If pursued, Act II for Georges probably to end like first

Ten days ago New Orleans businessman John Georges loaned his nearly defunct Louisiana campaign account $10.1 million, bringing the total he owes himself with his past 2007 governor’s and 2010 New Orleans mayor’s campaign debts to over $22.5 million. What does it mean and where will it lead, if anywhere?

Although his campaign finance paperwork indicates he could run for any statewide office, Georges is accustomed to being a chief executive officer and would not settle for anything but governor. Whether he will commit to it perhaps depends upon his chances of winning, which will be shaped by an assessment of his past campaigns and what they tell about him as a candidate, and of the blandishments of potential flatterers who will want to use his money for their purposes.

In 2007, running as an independent, despite spending over $11 million, even more than eventual winner and presumed fall opponent Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal, Georges finished a distant third and barely beat Jindal in his home and heavily non-Republican Orleans Parish. In 2010, running as a Democrat despite sounding more conservative than liberal, he finished third after spending about $550 a vote. In other words, his past results have been rather unimpressive, demonstrating not much electability.

Unlike others, fiscal bill treats only symptom, not disease

State Rep. Brett Geymann’s HB 189 provokes an interesting argument about a somewhat questionable state practice, but in that respect, and imperfectly, only tries to treat the symptom, not the disease that direly needs addressing.

The bill would require a two-thirds supermajority in each chamber of the Louisiana Legislature to allow for use in operating budgets of “one-time” money, which the bill defines as money going into any special Treasury fund (that is, not the general fund) not forecasted to go there previously by the Revenue Estimating Conference (which applies to several large revenue streams but not to many small funds collecting taxes and fees for specific purposes) or money that that REC declares as recurring yet originates from one-time transactions, such as “court settlements, the sale of state facilities, and the privatization of state operations.”

From the start, the bill contains a conceptual flaw with its overbroad definition of “one-time.”

Caddo school changes finally begin necessary reforms

Yesterday Caddo Parish School District Superintendent Gerald Dawkins got approved to run the parish's school for two more years although with no pay raise. Perhaps the "Vision 2020" plan recently approved by the Caddo Parish School Board that also extended his contract proved decisive here, as through it Dawkins finally decided rearranging deck chairs isn’t enough with the radical realignment program for the hemorrhaging district to save money - even as that only partially fits the bill.

The plan, which closes and consolidates a number of schools, finally acknowledges that doing less with more will not keep the district financially viable. As of the 2008-09 school year, the district had 42,610 students, a decrease of 8 percent from 1999-2000, even as district revenues increased almost 45 percent to $447 million, per pupil spending rose about 16 percent to $9,511, and average teacher salary jumped 17 percent to $47,191 during that span.

But it wasn’t just the hollowing out of the system that compelled to this restructuring.

Report confirms wastefulness of LA media tax credits

Stopped clocks are right twice a day, and even though generally they place greater priority on spending for spending’s sake rather than in setting priorities, promoting efficiency, and right-sizing government, the collectivists arguing for more tax increases that would cause even fewer people to pull the wagon with increasingly more people on it are right about one thing: the state tax credit giveaways to film, theater, sound, and interactive media are a waste bar none.

Every couple of years the Louisiana’s Department of Economic Development comes out with a report on the impact of those credits, with the latest attempt being unveiled yesterday. It’s always the same song and dance that breathlessly is publicized, focusing mainly on film since about 99 percent of the credits dispersed are in that area – jobs created (in film by the latest 2009 computations, assuming all activity is as a result of the credits, about 4,471), economic impact in varying degrees of directness ($592.6 million), and economic value generated for each dollar in credits ($5.59).

But hidden in the report, and what you never hear from the LED propagandists and their allies in the industry, because it’s required by the law that is the report’s impetus, is the tax dollars, local and state, actually generated by the credits and how much the credits cost.

Bill unreasonably pumps too much from taxpayers

While laudatory with its emphasis on providing more and better options to encourage improved health among children, HB 313 by state Rep. Scott Simon places too many demands on taxpayers when much less expensive and disruptive solutions are available.

This bill would mandate that state buildings, exclusive of those for elementary and secondary education at the local level, must provide a private room with ample electricity and plumbing to allow breast pumping for women. Unfortunately, it is a solution that could cost taxpayers potentially millions of dollars in renovation costs now, and extra costs in future building, searching for an essentially nonexistent problem.

It’s helpful to understand what’s involved in this issue. First, note that Louisiana Revised Statutes 51:2247.1 essentially gives a nursing mother the right to breastfeed in any public accommodation in a manner not segregated from the rest of the public. Of the minority of women who breastfeed, the majority already enjoy this protection and need no special rooms for their ability to enjoy it. Thus, clients in state buildings or their employees who can have their babies brought into the workplace, even just during lunch hour, need no special room.

