Budget hawks finally willing to back words with deeds?

Have so-called fiscal conservatives in the Legislature finally decided to take what has been to this point a supremely unserious effort in budget reform on their part and actually give it some substance? One only can hope with the pledge by a more than a couple of dozen of them to form a caucus and with it a political action committee to pursue this matter.

To date, the manner in which they have approached this has been mostly symbolic with little in the way of substance. During the past legislative session, they declared a pox on “one-time” money, some which is actual non-recurring dollars but most of which is recurring money shunted to dedicated funds that run surpluses that then require an extra legislative step known as a “funds sweep” to free them from perpetual non-use. This threw the budget out of balance, for which they then declared they had a solution – let somebody else (the commissioner of administration) take responsibility for balancing it using vague criteria they established, including hypocritically the use of one-time money.

More responsible heads prevailed, but that doesn’t mean the self-designated budget hawks have a bad idea. In fact, the notion that state government is bloated is right on the mark. Louisiana always has had a spending problem, not a revenue problem. But the solution is not to create a straw man born of an accounting trick called “one-time money” and then excommunicate it from a discussion of budgeting. The answer lies in properly matching revenues in order of priority of need, although that itself must come only after a decision (perhaps the first steps of this being taken now) about what amount of revenue and from where is appropriate for the state to address these needs in order of priority.

Voucher program standards set effort up for success

Promised accountability standards for non-public schools participating in Louisiana’s scholarship voucher program materialized and were approved by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education yesterday. A mixed bag, nevertheless they have more positives than negatives.

Participating schools will have students take the same academic tests as do students in the public schools, where reporting will occur for those with at least 40 program students or with one grade with at least 10 students. If after its first year of participation the school scores below 50 on a 150 point scale computed similarly as School Performance Scores for public schools (that being classified as “academically unacceptable) using only data from program students, it will be unable to accept additional program students and those there already may transfer out with priority. Do that three more years in a row, and the school gets yanked from the program.

But besides schools with few slots will have to meet these standards, many at least initially also won’t have to because testing only occurs from grade 3 on up. This means those that concentrate almost all of their slots in kindergarten through second grade will not have these standards apply – at this time about three-quarters of all slots available, although many schools appear willing to roll eligibility forward in grades as the years pass so soon most in the program will become subject to these standards.

Without genuine crisis, health care concerns reflect politics

What we must understand is that the concern voiced by Louisiana legislators over impending reductions in funds coming to the state’s charity hospitals has much more to do with their political careers than it does any reasonable worry that care for the uninsured or Medicaid clients will deteriorate significantly.

Yesterday, a number of legislators queried officials of the Gov. Bobby Jindal Administration about large reductions, nearly a quarter of the budget for the state’s charity hospital system, run by the Louisiana State University System, due to an unexpected clawback of the federal government of excess monies being sent the state’s way for Medicaid. The enabling legislation not yet a month old, they seemed unaware that Rome was not built in a day and pressed for details on specific cuts. Absent that, some lapsed into encounter group mode and testified about their feelings on this matter.

These, for the most part, revolved around a scenario of people clamoring for care that would be unable to access it at the facilities of the country’s only state-run hospital system for the care of the indigent, leading both to swamping non-state facilities or abandoning their quests to have medical attention for their hangnails or whatever else might ail them. Naturally, this dystopian view has next to no relation to reality.

Retirement systems keep tying to deceive the LA public

Although they were able to stave off any meaningful changes to retirement policy this past legislative session, Louisiana’s over 20 retirement systems overseen by it know they have to keep vigilant in maintaining an aura of competence or else very necessary and long overdue reforms will happen. Thus the public relations campaigns and extraordinary measures continue to try to prevent the public from understanding the fundamental problems that exist with the systems.

