally wrong and false. The Code of Federal Regulations is very clear concerning the obligations broadcast licensees must follow regarding political speech by candidates for public office (the Federal Communications Commission summarizes them here.) To summarize:

Griffon can say anything he wants about any candidate for office. He is not a candidate for office and thus none of these rules apply to him. The days of the “fairness doctrine,” which would have been unlikely to apply in any case, are long gone.

If one of his affiliate stations runs a network Griffon ad for a political candidate, to be in compliance with the law/regulations, all the station would have to do is allow other candidates for that office to buy air time at a price regulated by FCC rules at a time broadly set by FCC standards (see 47CFR73 Subpart H Sec. 73.1941).

There is no standing to sue; indeed, a plaintiff first must lodge a protest with the FCC, but such a protest would go nowhere because stations are required to keep records on these matters and any reasonably competent manager merely would have to prove that if a rival candidate had come to his station and asked to buy air time when the station had aired an ad for a candidate in the same contest via syndication from Griffon, that he offered such at non-discriminatory rates and non-discriminatory times. There’s simply no reason a station would need to remove Griffon’s programming on the basis Alexander claims.

Which leads to what appears to be Alexander’s regrettable motives. Surely someone of his experience in the industry knows all of this; if not, he must have been a pretty incompetent general manager (if so, I’ll leave a seat open for him in my introductory American Government class, for the lecture that we go over this). It seems to me that a genuinely friendly, if misguided, reproach could have been done without involving the citizenry’s money; that he spent Louisiana tax dollars by using legislative stationery and had the state pick up the cost of mailing also is telling;.

It tells that Alexander has been in office too long to know the difference between ethical and unethical use of power and taxpayer’s resources (Alexander accuses Griffon of “doing something which is unethical;” might the Louisiana Ethics Administration Program be interested in Alexander’s use of state funds on what seems to be a personal political quest)? It tells us that even a conservative who often has spoken and voted against the arrogance of big government can become seduced by it. And it tells us that maybe Moon is right – throw all the bums out regardless of their partisan affiliations or their ideologies, because if a representative like Alexander can be turned into the thing he appeared to be against, than anybody can be.