Merge LA retirement systems to improve performance

At least some progress has come at the poster child for problems with Louisiana’s retirement systems, the Municipal Police Employees Retirement System, has taken and looks to take other steps to rein in the potential for abuse of retiree and taxpayer dollars. But risk unnecessarily exists unless more drastic changes make their way into law.

As previously noted, MPERS launched questionable investment strategies and compounded with lax oversight controls created a situation that accelerated poor financial performance and allowed siphoning off additional funds to fraud. As a result, retirees from almost all municipal police forces in the state draw lower pensions and taxpayers must pony up more money and/or forgo increased service to compensate.

To date a trio of bills, SB 2 by state Sen. Elbert Guillory, HB 426 by state Rep. Chuck Kleckley and HB 332 by state Rep. Kevin Pearson, seek to address fundamental shortcomings in managing the funds designed for state employees. Kleckley’s bill addresses three of the four major funds by adding state executive branch representation, while Pearson’s alters of the composition of MPERS trustees specifically and Guillory’s addresses the same for the small Registrars of Voters Employees' Retirement System, adding the potential for much more informed and professional management.

Still, it’s not enough at getting at the root of the problem. Part of the breakdown at MPERS came because the trustees, with the exception of ex-oficio members the chairmen of the respective House and Senate Retirement Committees who rarely attended trustees meetings, were all current or retired officers with little background in finance. Adding the executive branch officers can provide more sunshine and opportunities to interject expertise into governance, but appointed representatives still would predominate. At MPERS, it was this majority of trustees that approved implementation of unsound managerial practices in the first place.

But related to the potential for inexpert majorities to make unwise decisions is Louisiana simply has too many separate retirement systems. Besides the four major “state” systems, there are the nine other “statewide” systems (such as MPERS) and then 20 designed for specific local jurisdictions. All having separate boards of trustees and only the four state systems at present with any formal state executive branch presence (under the jurisdiction of the state treasurer), it creates a lot of appointed positions but little guaranteed expertise.

Much better would be to dramatically reduce the number of systems, perhaps even to the minimum of one as practiced in Maine and Hawai’i. It may not have to be even that low, as similar-sized states neighboring Mississippi and Oregon have only four, while larger Wisconsin has just three and much bigger Ohio has six and New York nine.

There seems to be no logical reason to have so many systems separated out as they currently exist in the state, other than decades ago as state and local agencies agreed with the advantages of offering retirement benefits to their employees these systems came into being in piecemeal fashion. Are the investment objectives, given their specific kinds of employment, so different among registrars’ employees, municipal police employees, and employees of most state agencies? Why cannot a single board invest on behalf of all?

Having fewer systems means fewer boards with inexpert trustees and the reduced possibility of their activities escaping oversight. It also increases investment options by having larger pools of assets to put to work and limits the impact that bad investments can make. True reform of the structure of retirement systems in Louisiana would consolidate the many systems into a very few and putting board membership policies into place that would maximize oversight and professional management – making a repeat of what happened at MPERS over the past dozen years much less likely.

Results confirm Democrat impotency, emerging shrillness

Reality, as much as they tried to deny it, finally came home to Louisiana Democrats as the Senate finally approved a congressional remap that conformed to what Republicans, especially Gov. Bobby Jindal, wanted. In a larger sense, the surrender confirms the transformation of Louisiana politics.

The House adamantly supported GOP preferences and had its bill HB 6 by state Rep. Erich Ponti forwarded to the Senate, with the argument that, given Jindal’s position that he would sign only a bill like it with two north-south districts, it had the only bill that realistically could go into law. Further, House leaders agreed with Jindal that if the Senate would not agree now to this, they were willing to end the session without this matter resolved. Enough Democrat senators had succeeded in blocking this bill and in passing an alternative that improved their chances of electing Democrats only through the aid of former co-partisans who had defected on these votes in order to satisfy what they saw as regional imperatives.

In the past few days, Democrats and their shills had tried a number of tactics to deflect blame from their obstructionism. They faulted Jindal for insertion of his intentions – ignoring the fact the Constitution gives him an explicit role in the process. They tried to claim somehow their idea of having northern and central bands as districts somehow had some kind of moral superiority – even as theirs’ ravaged at least as many community interests, were opposed by at least as many communities as they claimed supported it, and were at least as partisan as the majority’s plan. They sought to define a session that did not act on a congressional plan as a failure costing taxpayer dollars (despite their wasting of time in acquiescing to adjournments and in supporting resolutions arguing for completion of congressional remapping) – even as if they had bowed sooner to the reality that they did not have the power to pass their partisan plan the session would already have ended with a congressional plan in place.

Yet the Senate in committee took the bill and would not agree to pass it out unless it was altered radically, away from the established preference. That happened only because state Sen. Bill Kostelka, who opposed in principle the alteration, voted to get it to the floor to keep the process alive. This became crucial because House leaders reiterated that a Senate bill similar to the amended version simply could not pass and would not move it, and if that was the best the Senate could do, the session would not produce resolution.

