Louisiana Voice

BATON ROUGE (CNS)—When is a tax not a tax?

When is the old bait and switch scam not a scam?

When is a sale not a sale?

When are public records not public?

The answer to all of the above: when Gov. Bobby Jindal or Commissioner of Administration Paul Rainwater says they’re not.
Got it?

Good. Discussion over. Let’s go home.

Hold up a minute, Guv, it ain’t quite that cut and dried. Sure you can rattle off statistics that tell us just how good your medicine is going to make us feel—after the nausea it induces passes. We’ve heard you do it in that non-stop staccato delivery of yours. But you know what they say: there’re lies, there’re damned lies, and there’re statistics.

Your statistics, figures, and projections amount to little more than what we called a blivet back in the day. We know you’re Ivy League-educated, so it’s pretty much a sure bet you don’t know what a blivet is, so we’ll tell you: a blivet is five pounds of excrement in a one-pound bag.

Let’s take the questions one at a time and examine them more closely.

When is a tax not a tax?

Jindal has repeated his “no tax” mantra so often that we hear it in our sleep. He killed the Stelly Plan and he has vowed to kill a renewal of the state’s tobacco tax, currently the second-lowest rate in the nation.

Yet he supports HB 479 that would require some 52,000 state employees to increase their contribution to the state pension system by an additional 3 percent, from 8 percent to 11 percent, beginning July 1.

It’s not a tax, it’s a fee increase. Any fool should be able to see that.

When is bait and switch not a scam?

Notwithstanding the fact that it wasn’t state employees who created the current fiscal crisis, that might make sense for employees to chip in a little more—if raises weren’t frozen and the money was to be used to put the retirement system on sounder financial footing—but it isn’t.

The 3 percent increase would mean employees would be paying an additional $70 million per year in premiums, which will result in roughly $25 million of state general fund savings. That $25 million, however, would not mean additional benefits or in a paydown of the pension’s unfunded liability. Instead, it would be used toward reducing the current $1.6 billion state budget shortfall. A classic example of robbing Peter to pay Paul.

That’s the same shell game that was used when $393.5 million was subtracted from the $3.3 billion Minimum Foundation Program for public education before the combined $393.5 million in 8(g) funds, state lottery proceeds and EduJobs funding were added back in. The net gain to education? Zero.

Both look an awful lot like looting and pillaging to us, but they’re not. They’re sound fiscal policy because Jindal, in amongst all his statistics, says so.

When is a sale not a sale?

Apparently when it involves the Office of Group Benefits (OGB).

Rainwater has testified before the Senate Retirement Committee that he does, doesn’t, does, doesn’t want to sell OGB, that he will, won’t will, won’t put the agency up for public auction.

Meanwhile, despite hostile hearings by the Senate Retirement Committee—three of which Rainwater simply boycotted—and ample evidence that OGB is a well-run agency that state employees would rather just leave alone, Jindal and Rainwater blithely plunge ahead hell-bent with their plans to privatize the agency despite a total lack of solid evidence that said privatization would result in any savings.

At stake in the meantime are the futures of about 150 OGB employees that Rainwater says must be cut. One of those employees, former OGB CEO Tommy Teague, who brought the agency from a $60 million deficit to its present-day $500 million surplus, was fired on April 15. No reason was given for his firing other than his “lack of leadership.”

What part of $60 million deficit to $500 million surplus in five years don’t you understand, Mr. Rainwater? Mark Brady? Bueller? Gov. Jindal? Anyone?

His latest pronouncement was that the state was seeking a third party administrator (TPA) for the state’s Preferred Provider Organization (PPO) and possibly for the state HMO, now administered by Blue Cross/Blue Shield (BCBS). Of course the state’s contract with BCBS is presently in litigation with Humana claiming it was outmaneuvered when the state allowed BCBS to submit a proposal that was not within the parameters set forth by the state’s request for proposals (RFP).

Thrown into the mix was the decision by the Division of Administration (DOA) to do a quickie financial assessment of OGB by issuing a contract to a New Orleans company even as the state was soliciting proposals through an RFP for a financial analyst with experience in negotiating sales of insurance companies. (There’s that word “sale” again; it just won’t go away like Rainwater now wishes it would.)

That contract, for $49,999.99, which just happens to be one penny less than the $50,000 that would require approval of the Office of Contractual Review, was issued to Chaffe and Associates of New Orleans back in March.

Repeated requests for a copy of Chaffe’s report have met with denials that any report had been received. Those denials were reminiscent of the lawyer who, when confronted by a man who said he’d been bitten by the barrister’s dog, responded in typically lawyer fashion, “My dog doesn’t bite. I keep my dog inside my house. Besides which, I don’t own a dog.” But then, at a recent Senate Retirement Committee hearing, a DOA spokesman let slip a mention of a preliminary report.

Aha! Time for LouisianaVoice to make its fourth request for the report.

When are public records not public?

A former request for the document was made to Rainwater under the State Public Records Law which stipulates that the custodian of a public record has three days in which to respond to any such request. Our request was made on May 24. On May 27, a gentle reminder was sent, along with a copy of the statute which laid out civil and criminal penalties for non-compliance. Those penalties include fines, payment of the requestor’s legal fees and court costs, and jail time.

At 4:52 p.m. on May 27 (last Friday), Paul Holmes, Attorney 4, Division of Administration, Office of the General Counsel, responded thusly:

“A report generated by Chaffe & Associates was received on May 25, 2011. The report is privileged as part of the deliberative process and is exempt from disclosure under R.S. 44:4.1 as well as pursuant to Kyle v. Public Service Commission, 878 So.2d 650 (La. App. 1st Cir. 2004) and Donelon v. Theriot, 2011 WL 1733548, (La. App. 1st Cir. 5/3/11).”

Now we don’t pretend to know the law the way Mr. Holmes Esq. must (he’s an attorney 4, after all), but we do know the Public Records Law from more than a quarter-century of having to deal with unenthusiastic, recalcitrant bureaucrats.

Nowhere in the statute is a financial document on a taxpayer-supported agency exempted from compliance with the state public records statute.

Stand by. After all, a wise old sage named Yogi Berra once said, “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”

Jindal’s efforts to privatize OGB, cut OGB personnel by half, sell state prisons, increase employees’ pension contributions (while continuing to freeze state employee salaries), and to resist efforts to renew taxes that make sense (like tobacco taxes) while at the same time, protecting ludicrous and financially crippling tax breaks for the rich will continue unabated.

Moreover, remember last year when legislation was introduced to abolish Civil Service? That met with quite a bit of resistance and the effort sputtered. It wasn’t renewed this year. Want to know why? It’s an election year.

If Jindal is re-elected, and at this point, there’s no one on the horizon to take him on, you can expect those bills to pop up again and to be pushed by the administration with an intensity that will dwarf his privatization efforts.

Remember when that happens that you read it here first.

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