On the legal front, three of the smaller systems continue to try to rescue themselves from their own stupidity. The Municipal Employees Retirement System, the Firefighters’ Retirement System, and the New Orleans Firefighters’ Pension and Relief Fund presently are attempting Hail Mary legal maneuvers in foreign courts to try to claw back over $100 million all together in funds invested with Fletcher Asset Management years ago. The company refused, initially, to pay off a partial cash out, and, now, the entire amounts.

Idiotically, they allowed the investment adviser (of dubious worth) with which they retain to con them into thinking they would get a minimum of 12 percent return on investment. News flash for the tyros that comprise the governing boards: unless inflation is running rampant for an extended period of time, nobody can guarantee that return. Only fools, made the worse that it was not they but Louisiana taxpayers that bore the risk, get taken in by deals like this. Fletcher filed for and got bankruptcy protection earlier this month, amid calls it had been nothing more than a Ponzi scheme, a month after the Legislative Auditor issued a report critical of the practices of the three funds.

Subversion can negate LA higher education positives

Recently, this space reviewed the conditions that lead Louisiana higher education to a point where lack of accountability encouraged by both federal and state policy led to today’s delivery system plagued with inefficiency and subpar performance. A recent report highlights how state policy must continue to evolve, shaped by larger forces, in order to overcome this – and it’s as yet uncertain whether the proper policy response will come.

The Institute for a Competitive Workplace gave the state a lower-than-average overall grade in effectiveness, especially faulting the state for its ability to get students graduated and getting into the system students from lower-income families. But pulling the overall mark up was creating incentives for better performance, which system officials argued was a recent product of policy that should bring about this as time passes. They also argued the strategy shift to increase admissions standards at baccalaureate-and-above institutions while increasing community college capacity also would pay off in retention, the theory being that too many unprepared students got sent to four-year institutions.

With the increase in admissions standards starting this fall, theoretically those who do not meet the new standards would enter community colleges. There, the schools should function to mold students into scholars capable of handling courses that are sufficiently challenging to have them graduate and with a degree making them capable of success outside of academia. At the baccalaureate-and-above schools, with the chaff separated from the wheat, resources can be used more efficiently to do a better job of educating.

Education reform opponents hypocritically resist transparency

One of the red herring arguments used by opponents to recent education reform efforts in Louisiana has been the process has lacked openness and transparency. Perhaps this has proven a popular line of attack out for its familiarity, because some of these opponents themselves come up far short in this category.

A group leading the charge has been the Coalition for Progress in Louisiana, which now holds itself out as “Louisiana Progress.” The affiliate of the far-left Center for American Progress is according to its website and IRS letter of determination for 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit status domiciled in Baton Rouge with former Shreveport state Rep. Melissa Flournoy as its executive director. Within the past year she has had several opinion pieces that ran in the Shreveport Times about education and other issues, and recently the organization with The Times sponsored a forum on coming challenges in education, and also the same with a couple of other Gannett publications.

Also being involved in other political outreach efforts, one would think this costs some money. The group appears to be able to attract some donors: the web site for Razoo, a foundation to channel money to groups, in the middle of July gave a total of 108 donors and three separate “fundraisers” that indirectly had money donated to it. The Form 990 that some nonprofit groups are required annually to submit to the Internal Revenue Service from Razoo showed in 2011 it shunted $6,453 to the organization.

Bossier Jury violates taxpayers, spirit of public service

The good news is that the leeches on the Bossier Parish Police Jury could have stuck it to taxpayers three years ago. The bad news is they’re going to stick it to them now anyway – continuing a long-time pattern of living the high life at taxpayer expense

A majority of jurors wasted little time after fall elections to help themselves to other people’s money that could be spent on genuine parish concerns, courtesy of a state law passed in 2008 that allowed an increase in members’ salary from the maximum $1,200 per month if salaried to $1,600. They followed the notice procedures in the law and then as one of their first acts of 2012 jacked up salaries to the maximum. The greediest voting affirmative were Wanda Bennett, Jimmy Cochran, Jerome Darby, Wayne Hammack, and Mac Plummer, as all will continue in office beginning their next terms this week, while the defeated Winfred Johnston, Barry Butler, and Brad Cummings perhaps decided to give citizens the middle-fingered salute for getting ousted by presenting their opponents with this gift.

