Posted in Uncategorized on February 27, 2012| Leave a Comment »
“It’s just dumb luck that no leak has occurred at, say, 7 p.m. on a Friday after everyone had gone home for the weekend.”
–Office of State Lands employee, commenting on Monday’s leak that dumped raw sewage through the office’s ceiling tile, narrowly missing irreplaceable state land title records, some of them dating back to the 1700s.
Posted in Uncategorized on February 27, 2012| 1 Comment »
When several state offices moved into the brand new Claiborne Building just a stone’s throw southeast of the towering State Capitol Building back in 2002, the Office of State Lands was designated for the basement, ostensibly because of the weight of its volumes of documents and records prohibited its being on an upper floor. Others say that former Commissioner of Administration Mark Drennan wanted the top floor for the Division of Administration. The citing of the weight of the volumes doesn’t carry much weight when one considers that much heavier volumes are housed on the second and third floors of the Louisiana State Library a couple of blocks to the south.
But it was located directly beneath the building’s cafeteria kitchen.
Turns out that was a typical, if fateful, bureaucratic decision.
A half-dozen buildings were constructed within a few blocks of the Capitol Building toward the end of former Gov. Mike Foster’s second term. The Claiborne Building was constructed almost directly atop a municipal sewage pumping station and that fact is never more evident than on hot summer days.
At times the stench is so strong one can almost see it—like heat shimmering off a hot asphalt highway.
Gov. Bobby Jindal briefly floated the idea of selling state buildings, including Claiborne, and leasing back state office space but that idea apparently didn’t pass the smell test and was quickly flushed.
Before the $54 million Claiborne Building was even completed, a heavy rain caused flooding in the basement where State Lands, the Office of Risk Management, a state printing office and a few Department of Education offices were to be located.
Even after tenants moved in, the water line from the flood was still visible on the walls.
Then, after tenants were settled in, another torrential storm blew rainwater horizontally and water poured into the basement area through, of all places, the buildings steps that front Third Street.
But on Monday, a brand new water invasion left employees of State Lands feeling pretty crappy: a sewage leak from above dumped raw sewage water through the State Land suspending ceiling tile, narrowing missing irreplaceable historical records, some of them dating back to the late 1700s.
The State Lands Office houses priceless, one-of-a-kind land title records and Monday’s incident was only the latest of about a dozen incidents in which water has leaked through its ceiling from the kitchen above.
This is the first time, however, that sewage has leaked into the office.
The Bureau of Land Management office in Washington, D.C., does have duplicates of State Land’s records and the records kept by State Lands have been scanned, but it is the originals that are state treasures and impossible to replace.
They are kept on hand because occasionally scanned documents do not pick up penciled in notations and workers have to refer to the actual documents.
Even though all the previous leaks, as well as the latest one, have missed dumping water directly onto the files, the misses have been extremely close, in some cases, only inches away.
On Monday, the precaution of spreading plastic sheeting over the file cabinets was taken.
“It’s just dumb luck,” said one employee, “that there have been no leaks occur at say, 7 p.m. on a Friday when everyone had gone home for the weekend.”
Posted in Civil Service, Governor's Office, Health Care, Notable Quotables, Transparency on February 23, 2012| Leave a Comment »
“You can spend or you can save but you can’t do both. There’s been no showing how you have savings to make up for that $37 million.”
–Baton Rouge attorney J. Arthur Smith III, who represents about two-thirds of the 69 IT employees of DHH who would lose their jobs if a privatization contract pushed by the administration is approved. The Civil Service Commission rejected the proposed $37 million contract.
Posted in Civil Service, Governor's Office, Layoffs, Privatization, Teague on February 23, 2012| 10 Comments »
One of Gov. Bobby Jindal’s former teachers at Baton Rouge’s McKinley Middle Magnet School recently provided revealing insight into his mental makeup when she confided that he was a difficult student who simply could not accept the fact that he might be wrong. About anything.
