If GOP candidates sound like Democrats, seat jeopardized

Two notable and connected things emerged when the dust settled around qualifying for the Fifth Congressional District special election in Louisiana – the contest attracted a number of whiners if not ignoramuses, and it may be that some of these could give a Democrat the best chance imaginable to win the seat.

Triggered by the sudden upcoming resignation of Rep. Rodney Alexander, as previously noted the race was bound to attract a lot of interest given that any Member of Congress from the state who stays at least one term in office who runs for reelection has not lost since the World War II period and, as a result, open seats open up only rarely. This once-in-a-generation opportunity in the district sucked in 14 contestants, and perhaps six of them may be regarded as competitive – state Sen. Neil Riser, state Reps. Marcus Hunter, Robert Johnson, and Jay Morris, Public Service Commissioner Clyde Holloway, and Monroe Mayor Jamie Mayo.

Riser, Morris, and Holloway are white Republicans, Johnson is a white Democrat, and Hunter and Mayo are black Democrats. The district’s registrant composition is about two-thirds white, one-third black and about a half Democrat and a quarter Republican, although in recent statewide and presidential elections Republican candidates, as did Alexander in his elections, have outpolled considerably Democrats.

Johnson unlikely to fool voters in Fifth District tilt

As qualifying for the U.S. House Fifth District seat being vacated by Rep. Rodney Alexander wraps up, a white potentially competitive Democrat plans to enter the contest so that his party may dream of picking off the district. Can this guy make it a reality?

Simply, a black Democrat is unlikely to win, given none of them are close to conservative enough to attract anything beyond the paltry numbers of the hard left/Angry Left among whites within the district. Thus, the party’s only hope is in getting a white Democrat who could demonstrate some crossover appeal to more conservative whites.

And into the ring last week went the hat of State Rep. Robert Johnson, a white Democrat from around former Gov. Edwin Edwards’ old stomping grounds. Johnson perhaps is best known for attacking the Gov. Bobby Jindal Administration’s plans to privatize prison operations in central Louisiana. Although he and others succeeded in stopping that efficiency measure, he did provide a truckload of asinine comments that can be exploited by opponents in his current endeavor by his repeated demonstrably erroneous assertions that streamlining corrections would cost more and by claims that taxpayers had the obligation to pay more in order to increase the number and remuneration of state employees. Making matters tougher, he had less than $15,000 as of the end of 2012 in his state campaign account, which he can use for this contest, and his 2011 personal disclosure form (having filed for an extension for the 2012 edition) shows he might have difficulty in self-financing a sprint to the Oct. 19 election.

Arrests should prompt Shreveport review of its procedures

While there are mishaps all around that led to the awful situation that has led to five arrests and the investigation of additional Shreveport firefighters, it does all begin and end with them and suggests the city has not done enough to prevent potential future similar problems from occurring.

In the past three weeks, arrests have been made connected to the alleged abuse of a couple of intellectually developmentally disabled individuals at Fire Station 8, located at the Fairgrounds, purported to be from the simply cruelly juvenile (stranding the individual on the roof for days) to the morally disturbing (goading the individual into illegal sexual activity while observed). Too many unsettling questions have arisen as these revelations emerged.

The first of which being how the presumed incidents came to the public consciousness. Details about the arrests apparently came from leaked court documents, and while a day later First District Attorney’s spokesman and fellow Fax-Net columnist Pat Culverhouse tendered his resignation, there apparently was no connection between the two events. But as the SFD had received notice of the allegations in late June and over a month passed before any arrests were made, this has led observers to wonder whether the SFD tried to downplay, if not quash, a criminal investigation.

Focus on support, tuition misses real LA college problem

As the academic year begins for most Louisiana public universities, we get another dose of alarmism: tuition is going up and Louisiana is among the quarter of states not increasing state funding of higher education; indeed, it continues to reduce that. It’s assumed that these ought to be worrisome trends and therefore should be altered by state policy, meaning stop raising rates (or at least as much) and start shoveling more state money at Louisiana higher education.  Wrong.

