Abolishing clemency powers unpardonable mistake

No doubt prefiled HB 85 by Democrat state Rep. Austin Badon is more political jab than serious policy, but the issue deserves a nontrivial hearing.

This bill would amend the Constitution to abolish the governor’s authority to issue pardons and would retain only the automatic pardon provision for first-time perpetrators of nonviolent crimes and some violent offenses. This would make Louisiana unique as the only state not to grant some kind of executive clemency power for nearly all state crimes; currently in 41 states governors, many requiring the recommendation of a board (such as Louisiana), and in nine states an executive board may exercise sweeping pardon powers.

Companion legislation filed by Badon, HB 84, would excise the state’s Board of Pardons, the imprimatur of which is necessary for a request to go to the governor. It also wipes out the governor’s power to commute sentences and to grant reprieves, along with the Board’s role in that process.

Desperately bad arguments against reform betray fear

Maybe now we know why the Louisiana State Employees Retirement System’s investment return barely beat that of a risk-free 30-year U.S. Treasury bond over the past five years – because its top officers aren’t very good critical thinkers, as evidenced by the sloppy, if not illogical, arguments they try to make against reforms proposed for the state’s retirement system for most of its non-education employees. Or maybe this display of intellectual piffle shows they're just desperate to stop an erosion of their power and privilege.

Gov. Bobby Jindal has proposed altering regulations regarding LASERS, one of the four state (major) retirement funds and which is responsible for about a third of the unfunded accrued liability taxpayers must face (inflated in no small part by its failure in recent years to achieve its stated target of an 8.25 percent rate of return on its roughly $10 billion investment portfolio). These would have current employees pay 11 percent rather than 8 percent of their pay into retirement (the private sector average is 18 percent), and calculate the value of their defined benefit pensions (which few in the private sector offer any more) on the average of their (usually last) five years instead of three, and in addition for future employees raise the retirement age for most jobs from 55 to 67 (matching the regular retirement age for Social Security), and enroll them in a defined contribution systems that acts like an individual retirement account (which most private sector employees now offer).

Dim bulb #1 is LASERS Executive Director Cindy Rougeou, who complained that these kinds of changes ultimately would constitute a change of provisions that “would violate the constitutional restriction against impairing existing benefits.” She further declares that, because LASERS is the only state system about which these kinds of changes have been contemplated, that these changes are not comprehensive enough to merit adoption, and she promises “protracted litigation” over the matter.

Higher admission criteria will fail without other reforms

The politics of demagoguery and putting of special interests first are coming home to roost for Louisiana as the day draws closer to the implementation of just one of many needed changes in its higher education delivery, in potentially setting the state up for failure. One hopes this serves as a wake-up call to implement needed others before the system takes a turn, reversing the small progress of the past few years, to even greater inefficiency and ineffectiveness.

Readers of this space have known that looming changes to admissions standards for baccalaureate-and-above institutions, beginning this fall and continuing through 2014, will reshape profoundly the landscape of higher education, forcing a significant shift in students and thereby resources from these institutions to community colleges. This will create more slack resources for the senior colleges although, theoretically, increased performance will come from the student body as a whole, as marginal students no longer would begin an academic career at a four-year university and have a better chance of degree completion.

Particularly affected will be the lowest performing universities, in terms of retention and graduation rates. During last year’s debate over the combining of Southern University New Orleans, the University of New Orleans, and Delgado Community College, this space pointed out the impending standards increase alone justified the effort.

Landrieu needs to lead, not pose, on spending issues

As noted in yesterday’s post, one challenge Louisiana must meet as it evolves towards a more effective and efficient indigent care system is dealing with mental health issues. This requires analysis and leadership rather than the posturing exemplified by New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu.

Part of mid-year budget corrections involves the state reducing funding for indigent mental health care. As Medicaid funds from federal sources few recipients for this service, states pick up the bulk of this, and Louisiana, with its aberrant charity hospital system, until recent years funneled the vast bulk of its spending on this to those institutions or to nursing homes. With cuts now necessary until the end of this budget cycle, these hospitals must absorb the bulk of them, including disproportionately those in the care of the indigent mentally ill.

This upset Landrieu, who asserted an issue looming large for his administration was crime, and he noted correctly that less servicing of the indigent mentally ill increases crime and its costs. He called these cuts therefore counterproductive and implored Gov. Bobby Jindal generally and the Louisiana State University System specifically to reconsider them.

Painful cuts point out need to dismantle charity system

While mid-year budget corrections disrupt optimal planning, and Louisiana’s fiscal structure exacerbates the problem by shielding much, some low-priority areas, from reductions to force them upon very few and higher-priority areas of state government, the silver lining again is the opportunity for the exercise to accelerate beneficial reform – as one state legislator accidentally may have discovered.

To be implemented immediately, joining the rest of higher education and also other areas of health care provision, Louisiana’s charity hospital system for the remainder of the fiscal year will suffer cuts that officials predict will have a measurable impact on service provided to the indigent. These also will slice a few hundred jobs off of the state payroll.

State Rep. Joe Harrison seemed rather miffed that one such facility in his district, Houma’s Leonard J. Chabert Medical Center, would endure such belt-tightening, to the tune of 80 positions and $2.9 million less. He publicly announced he would investigate in the upcoming session to separate the facility from the Louisiana State University System that runs these hospitals and create its own independent district.