This still did not quell Democrat desperation, born of protest against their new political world where they do not have majorities in any branch of Louisiana government. Perhaps the most persistent objector to the preferred plan was Democrat Pres. Joel Chaisson, who urged the Senate to reject amendments by state Sen. Neil Riser to put the bill essentially back in the form it had come from the House.

But the Senate finally saw it Jindal’s and the House’s way by approving Riser’s amendment fairly decisively. As a point of reference, three of the five switchers from Democrat to Republican in the past four years who had voted against Riser’s bill SB 24 that had been similar to Ponti’s voted for the amendment.

Chaisson basically threw in the towel at this point. But now black Democrats brought up their own previously-defeated, and very likely unconstitutional, two majority-minority districts, and state Sen. Lydia Jackson harangued its membership by saying repeated calls to call the question on the entire bill, which didn’t succeed, were racially discriminatory – as part of a larger kitchen-sink tactic to try to set up a legal challenge to anything that doesn’t fit their plan. Arrogantly, state Sen. Karen Peterson echoed the theme that racism lay behind rejection of that plan (which brought objection of her rhetoric from state Sen. Joe McPherson, even as he said he liked the idea because it would be a good district for him to run for Congress).

However, in the end, all the bullying and posturing amounted to nothing, with the defeat of this amendment and then passage of the bill in the Senate. Later, the House concurred in the Senate changes, sending it to Jindal for his expected signature.

In some ways, the exercise reminds of the scenes in the original version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where alien life forms come to Earth as seedlings, grow into pods, subsume humans bodily, and then supplant them, although in the end humans prevent them from taking power. When the pod swallows the body was like when Riser’s amendment succeeded, signaling a substantive end for white Democrats as being able to control affairs of Louisiana government. After that, the emergence of the mutated human symbolizes the new Democrats in government, evidenced by their last-ditch amendment and associated rhetoric of now a voting minority party run by its racial minority members, and unable to wield power.

In historical perspective, the way to conceptualize the place of this session, and specifically on the issue of the congressional map, is to see it as the final stage of the transfer of power from Democrats, pursuing a populist, liberal agenda, to Republicans, following a reform, conservative agenda. And while the new majority will continue with its previous agenda, the powers that will run the now-minority will change its agenda. Look for it to become more shrill, based upon casting racist motives on the majority, and even more emotive and less analytical in its argumentation. Thus is the price of progress in improved policy-making in Louisiana.

Court stops try to make LA recognize same sex marriage

Finally, reasoning heads have prevailed when the full federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that other states’ laws do not have to alter Louisiana’s Constitution in an area where states have full autonomy to exercise power.

The court overturned earlier rulings by a district court and a three-judge panel of its to declare that Louisiana did not have to issue a birth certificate with the names of two males for a Louisiana child they adopted. In other states that permit adoption by a couple of the same sex they had adopted this child, and also benefitted from a same-sex marriage. Then they asked that both of their names be placed upon the Louisiana-issued certificate.

But Louisiana law says that adoption may occur only to a family of a single individual or of a married couple. Further, the Louisiana Constitution defines marriage as occurring between a single man and a single woman.

Futile plan opposition to continue at LA citizens' expense

After travelling a convoluted path, bills to redistrict the Louisiana House and Senate pretty much ended up where they started, while some less-than-honest legislators continued the spadework to throw a spanner into the process to satisfy their political agenda.

HB 1 and SB 1, the chambers’ plans, passed by large margins in the other chamber and now go for promised signature into law by Gov. Bobby Jindal. Neither is much different from their versions originally introduced, making necessary boundary shifts due to population and increasing the number of minority-majority seats that gets the overall proportion of such districts closer to, but not equivalent to and still below, the proportion of the state’s black population. Besides that goal, chamber leaders said the plans also focused on incumbent protection.

These outcomes are perfectly consistent with jurisprudence regarding redistricting and as such the plans suffer no constitutional deficiencies. Yet some black Democrat legislators, until the very end, either ignorant or disingenuous about the law, kept insisting otherwise. Understanding their political motives explains why.

Strange map maneuvers may reveal high-risk gambit

Even with the inevitability that interests aligned with Gov. Bobby Jindal will prevail at some point, publicity about Louisiana remapping of Congressional districts has taken away attention from a more curious dispute within the Legislature about how each chamber’s new districts are to look.

It’s unusual because the norm has been that each chamber takes care of its own lines and then the other defer totally to it, and vice-versa. But last week Republican House Speaker Jim Tucker declared that the Senate version SB 1 could not go through as is given the existence of non-contiguous precincts existing in a Rapides-parish based Senate district (the plan carves up the parish into four of them). Democrat Senate Pres. Joel Chaisson denied this and said Tucker was manufacturing the issue to hold the plan hostage for some unspecified reason. This touched off successive adjournments through the weekend presumably to work out matters.

Clearly, both leaders cannot be correct.