When a condition is misdiagnosed, you get the incorrect treatment. And beyond increases in tuition and fees over the past few years (for example, tuition and fees at my institution for a state resident taking a 12-hour load have gone up a third from three years ago) and a decline in state support (of four-ninths over the same time period for all Louisiana higher education), it’s another set of data that provide insight into guiding higher education policy in the state in the near future.

The latest data from the Southern Regional Education Board, which tracks particularly the 16 states considered with Louisiana as part of the region, that are fiscal year 2012, confirm the downward trend of state-funded spending, even relative to all other states. Since FY 2009, Louisiana in percentage terms has had the second highest reduction among SREB states and fourth highest among all states.

Money spent wisely if LA tax reform idea still pushed

It’s correct to say both that taxpayer expenses paid to research and publicize Gov. Bobby Jindal’s unsuccessful tax reform plan of earlier this year were a victim of the state’s populist streak in its political culture and provided value as long as lessons learned do get applied.

The idea was, in general, to flatten and broaden the tax code by getting rid of many exemptions and eliminating the income tax by a swap for higher sales tax rates. Intellectually, the idea absolutely was correct if the goal was to create a more robust economy by encouraging better, more efficient use of inputs by the nongovernment sector. Unfortunately, that was not a goal shared with a significant number of policy-makers and special interests.

Populism prevented that, and stood in direct contrast with the basic theory behind the swap based on the idea that economic gains measured in an absolute sense were the most desired. That is, the best economic system was the one that produced the most overall wealth, because that meant most would be better off. However, century-old populism infused into Louisiana’s political culture derives from a relativist view: one group gains at the expense of others, where the political process determines the winners and losers (such as by having a progressive tax code or in carving out exemptions and subsidies for favored constituencies). Whoever flexes the most political muscle shapes economic outcomes, causing conflict and division, instead of embracing a unifying paradigm that gives all an equal chance to succeed economically in proportion to the contribution they make to that effort (although skewed somewhat by government to ensure that those willing but least able to contribute enjoy charity from others that supplies them with basic necessities, although in practice usually much more than just that).

LA delegation must balance between nation, state residents

The balancing act now conducted by Louisiana politicians on the issue of flood premiums demonstrates the tension between following good holistic policy and playing to electoral politics at home.

Plagued by frequent stopgap funding requests for the National Flood Insurance Program, last year Congress passed legislation designed to put the program on consistent footing for the next few years, as part of a larger bill which passed along billions of dollars to Louisiana related to the 2010 drilling rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico that caused the state environmental problems. All homeowners in a flood zone must purchase it while others may do so optionally from the program established by the federal government 45 years ago in lieu of private insurers. The idea was to set a uniform rate nationwide covering a broad-based clientele to prevent wide variations in premiums, including prohibitively expensive ones.

But it also was supposed to be self-supporting, even though by statute this was not achieved in the initial pricing and has only crept towards that ever since. Last year’s legislation was supposed to achieve that by inducing rate hikes based somewhat on risk as high as 20 percent per year over several years. Louisiana’s congressional delegation unanimously approved of it even as a few reservations were voiced, most often from Sen. Mary Landrieu and from Sen. David Vitter through his competing legislation and negotiations to limit increases and to spread them out over more time and to make it easier to demonstrate greater protection from flooding.

Intrigue aplenty in Riser House bid, quest to stop him

It’s been just a week since Rep. Rodney Alexander’s surprise announcement to ditch his current office in favor of a sinecure in the Gov. Bobby Jindal Administration came out, and the sequence of events since then makes for intriguing potential political scenarios of soap operatic proportions. From the beginning:

The heir apparent gambit. Observers not only were struck by Alexander’s announcement that initially he would not run for reelection, but then felt the surprise compounded by his quick amending of it to say he was resigning within weeks to head up the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. This immediately redounded to the advantage of state Sen. Neil Riser, who has money, a political action committee already set up, and has admitted he had nudged Alexander all along in this direction. It also seemed convenient that Jindal, with the secretary’s spot open since the beginning of the year, suddenly decided to fill it at this time with Alexander. This has led some to accuse a "rigging" of the election for Riser, disavowed by the Jindal Administration.