That certainly explains a lot.
Take, for example, that state Civil Service Commission meeting of Feb. 1.
The commission each month is provided a list of proposed contracts along with justifications of why it is more economical—or necessary—to contract services out than for state employees to perform a job.
(These are the same documents, by the way, that the Division of Administration said did not exist when LouisianaVoice made a public records request for them back on Dec. 19.)
Yes, this more about Jindal’s apparent obsession with privatization.
The contract called for the Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH) to contract out its information technology (IT) services to the University of New Orleans. The proposed contract would have provided IT services currently provided by 69 classified employees.
Approval of the contract would have resulted in the 69 employees being Teagued.
To the less erudite, to be “Teagued” is to be removed from one’s employment with state government by a governor critically short on forgiveness.
The term derives its name from Jindal’s propensity to fire employees, especially those who may have the temerity to question or challenge his decisions. It began early in his first administration when Tammie McDaniel, a member of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, questioned certain budget decisions. Jindal immediately asked for her resignation. She refused at first but eventually resigned.
Then there was William Ankner who was forced out at the Department of Transportation and Development when it was revealed that a $60 million highway contract was awarded not to the low, but the high bidder.
Jim Champagne, executive director of the Louisiana Highway Safety Commission, in a moment of ill-advised level-headedness, disagreed publicly with Jindal’s plan to repeal the state’s motorcycle helmet law. Gone.
Ethics Administrator Richard Sherburne hit the bricks when Jindal gutted the Ethics Board’s adjudicatory authority and gave it to administrative law judges.
But the most high-profile firings, and the namesake of our new terminology, were the dismissals of Department of Social Services grant reviewer Melody Teague in October of 2009 and her husband, Office of Group Benefits (OGB) Director Tommy Teague, 18 months later.
Mrs. Teague testified against Jindal’s government streamlining plan that included calls for massive privatization. It took her six months but she got her job back.
Her husband was not so lucky. He was shown the door when he did not jump on board quickly enough to please the administration when it floated its idea of privatizing OGB.
Thus, the all-too-appropriate term Teagued.
But now, back to those 69 IT employees.
The Civil Service Commission took one look at the contract proposal—and balked.
For one thing, documents submitted by DHH never nailed down the precise cost of the proposed three-year contract, saying it would be for either $35 million of $37 million.
Carol Steckel, chief of DHH’s Center for Health Care Innovation and Technology, said the proposal would save an estimated $2.1 million over the next three years (later revised to $7 million) but commissioners weren’t buying it.
“I have zero confidence in your numbers,” commission member Scott Hughes, of Shreveport said.
“I don’t think you have come close to showing there’s either a cost saving or efficiency,” added member John McLure, of Alexandria.
Member Lee Griffin, of Baton Rouge, said he could not understand the proposal despite his “50 years in the banking industry.”
Commissioner Kenneth Polite, of New Orleans, said he found it difficult to support the proposal because the Jindal administration “has railed against increased spending” and yet DHH is relying on additional federal funds, which the administration also has opposed.
Information submitted by DHH was “woefully inadequate,” said commission Chairman David Duplantier, of Covington.
The commission voted unanimously to disapprove the contract after Hughes observed that the documents submitted by DHH made it clear that instead of saving money, the agency would actually increase spending by up to $8 million with the contract.
That, as we said, was on Feb. 1.
But let’s back up to December. DHH employees were called in for a telephone conference call several weeks before the contract proposal was presented to the Civil Service Commission.
During that conference call, the IT employees were informed that in January, their positions would be abolished.
Following that collective downer, the IT personal returned to their work stations only to discover that during the conference call, they had been locked out of their computers.
Subsequent to the Civil Service Commission’s action, the employees have regained access to their computers. But the issue is scheduled to come before the commission again in March and if the past is prologue, there will have been considerable pressure applied by the fourth floor of the State Capitol by then.
