Dissuading party switchers counterproductive, costly

Another day, another sitting Louisiana state legislator switches from Democrat to Republican. It’s not that rare; in the past half-century, as the state began its slow, delayed, and ultimately successful turn to conservatism, 37 of these have happened. But the speed of three in the past month has gotten some in the media to wonder whether that ought to be permitted.

Even with the relative commonality of switching in the state’s recent political history, it’s no big surprise that the three involved, state Rep. Jim Fannin and state Sens. Elbert Guillory and Rick Ward, made the move. While Ward has been around only two years and has averaged just under 50 on the Louisiana Legislative Log’s voting index, where a score of 100 reveals all votes on legislation as conservative or reformist and his was above the Democrat average but below the Republicans’, the other two’s showed they had voted more conservative/reform than almost all Democrats and above the GOP average during their times in office. Ward may have more another higher office in mind than reelection, however.

After Ward’s, which gave Republicans a two-thirds/supermajority advantage in the Senate, at least one media outlet asked vox populi about whether state legislators in office should have to have to win an election under their new label to stay in office. There is precedence for elected officials to resign voluntarily and run in a special election, but almost no state places any kind of restriction on the ability for officeholders to switch.

Decrease disabled services wait list with policy changes

Predictably, no veto override session will occur in 2013, confirmed at the end of last week. But that doesn’t mean that what emerged as the highest-profiled of the matters vetoed, more money to fund permanently expansion of the New Opportunity Waivers program, cannot be altered to serve more people and make better use of taxpayer dollars. And an important first step was taken last week to do this.

The Legislature this year passed a $4 million in line items to mandate new ongoing spending for 200 additional slots for this. Waiver programs let states use federal Medicaid dollars to give services to the developmentally disabled or elderly who would not otherwise qualify for the program on the basis of income or assets, as long as the average cost per client does not exceed what the state would spend on paying for them to live in nursing homes.

With a waiting list of approaching 11,000 for NOW, at least a small dent could have been made in that, where some on the list with severe disabilities have waited for eight or more years. But citing legislative directives that produced a health care budget $40 million in the red ordering the executive to make cuts, Gov. Bobby Jindal vetoed those line items.

Session vote signals recoupling of "hawks" to GOP

We’ll see how pledged gubernatorial candidate state Rep. John Bel Edwards does in that 2015 contest, but he’s likely to have to get along without being able to point to policy victories handed to him by a Republican Party divided in the House of Representatives.

In response to a query about getting minority House Democrats into a coalition with disgruntled chamber Republicans known as the “fiscal hawks,” Edwards opined that he thought the same grouping can be resurrected on issues beyond the specifics of the fiscal year 2014 budget that the pairing had major influence upon. This came after it was known there would be no unprecedented veto override session where some line item vetoes of that budget were by far the most publicized, because the typical patterns of voting had been followed.

That is, since Gov. Bobby Jindal became governor, every year most Democrats in the House have not returned their ballots to indicate that an override session should happen. This year, only two of the 38 returned ballots to indicate no session necessary came from Democrats, down from six the previous year. By contrast, each year a solid majority of Republicans have returned ballots; last year 45 did so, while this year 35 (about three-fifths) did.

History tells Caddo to reject more Elio funding

Ouachita Parish’s citizens once got fooled. Are Caddo Parish’s far behind?

Months ago, the concept automaker Elio Motors announced they would purchase and manufacture vehicles in Shreveport’s former General Motors facility. The car has only one wheel in the rear but projects a base price of only $6,800 for an predicted miles-per-gallon gasoline performance of 84. It claims it has gotten 13,000 preorders already, has interest from foreign countries in it, and that it would churn out as many as a quarter of a million of them a year.

However, the company has let it be known that it is having trouble raising money from private investors. Further, it cast its eyes to Shreveport because it was turned down by state and local governments in Michigan for funding. Already, Louisiana has promised it access to state tax incentives that could be worth as much as $150 million over a decade when its starts production, and Caddo Parish provided up front assistance of $1 million on ten times that in lending.

Non-performing NW LA state property needs selling off

When it comes to state-owned property with a public safety connection in northwest Louisiana, the theme best suiting taxpayers needs would be to get rid of it.

For one agency, it’s a matter of cutting losses while you can. The Municipal Police Employees Retirement System has become notorious in the last decade for its obviously foolish investments, the outstanding examples being Bossier Parish’s Olde Oaks and Stonebridge (in bankruptcy when purchased) golf courses, and their surrounding real estate, and $24 million in foreclosed lots in Texas. Concerning the courses, the latest audit shows, with improvements, they are worth about one-fifth of what was paid, for a loss for all of these of about $48 million (and financial shenanigans concerning the courses led to the former executive director going to prison).

Finally, the MPERS board, composed of active and retired sworn officers, recently has decided to try to sell the courses after years of rejecting the idea. Unfortunately, this is closing the barn door after the horse has gotten out and since taken a trip around the world, during which the consequences of it poor decision-making have become accelerated. From funded status of about 85 percent just a few years ago, it has dropped alarming so that the latest audit has it under 60 percent. As a result, last fiscal year taxpayers found they were footing a 31 percent of salary contribution rate, over 20 percent higher than it should be at the level that would match employee contributions were it close to being fully funded.

Draining nursing home fund money its best use for now

It should not have been unexpected that Louisiana would intensify its draining of the Medicaid Trust Fund for the Elderly after voters unwisely further cordoned off funds on behalf of a special interest. That response assuredly was the correct one.