To offset inertia, right-sizing govt needs attention to detail

As the state cues up more means to improve service and save money, this does not mean it can afford to abrogate its responsibility to present clear rationales for doing so, as the latest meeting of the State Civil Service Commission demonstrates.

In it, the CSC was given notice of four planned reorganizations that would shrink bureaucracy. In any situation where layoffs occur, the CSC must approve of the plan on the evidence that government must do so because of insufficient finances or that an alternative method, such as contracting, will save the state money, in order to prevent arbitrary discharges of employees from the state’s classified civil service. As a result, for next month’s meeting the agencies involved will have to present data to demonstrate savings with the likelihood of comparable or better service, which they indicate they can and will do.

Yet, given that opportunity for another change that did not involve contracting outside of government, one agency involved, the Department of Health and Hospitals, threw up a brick. It planned to eliminate over five dozen jobs dealing with information technology in New Orleans by, in essence, transferring the responsibility to the University of New Orleans. While it argued that data processing at UNO was done with greater expertise, the supporting documentation contained so many errors and was so convoluted that not a single member of the Commission was convinced, and some thought it would cost more.

Create cheap dental coverage to foster responsibility

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure even when government provides it on behalf of those who can’t or won’t do it themselves. But if government gets forced into provision on cost considerations, at the same time it need not take its typical tack of providing anywhere from half a pound to a ton of prevention when faced with a social welfare issue, as a review of Medicaid oral health policy shows.

This federal-state program guarantees dental care up to age 18, and after that age states may add care as they see fit. Louisiana provides it up to 21 and for expectant mothers. As for other Medicaid recipients in this state, they’re on their own resources. Unfortunately, this leads a vast number of those with dental problems to emergency rooms, where Medicaid will pay for palliative care but not for dental procedures often necessary to fix an underlying problem.

As a result, the problem only gets obliquely addressed, often necessitating more visits than if directly addressed, which ultimately would cost taxpayers less money. Over the past couple of years, the cost to the state has been around the $1.7 million mark, which if focused on curing the disease rather than treating the symptoms may have been half or less.

Mistaken ruling opts for convenience despite clear intent

A perplexing and wrong-headed judicial decision temporarily has the state off the hook for committing at least $150 million in revenues, but hopefully an appeal will restore constitutional dignity to the matter.

As previously noted, at issue was the timing of the state’s having to pay back withdrawals from the Budget Stabilization Fund, which serves as a bank account for the state from which to make limited withdrawals in limited circumstances to help produce a balanced budget. As written, the state Constitution required, under the recent set of fiscal circumstances encountered by the state, that an amount taken from it in 2010 to have been paid back already (essentially, almost immediately), while a conflicting state law passed a year prior did not mandate this. The state accepted the law’s rendering for the pending budgetary year.

After the fiscal 2011 budget went into effect, interested parties sued to force immediate payback, citing that the Constitution takes precedence over conflicting state law. But they postponed the matter when the Legislature in 2011 offered up a Constitutional amendment that would write into the Constitution the statute’s interpretation. Last fall, that measure failed at the ballot box, and the suit resumed.

Factless distortion campaign continues against plan deal

Despite the fact that the obvious evidence shows contracting out all state health benefits administration in the first year alone would net as much as almost $300 million, and over $75 million each succeeding year, misinformation and conspiracy theories continue concerning this from vested interests against what appears to be a sound move by Louisiana.

The state is only one of two that has a significant amount of benefits administration, a little under 30 percent of its insured population, performed by the state. This occurs through the Office of Group Benefits, a part of the Division of Administration, the agency designed to assist the governor in running matters given to his responsibility under law.

While discussion about this has been going on for a year, with studies done demonstrating the savings, promises made by the Gov. Bobby Jindal Administration that contracting out this business, joining the plans covering all other state employees and retirees, would occur only if cost savings would occur as result of an actual contract being in place, and with the legally required oversight of the Legislature’s Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget producing consent, the next step has been taken in hiring a firm to work out whether such a contract with a private sector entity can be worked out.

Roemer adds another layer of hypocrisy to campaign

In case you were wondering whether former Gov. Buddy Roemer, running for president under a banner-to-be-named later, has run out of hypocrisy during this campaign, in case you thought not, well, guess again.

Roemer, who got both his political and business careers started amid wealth and insider connections, has built a campaign railing against both. To demonstrate his fidelity to his born-again ideology, he refuses to accept donations higher than $100 to the effort – but when Republican voters showed they thought about as much of his conspiratorial mindset as they do black helicopters and the puerile class warfare worldview peddled by Pres. Barack Obama, Roemer began to sidle on up to an organization known as Americans Elect, funded secretively through many large donations from individuals who harbor leftist views.

After his thorough rejection in the New Hampshire primary, Roemer’s dalliance with the group, which states as its purpose to get a candidate onto the ballots of all 50 states and the District of Columbia selected by the public from choices it provides, became less restrained. Despite the fact that Roemer remains on the ballot in at least a couple of more states for the GOP nomination and plans to get on it and campaign in others, he now speaks of a simultaneous pursuit of the AE selection and, assuming he gets the nod from the organizers, victory in the Internet-based public polling.