Not that the minority, comprised of the departing Hank Meachum and Bill Altimus, and returning Glen Benton and Rick Avery, seemed that resistant to the idea. Avery didn’t seem to disagree that they should have the one-third increase, just that the time wasn’t right, while Altimus, who will stay parish administrator, thought it could have been handled during budgeting.

Rebel flag leaves courthouse area with deserved whimper

The last significant forces of the Confederate States of America surrendered last month in history, who had been stationed around the last state capital of the Confederacy, Shreveport. But another significant surrender happened quietly months ago in Caddo Parish.

Without warning, late last year, with a vote one short of unanimity, the Caddo Parish Commission ordered the (Third) Confederate (Battle) flag from its perch on a monument honoring Confederate forces very near the Courthouse. Hours later it had been removed. Thus quietly ended a long-running, sometimes heated, controversy, and rightfully so.

Six decades ago the United Daughters of the Confederacy placed the flag in an apparent response to the burgeoning civil rights movement, on the monument that now has sat for over a century in the square block encompassing the Courthouse. Both objects remained as society drastically changed around them, spawning several relatively recent attempts to have the flag taken down, but never legally so because of the presumed ownership of the small plot around the northwest corner of the lot by the UDC …

Manageable aid cut to hasten charity system demise

The Gov. Bobby Jindal Administration continues to make lemonade out of lemons, as the hit the state takes from Congress deciding to stop favoring it on Medicaid reimbursement provides another opportunity for the governor to push along the needed revamp of care to the indigent, and even finally wean the state off its inefficient model that makes government the primary provider of health care.

As head of the Department of Health and Hospitals 15 years ago, Jindal saw firsthand the tremendous inefficiency of a health care system based upon primary care provided large institutions – the country’s only such system where a number of state-owned hospitals provided this for those on Medicaid. Then as now dealing with a budgetary imperative, he began to wrench efficiency into the system, the process of which would continue under the oversight of others when he left the job, although very slowly if at all under the appointees of his predecessor to him as governor.

The pace picked up again when he became governor. Although he could created more efficiencies by making it smaller, the replacement for the state’s hospital in New Orleans, ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, at least was downsized from earlier versions in some recognition of the smaller role the state should play in direct provision of indigent care beyond that needed for its use as a teaching hospital. He also got the Legislature, which must approve of closures, to go along with closing the aging hospital in Baton Rouge, having its service performed by private providers contracted to the state.

Program symptomatic of LA higher education deterioration

It’s not really the content of what’s termed a “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender” minor to which Louisiana taxpayers ought to object. Rather, it’s just the symptom of a larger disease in the state’s higher education delivery system, a malady that must be treated if the system is to evolve into an efficient and effective producer of economic development and in its capacity to assist in advancing knowledge of the human condition.

The University of Louisiana at Lafayette seems to have instituted this kind of minor, which is a selection of coursework often about 18 hours of study that are in addition to a student’s major area of study. Often, courses in these can serve double duty in fulfilling university requirements past the roughly one-third of hours required for all baccalaureate students in Louisiana. Noted on completer’s transcripts, this one is said to cull courses from sociology, cultural anthropology, child and family studies and human sexuality. As is typical of most minors, it does not require any additional startup costs, as existing courses and resources are used to deliver it.

Naturally, it has little practical use out in the real world. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because while one purpose of a college degree is to impart a useful skill set, which has particular import in the hard sciences and related areas such as in business, the other is, to put it maybe tritely, to broaden horizons. This is accomplished by exposing students to a spectrum of the human condition, as expressed through a number of different activities and end-products of them, with the end goal being to get students to understand the basics and then use those as a jumping off point to encourage them to be able to think successfully critically about them, to form their own meritorious ideas, and to explicate them in a way others can understand.