At the turn of the millennium, the Fund was created by the state at the prodding of the federal government to deposit $500 million of federal Medicaid money as part of an agreement closing out a loophole a number of states had enjoyed that multiplied their receipts, but Louisiana more than any other by routing so much Medicaid bucks through the charity hospital system. Although backers claimed the principal should not be touched, the law clearly allows that any of it can be used to support funding paid to nursing homes, while the interest earnings from the principal essentially could be used for any purpose.

Last year, that latter possibility got removed through a constitution amendment, making this an even sweeter deal for nursing homes, which long have been favored by state policy despite their increasing inefficiency in care relative to home- and community-based solutions. Until the time the fund was created, policy deliberately favored them that created a situation where the typical nursing home in the state received over 80 percent of its revenue for Medicaid and among all of them the state had the nation’s highest per capita state payments to nursing homes with the lowest rate of bed occupancy.

Transformative Jindal hopes for better national reception

In the slow days after a regular legislative session has ended, complete with the governor’s chance to veto bills and line items and when it has become apparent there won’t be an unprecedented veto session, during this period of sparse political news in recent years it’s become fashionable for observers, looking for something to discuss, to assess the states of Louisiana and Gov. Bobby Jindal. With his relatively high national profile, there’s always something banging around in his political life that can provide fodder for commentary.

Thus we get an excursion into his national political health, on the assumption that he covets substantial elective office of some kind at that level; specifically, the nexus of how his state governance translates into future ambitions. From legislators who work with him and a pollster, we learn that his popularity has dipped into negative territory because reform is wearing people out and that he needs more engagement in order to succeed more with a reform agenda. Further, this engagement must be at a more personal and visceral and less nuanced level. Until he behaves this way, it is averred, he cannot create state policy-making success that pays dividends at the national level.

All of this is true, yet most of it is irrelevant to understand the state’s current policy-making environment that shapes and constrains Jindal. The clue comes from the notion of “reform fatigue,” because this reveals the motive force behind much of his policy-making and the reaction to it. Simply put, that is this: Jindal’s gubernatorial career has consisted of a radical and entirely necessary transformation of the state’s political culture that started behind the scenes and now has burst into full view that has challenged allies and enemies alike, and he’s paying for it at the state level.

Dueling voucher pieces shows opponents' desperation

I doubt it was planned, but what turned into a New Orleans Times-Picayune version of point/counterpoint on the issue of school vouchers illustrates well the poverty of the case against their use in Louisiana’s provision of education and in a way desperate enough to be telling that the real goal is distraction from the main issue.

Almost simultaneously published on site were a column wondering whether the several million of dollars that went into this year’s program was spent wisely and another concluding the initial indications showed the program’s administration was off to a good start. The program allows students who otherwise would attend a poorly-performing school to have the state pay for their tuition to attend a qualifying private or public school, at a level below what taxpayers would have to give to the public school that would have been attended.

The negative piece, written by former reporter and political shill for various elected Democrats, and current journalism school director Bob Mann, concentrated mainly on the one school where auditors discovered misuse of funds, and more generally charged that “education ‘reforms’ appear to be as shoddy and deceitful as the product” produced by that school, on the basis of that and that the large majority of audited schools did not keep records in a way that definitively allowed for determination that money used had proper accounting controls and was for educational expenditures. Throughout, rhetorical tricks were used in place of logical analysis to try to make these points, supplemented by the ignoring of any context at all.

Glover must relent, not hold out until last dog hung

Like fleas on a mutt, the dog park issue for Shreveport just won’t go away. (From now on, this author promises instead of inflicting a groaner every time this issue gets discussed, he’ll simply write, “Insert clever phrase about politics and dogs here.”) Throughout, the tide of political ramifications continues to turn against Mayor Cedric Glover.

Many moons ago (whether barked at; sorry, last time as well for deliberate use of phrases associated with dogs), proponents of using $280,000 given by the Red River Waterway Commission to build a dog park on the Shreveport river front brought in courts to intervene successfully in the matter. The RRWC has the authority to fund projects of this nature with its separate taxpayer dollars as long as they enhance the environment proximate to the river. The problem was they didn’t have the land to do it, and therefore would have to have the city agree upon putting it on city land, in particular in Hamel Park.

The City Council was quite receptive to the idea, but not Glover. In a thinly-disguised power play in order to extract money from the RRWC to pay for projects Glover valued, and had asked it to fund, but that the city could not afford as it tries to survive a strained budget that has been the hallmark of Glover’s administration, he said he wouldn’t sign unless they added the others. The RRWC stuck to its guns in stating it would fund only this project a long-standing request for many years to them by citizens who organized themselves as the Shreveport Dog Park Alliance, and only river front items.

Economic wisdom shown by refinancing proceeds now

While half-wise isn’t as good as totally wise, it’s much better than stupid, although certain pundits and politicians would have you believe otherwise.

That’s how to judge the reaction to the Gov. Bobby Jindal Administration’s completion of refinancing of debt tied to the massive tobacco settlement of 15 years ago. The state took money upfront from it for the majority of the value of the annuity in exchange for periodic payments to the lenders, backed by the annuity payments. At the beginning of the year, the Administration started the refinancing process to lower those payments to take advantage of very low interest rates.

When completed, the state saved about $83 million. But had the timing been just a bit better, with the sale having come perhaps a month earlier, it could have reaped another $59 million as rates went up in the interim. This has brought criticism from some predictable sources trying to use this as a tool for political gain, both using the same flawed argument.