No matter where, pork shouldn't prevail

It depends on which side of the Red River you live whether it’s legal. But, regardless of whether a river runs through it, it’s unethical.

Tomorrow, the Shreveport City Council will try to find a way to evade the city’s charter. Prompted by Democrat Mayor Adrian Perkins – no stranger to trying to sidestep the law in various ways such as spending city tax dollars on his inauguration, double-billing on his automobile usage, and city appointments – the Council had budgeted in 2021 to give each of its seven members authority to direct $250,000 for road work in their districts. Sec. 4.32 flat out prohibits this, which begs the question whether the Perkins Administration or councilors and staff even bothered to read the charter.

With plenty of winks and nods, Republican Councilor James Flurry will try to salvage the deal by shuttling funds to the city’s Office of Community Development – which has authority over workforce development, business development, affordable housing and improvements, homelessness, public services, public facilities, and program funding for federal grants but not roads – and have him and his colleagues “pick up the phone and [ask] ‘Say can you do this? Can you help us on this? I have a need.’ And they come up with the funds. But this time we'll have our own funds there.”

Lawmaker ignorance subverts good care policy

If you’re going to make bad policy, at least know what you’re talking about, a lesson that Republican state Rep. Larry Bagley needs to learn.

This week, the Louisiana Legislature’s Joint Medicaid Oversight Committee had one of its occasional meetings to review matters of interest. One concerned a rule change that would shovel over $5 million more to nursing homes that would convert more rooms to single occupancy even though it would appear this would not reduce the overgenerous compensation these providers receive,  nor discourage payment for excess licensed beds in a system that disproportionately sends Medicaid clients to nursing homes instead of almost-always less expensive home- and community-based care.

The counter-intuitiveness of the change hasn’t fazed key legislators who could trigger a review and its potential veto, leading them to scramble in justifying it. This includes Bagley, who has attempted to fend off criticism of it, which equates to criticism of him, for as chairman of the House Health and Welfare Committee he could have called his committee to meet by the end of the week to vet the change.

LA finally gets rural broadband right -- for now

This is how you do rural broadband right – if you can keep it.

After over a decade of false starts, it appears over the next decade Louisiana will start filling in the rural broadband gaps. Award notices from the Federal Communications Commission’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund went out, with Louisiana picking up over $342 million worth of services intended to reach over 175,000 addresses in areas currently unserved by broadband.

Twice the state has attempted to obtain federal dollars to expand the provision, off of initiatives from the Democrat former Pres. Barack Obama Administration. Twice it wisely abandoned the efforts because of the strangulation of red tape and concentration on achieving political objectives at the expense of service provision.

New name doesn't change need to sell BC arena

The first step is to rename Bossier City’s CenturyLink Center Drive and the city’s CenturyLink Center Arena Special Revenue Fund. The next is to sell the renamed Brookshire Grocery Arena.

Under whatever name, the two-decades-old arena near the foot of the Jimmie Davis Bridge consistently has lost money. Its siting in open space closer to residential areas than any commercial activity, much less the kind that could leverage off the facility such as entertainment establishments, with somewhat constricted road access came for political, not economic, reasons that might otherwise have caused its building around the Interstate 20/220 intersection by Louisiana Downs.

Emergence of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic illuminated even more brightly its white elephant status. With essentially no activity occurring in the arena for most of the year and perhaps several months into 2021, its deficit grew so large that the city last month the City Council swiped $500,000 – nearly the entire ending 2019 Disaster Relief Fund balance – to pay off 2020 property taxes on the structure and the first two months of 2021 (non)operating expenses. (Whether the legal restrictions that came with the grant of that money would permit such use is another matter.)

Edwards, legislators squander Medicaid dollars

It’s bad enough that both Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards and Louisiana’s Republican legislative leaders have adopted as their main fiscal strategy pennies from heaven. It’s unconscionable that they have to make matters worse for taxpayers and the infirm on top of that.

Rather than start the long overdue paring of state government, imperative more than ever with revenue shortfalls courtesy of Edwards mandates in response to the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, Edwards and GOP leaders just cross their fingers and hope money rains down on the state from federal taxpayers to stave off a huge budget deficit, looming perhaps as soon as early next year. The last thing they need to do in this environment is to aggravate matters with extra needless, if not counterproductive, spending.