So, what we have here is an administration so cocksure of itself that it notified 69 IT employees that they would be unemployed in a few weeks before it ever got around to making its pitch to the Civil Service Commission, even going so far as to unplug the employees’ computers while their backs were turned.
What could conceivably account for such arrogance, such underhanded Machinations?
For that answer, perhaps someone should ask the governor’s middle school teacher.
Posted in Civil Service, Governor's Office, Layoffs, Privatization, Retirement on February 22, 2012| 10 Comments »
Cindy Rougeou, executive director of the Louisiana State Employees’ System (LASERS) has been openly critical of Gov. Bobby Jindal’s retirement package for Louisiana Civil Service employees.
Jindal has offered sweeping retirement reforms for some 58,000 active employees—reforms which Rougeou says targets workers who are barred from lobbying on their own behalf, which attempt to force state employees to work longer for reduced benefits, which give legislators false information on the percentage that employees contribute to the cost of their retirement, which ignore that the current unfunded accrued liability (UAL) came about because of legislators’ reneging on their obligation to pay the state’s required contribution, and which violate both the Louisiana and U.S. constitutions.
What’s more, Jindal is concentrating only the LASERS’ $6.8 billion unfunded accrued liability, which is just over a third of the total UAL for the four state retirement systems—teachers, school employees and state police are the others.
But it seems there may be one more: The Jindal Retirement Alternative Plan Enhancement.
Also known as J-RAPE, as in raping state taxpayers, this is an unofficial plan to enhance former legislators who the governor feels were loyal to him before either losing their re-election bids or becoming term limited.
In other words, while the state struggles to find funds to balance the budget for yet another year, the administration sees nothing wrong with padding the state payroll with pathetically unqualified former legislators—so they can enhance their state pension.
Example: former Rep. Noble Ellington spent 24 years in the legislature. If his three highest earning years in the legislature averaged $35,000, he would qualify for a yearly retirement of $21,000.
But wait. He somehow managed to land a job as second in command to Jindal ally Insurance Commissioner Jim Donelon at a cool $150,000 per year. If he remains in that position another three years—five years if Jindal’s retirement reform passes—he will be able to retire at $105,000 or $108,750 per year, again, depending on passage of Jindal’s retirement package. Either way, that’s a 400 percent increase in retirement benefits as a political favor from our fiscally-responsible governor.
J-RAPE.
Then there is Jane Smith, another legislator-with fewer years than Ellington-who was term limited but nevertheless landed a $107,500 per year job as deputy secretary of the Department of Revenue, a stroke of good luck that will bump her retirement from $10,500 to $43,000—in addition to her benefits from the teachers’ retirement system. Both she and Ellington possess woefully inadequate experience or qualifications for their positions.
J-RAPE.
An infuriating aspect of these—and other appointments—is that the average retirement for state civil service employees is around $19,000 per year. Yet, neither the appointees nor the governor show any remorse for such blatant misuse of political patronage—all while Jindal holds himself up to voters as the citadel of ethics and all things good and decent.
Troy Hebert is another. After 11 years in the legislature, he was eligible for a whopping $9,650 per year in retirement benefits. But then he was appointed Commissioner of the Office of Alcohol and Tobacco Control. His $107,000 job will qualify him for an annual pension of $40,000 if he stays on for four years, an increase of more than $30,000. If he remains for nine years, giving him 20 years of state service, his retirement would be $53,500.
Another aspect of all this that is particularly grating is that no one in the media asks the obvious questions: How can you possibly justify thumbing your nose at taxpayers and state employees by handing out these six-figure jobs to political cronies? Where is that transparency, that accountability now?
When someone like Edwin Edwards, probably the most media-accessible, media-friendly governor in this state’s history did things like this, reporters were all over him like red beans on rice.
But when Jindal, who seldom holds press conferences because he despises reporters, abhors the media, loathes the fourth estate, does it, no one says a word.
The silence is deafening.
Where’s the outrage?
J-RAPE.
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