The timing and scheduling of a special election with the grooving of the job to Alexander favored Riser much more than any other potential candidate. It seemed allow Jindal to set up a situation where he did not have to pick and choose among acceptable candidates to him by creating an environment encouraging others to defer. That another whispered-about candidate, state Sen. Mike Walsworth, immediately deferred, other GOP Members of Congress jumped in to endorse Riser quickly, and another rumored candidate, Alexander’s chief of staff Adam Terry, seemed caught flatfooted, appears to confirm some detailed machinations went on in the background to clear the Republican field for Riser and to put non-Republicans at a disadvantage.

LA college solutions plentiful; legislative will lacking

I guess now that Louisiana House Speaker Chuck Kleckley chose to bring it up, I can’t be accused of flogging a dead horse on the issue of positioning Louisiana higher education to deliver quality in the face of a changing environment that puts a premium on efficiency and new modes of delivery.

This space repeatedly has offered up policy changes designed to address this goal (the most recent being here), which long-time readers will think sounds like a broken record (speaking of new modes of delivery, in this case of music, perhaps younger readers will not recognize that cliché.) Kleckley’s request in front of media members for higher education leaders to volunteer vigorously their own ideas to some degree pretends that there has not been attempted recently that very effort in an organized fashion, as part of the Postsecondary Education Review Commission, many ideas of which found themselves forwarded as legislation, almost none of which ever made it into law. Another effort dedicated itself just to the issue of governance.

So it’s a bit disingenuous to imply that the higher education community in the debate needs this shrug of the shoulders from Kleckley as a call to provide answers where the Legislature has failed, because they and others already have provided these to the Legislature, which, under Kleckley’s leadership, simply has failed to embrace them. But, in the spirit of bending over backwards to assist, here’s some more of them and repackaged in a way that might get the Legislature to act more decisively than its current tepid GRAD Act framework that pays for mild performance gains.

New leadership needed but delayed for Caddo schools

The Caddo Parish School Board lived up to its history of indecisiveness with superintendent hiring last week when it failed to name one in a scheduled attempt. Meanwhile, a partial list of school performance scores came out, which may have everything or nothing to do with what the Board finally will do next.

One might have thought that with seven months of lead time some kind of final decision could get made. Back then, the Board did not renew the contract of outgoing Superintendent Gerald Dawkins, meaning his last day of work ends up being this week, right before the school year’s beginning. Dawkins’ five years was marked by a rapid deterioration in the district’s fiscal position that led to retrenchment mirroring that drop in pupil population and was marked by a persistent inability to raise district performance …

… until perhaps this past year? Although it will be in the fall that the state releases all the data on school performance, under federal law it must alert parents about the status of failing schools (that continue under the same operator) prior to the beginning of the school year. It did so quietly last week, not even posting a list statewide.

Misrepresenting group exists only to spend tax dollars

In the wake of Treasurer John Kennedy’s announcement that his office would demand compliance about reporting requirements for nongovernmental organizations that receive state money, the one of the three dozen cited that has received the most attention as it is connected to a state senator he may have trouble in getting accurate information from it any time soon – because it appears that group for nearly a decade has been in violation of Internal Revenue Service rules and misrepresenting itself to the public while existing only to spent nearly $1 million taxpayer dollars

While state Sen. Yvonne Dorsey-Colomb frets that The Colomb Foundation, founded by her husband, surely should not be on this list, blaming a lack of documentation provided – that was first requested 18 months prior – on “office moves,” in fact the organization has a history of failure to provide proper legal documentation regarding what it holds itself out to be. According to its corporate filing with the state, it began in 2004, predating her marriage to him, and currently is in good standing with the state.

But the problem is, if we take it at its word, it never has been in good standing with the Internal Revenue Service. The group solicits donations and on its website at the appropriate page states, “We are a 501(c)(3) non-profit, meaning that your contribution of time or money will be tax deductible.” In order to achieve this, a group must secure from the IRS a letter of determination, and then to stay in good standing must follow a regular schedule of reporting.