But that’s exactly what they seem poised to do. This fall, the Department of Health issued a rule revision that would shovel more money to nursing homes paid through Medicaid. The latest data indicate that Medicaid covers about four-fifths of state nursing home residents, which means, since typically other payment sources are charged higher rates, that around three-quarters of industry revenues come from taxpayers. All in all, state taxpayers funnel around $1.2 billion yearly into nursing home operators’ pockets.

Edwards tries to delay likely day of reckoning

It’s too common for Louisiana elected officials to break the law, but in this particular instance the anxiety prompting this reflects a larger policy failure.

This week, the state’s Revenue Estimating Conference announced it would it abrogate its legal duty to met before the end of the year. The REC provides revenues estimates for the current fiscal year, which could require executive and legislative actions to trim an ongoing budget deficit, and for future fiscal years, particularly for the upcoming one where a revenue baseline it determines sets the maximum amount that state government can spend in the budgeting process commencing this spring.

One of its four members, current chairman Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne who represents Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards, asked for this. With a wink and a nod, the other members – House Speaker Republican Clay Schexnayder, Senate Pres. Republican Page Cortez, and university economist Stephen Barnes – assented.

Reverse Robin Hood should trigger TOPS rethink

While those who value effectiveness and efficiency over political patronage and wealth redistribution – upwards – prepare to fend off Democrat presumptive Pres. Joe Biden’s suspension of student loan debt, few states will see less impact from this than Louisiana even as the issue highlights where the state can do better.

To start, Biden’s idea of using executive branch discretion permitted in the law authorizing this lending by the federal government to forgive anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000 abuses the law and seems incredibly unlikely to withstand judicial scrutiny. Which is why he’ll try it, even if it is doomed to failure, and understanding the dynamics of the debt held explains this.

While the average debt outstanding was around $29,000 (in 2019), the median was only $17,000 (in 2016, when the average was about the same). This reflects a heavy skew towards graduate education and private schooling. In fact, the large majority of total debt is held by households with high incomes whose members attended expensive schools and/or pursued graduate – usually professional – degrees. The typical household could pay off that average amount at fewer than $200 a month for 20 years, and usually has income that can support that.

Election results confirm GOP takeover of LA

This past weekend’s elections put the final touches on the takeover of Louisiana by the Republican Party.

At the statewide and parish level, the only contest settled in partisan fashion was the Public Service Commission District 1 race where incumbent Republican Eric Skrmetta won a third and final term, leaving the PSC with a 3-2 Republican majority. This complements the GOP majorities on the Louisiana Supreme Court and Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, and every other single statewide executive office save for that of Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards.

Last year, when Republicans swept to a seat more than a supermajority in the Senate and came up just two short of the same in the House, plus winning handily all but the governorship where Edwards squeaked out reelection, much comment occurred about these topline results. Almost unobserved was a quiet revolution in courthouses that began with sheriffs’ elections in 2019 and concluded with district attorney contests this fall.

Engaged LA voters sent amendment to defeat

Misunderstanding why Amendment 1 failed last weekend serves as a larger metaphor for the steady erosion of leftist legacy media influence in Louisiana.

That amendment would have allowed out-of-state residents to serve on state governing boards of higher education. The majority of states permit this, with proponents arguing that it allows for broader perspectives on higher education management, and certainly the state’s very underachieving system of higher education in the state could benefit from this additional input.

But Louisiana higher education management won’t benefit from a larger knowledge base until it moves away from its long-standing tendency to have too many political hacks awarded seats by the governor who appoints them with rubber-stamp Senate approval, who essentially buy their way onto a board. Let’s just review campaign contributions from the Board of Regents appointments made by Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards.

Progressive mayors costing LA; relief needed

Where is the Kevin Lincoln for Shreveport and New Orleans?

Republican Lincoln will assume the mayoralty of Stockton, CA next month. A native, he joined the Marines, rising to become part of the elite unit guarding the president on helicopter trips. Out of the service, back home he became a pastor, then challenged incumbent Democrat Michael Tubbs. (Technically, the office is nonpartisan, but the candidates are widely labelled as above.)

Elected at 26 after a term on the city council, Tubbs was the left’s rock star. A majority-minority electorate gave him 70 percent of the vote to become the city’s first black mayor, whereupon he began implementing a progressive agenda, largely funded by hitting up starry-eyed leftist philanthropies. Since Stockton has a council-manager system of government (the city council appoints a professional manager to run most city functions), the amount of money he raised for these programs far exceeded his austere official city budget.