Louisiana Voice

State Sen. Francis Thompson is not only the family employment champion among state lawmakers (a news report from the 1980s claimed that he had more relatives on the state payroll than any other member of the legislature) but he also appears perfectly capable of siphoning off millions of dollars in state revenue for pet projects. Those projects primarily include ground water reservoirs in more than a dozen parishes costing taxpayers more than $163 million since 1997.

In a state teeming with hundreds of lakes and reservoirs while reeling from dwindling tax revenues, Sen. Thompson has managed to convince fellow legislators and three governors of the necessity of constructing even more. With the passage of each piece of legislation to appropriate funds for a new reservoir Thompson’s brother, former Delhi mayor Mike Thompson, secured a $100,000 per year consulting contract from the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development (DOTD). That’s $100,000 per year per reservoir project.

Mike Thompson earlier this year was sentenced to 18 months after having been found guilty of one count of using district employees to work on his home in Delhi and charging the Poverty Point Reservoir District for the labor in violation of the Hobbs Act. The Hobbs Act was enacted by Congress in 1951 to combat racketeering in labor-management disputes but is often invoked in cases involving public corruption. He could have been sentenced to up to 20 years in prison and prosecutors did argue for a sentence of 41-50 months. He was scheduled to report to prison on Monday of this week.

Francis Thompson’s older brother, Clyde Thompson, currently employed as executive director of the Madison Parish Port Commission at $49,207 per year, once served as second in command to DOTD Secretary Paul Hardy during the administration of former Gov. Dave Treen.

Monroe engineer Terry Denmon just as consistently was awarded engineering contracts for each of the reservoir projects undertaken. His contracts ranged from $200,000 to more than $700,000. Like Francis, Mike, and Clyde Thompson, Denmon is a graduate of Louisiana Tech University in Ruston and as recently as 2007 was chairman of the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Commission.

None of the reservoir projects has proved as expensive to the state and profitable—and troublesome—to the Thompsons and Denmon as the centerpiece of all of Francis Thompson’s reservoirs, Poverty Point Reservoir in Richland and Madison parishes. That project alone has cost the state more than all the others combined in priority 1, or first-year, funding. From 1997 through the 2010 regular legislative session that adjourned on June 21, Poverty Point has cost state taxpayers at least $81,855,000. That compares to $81,257,000 for all the other reservoir projects combined.

Not that the Bayou Dechene Reservoir project in Caldwell Parish isn’t in the running. The cost of that proposed lake to date is $40,650,000 in priority 1 funding—and counting.

Even as the state budget was swimming in a sea of red ink that forced major cutbacks to higher education and health care this year, the legislature plowed ahead, appropriating nearly $8.1 million in funding for Thompson’s reservoir projects in 2010. That amount included $3,152,000 for Poverty Point and $4,940,000 for four other reservoir projects in Allen ($800,000), Caldwell ($1,415,000), Washington ($2,625,000), and LaSalle ($100,000).

Those figures can be misleading because if bonds approved are not sold or funding appropriated for a project are not spent, the project must obtain renewed approval the following year. Bayou Dechene, for example, has received approval of identical amounts of $1,415,000 in each of the last seven years, including 2010.

What is not misleading, however, is how the Thompsons, through the efforts of Francis, have ensconced themselves in profitable recreational lakefront property development largely at the expense of taxpayer dollars. Francis Thompson even convinced the state in 2006 to take control of the 439-acre Black Bear Golf Course which is part of the Poverty Point Reservoir development and to install Mike Thompson as administrative director of the golf course.

But more significantly, was the plan to develop an elaborate retirement community at Poverty Point Reservoir. After purchasing the land and constructing elevated berms on which the state constructed roads and cul de sacs that would extend outward as island lots into the still-to-be-built lake, Thompson, then serving in the House, pushed through HB 1136 in the 2001 session which called for the state to purchase 2,586 acres that would become the Poverty Point Reservoir, excluding of course mineral rights and the berms that would make up the residential island lots on which Francis and Mike Thompson planned to develop a retirement community. That sale was consummated in early 2003 when the state paid the Poverty Point Reservoir District more than $2 million. The state, according to a 2002 state audit, also paid $1.2 million to develop the island lots, one of which was sold to a neighbor of Francis Thompson for $621,200. The state also paid $2.2 million for a keyed-gate entry private road to the lots and another $300,000 for an office burglar alarm system.

Then, during the 2002 legislative session, then-Rep. Francis Thompson struck again with what he probably felt would be the major coup. HB 84 of that session called for the exemption of a “developer of a qualified retirement community” from having to pay state or local ad valorem (property) taxes. The measure passed Senate by a 33-0 vote and the House with only seven dissents. Thompson might have been expected to abstain from voting on a measure that stood to benefit him financially—but he didn’t. Instead, he was among the 93 members voting in favor of the bill that eventually became Act 57 when signed by then-Gov. Mike Foster. Likewise, Thompson was one of 99 House members who in 2001 voted in favor of HB 1136, Thompson’s bill to sell Poverty Point Reservoir to the state for $2 million.

The only fly in the ointment was that the measure would have to go before the voters as a constitutional amendment in the Nov. 5, 2002 statewide election. It turned out to be a major problem when voters rejected the proposed amendment.

Thompson, upon being term-limited in the House, was elected Senator in 2007 to succeed similarly term-limited Charles Jones. Undeterred over the failure of the 2002 proposed constitutional amendment, he tried again, this time with SB 584, a bill identical in language to the 2002 House bill. This time, opponents were better prepared. The Legislative Fiscal Office provided estimates that the bill, if successful, would cost local and state governments as much as $600,000 per year in lost revenue.

Perhaps Francis Thompson, in voting in favor of HB 84 back in 2002, a bill that had the potential of enriching himself by as much as $600,000 per year was not joking when in his farewell address to the Louisiana House in 2007, he admonished fellow House members to “never allow ethics to get in the way of a good bill.”