At least they listened
to this space and took another whack at it. But there’s no real evidence
that the bill offered will provide any real benefits and threatens unseemly
costs. Indeed, it heads in the wrong direction.
Yesterday
the Louisiana Senate passed SB 271 by
state Sen. Fred
Mills. It makes changes to the medical marijuana law passed last year that
left many holes and questions in its wake. Among other things, the production mechanism
makes this part of the process clumsy, the restricted distribution network invites
cronyism and corruption, it sidesteps federal law that will discourage legal
authorization for its use, it legally allows for a potentially incomplete range
of uses, and the scientific evidence for the efficacy justifying those uses
remains at best sketchy.
This updated version tries to address many of
these questions by changing language regarding authorization of use and
production and swelling considerably the number of conditions eligible for its
use. Application of cannabis according to it remains in liquid form.
Look no further for why Louisiana’s legislators
submit to tax increases rather than inducing enhanced fiscal rationality into
the budgeting process than recent remakes regarding bills that would impact the
issue of dedicated funding.
During a recent meeting of the Louisiana Wildlife
and Fisheries Commission, a representative from the Department of Wildlife and
Fisheries complained
about measures that would allow redirections of more money from several
dedicated funds that funnel money to the department or abolish these funds
entirely. In the convoluted world of Louisiana bureaucracy, the Commission
deals with policy in the form of rulemaking, licensing, regulation,
enforcement, and adjudication, while the Department deals with all other
administrative matters including budgeting, personnel and legal and public
representation.
Redirection or abolishment from two funds, the
Artificial Reef Development Fund and the Conservation Fund, particularly concerned
the Department. The former collects donations from oil producers
decommissioning platforms where instead of spending to remove them these may
stay offshore by coughing up
half that projected charge to the state, while the latter captures revenues
from a multitude of sources, mainly licenses for outdoors-related activities and
sales thereof, fines, fees from prestige license plates, and mineral royalties
from state lands. The former contributed about one-sixteenth percent of the
Department’s budget,
while the latter constituted just over half.
The bill goes into greater detail than state Sen. Beth Mizell’s SB 276, but
like it makes a state commission the arbiter of whether local governments may move
or remove monuments dealing with historical events and people. Carmody’s bill
presumes that any such structure in place for at least three decades a local government
cannot move without the body’s approval.
Controversy over these items arose last year when
New Orleans announced opposition to, then ratified the movement of, four monuments
related to the Civil War. This has faced legal and administrative hurdles
since, but by no means represents an isolated arena of conflict. In Shreveport,
for example, the monument in front of the Caddo Parish Courthouse that
commemorates the Confederate States of America’s last capital has
garnered calls for its removal.
The bizarreness of the arrest
and subsequently dropping of charges against a television reporter by White
Castle, population 1,883, officials pales to that in comparison of many small
Louisiana municipalities paying part-time mayors exorbitant salaries, a
practice that must end.
Baton Rouge station WBRZ’s Chris Nakamoto found himself
under arrest last month for making inquiries about the salary of the town’s
Mayor Gerald Jamarr Williams, which had nearly doubled recently to over $50,000.
The city attorney – also appointed by its aldermen to serve as the judge of its
mayor’s court, making her both prosecutor and judge – said Nakamoto had acted
in a disorderly fashion while trying to access town records. Without comment,
the attorney/judge dropped the charges recently.
It’s not the first time a mayor’s
salary in a small Louisiana municipality has touched a nerve. In 2013, the
newly-elected mayor of Port Allen, population 5,101, went on a spending spree
for her inauguration and that and other spending prompted the aldermen to cut
her salary $20,000 – all the way down to $65,000 annually – but done illegally
(municipal legislatures cannot cut mayoral salaries during their terms). In
2014, irate constituents threw her out of office.
