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Archive for July, 2012

Another potential member of the Teague Club: Jindal wants LLT board member Vallee gone for independent thinking

Posted in Governor's Office, Taxes, Teague, Transparency on July 16, 2012| 1 Comment »

Gov. Piyush Jindal has yet another dissident in his crosshairs.

This time it’s Louisiana Land Trust (LLT) board member Don Vallee of New Orleans who he wants to Teague.

This time, however, there could be a slight problem known as the State Constitution.

LLT, originally the Road Home Corp., is a publicly-chartered non-profit organization formed to manage properties purchased by the State of Louisiana under the current Road Home Program as part of the ongoing recovery effort from damage caused by hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005.

Once it takes title to properties purchased by the Road Home Homeowner Assistance Program, LLT has broad powers to receive and dispose of the properties, to accept funds “from any sources,” to borrow against the properties and to obtain payment for obligations under the guidelines set forth by the Louisiana Recovery Authority and to provide for financing as administered by the Office of Community Development (OCD).

Funding for LLT is provided through community development block grants (CDBG) funds administered by OCD.

LLT is governed by a seven-member board of directors with one member appointed from a list of three persons nominated by the president of the Senate and one appointed from a list of three nominated by the speaker of the House.

Donald Vallee, former president and general manager of Boland Marine and Manufacturing Co. of New Orleans, was nominated by then-House Speaker Jim Tucker and subsequently appointed by Jindal in May of 2008.

Vallee has occasionally clashed with other board members, even accusing one member of a conflict of interest. Vallee said in 2009 that he felt rents in New Orleans were artificially inflated by voucher rates.

In successfully lobbying the state Bond Commission for a temporary moratorium on new bonds for subsidized, affordable-housing construction in New Orleans, he said in September of 2009 that the city’s rental market “overbuilt.”

The Bond Commission hearing was prompted by a Bureau of Governmental Research report that supported Vallee’s position.

The report said that since Katrina, a larger share of New Orleans families received federal housing subsidies. It further suggested that the city may be in danger of having too much affordable housing, predicting that by 2012, if all proposed projects were completed, one in four households in New Orleans would be subsidized.

The rate was one in 10 prior to Katrina.

“What we don’t need is more construction,” Vallee reiterated. “We need reasonable rents.”

He said the moratorium on new subsidized housing was necessary because no one had properly studied the big picture. He called for the moratorium to remain in place until a comprehensive market study could be completed by an independent party—“someone without any skin in the game.”

Tucker also supported the moratorium, saying policymakers had been “flying by the seat of our pants” when making determinations of what housing subsidies were necessary in New Orleans. The result, he said, was an “excess supply.”

Added to the problem was the credit-market crash of 2008 stalled some developments and potential builders were unable to find investors to buy state-allocated tax credits.

Apparently Vallee’s independent streak doesn’t sit well with Jindal, who has expressed his wishes to replace him.

Apparently, whenever one stands between Jindal and tax credits, it gets Piyush’s hackles up.

But Vallee said he will fight his attempted ouster because he believes that Jindal lacks the legal authority to replace him.

“We’re not a state agency,” he said. “We are a private, non-profit corporation. I was not selected by the governor. He did appoint me but it was on the nomination of the Speaker of the House.”

Part of Vallee’s problem could be that unlike many of Jindal’s appointees, he has never contributed to any of the governor’s political campaigns.

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Notable quotables (in their own words)

Posted in BESE, Education, Notable Quotables on July 12, 2012| 4 Comments »

“It’s like we’re trying to fly an airplane while we’re building it.”

–Board of Elementary and Secondary Education member Lottie Beebe (R-Breaux Bridge), often at odds with Gov. Bobby Jindal and State Superintendent of Education John White on issues involving public education, on hearing that English Language and math teacher training for the Common Core Standards (adopted by 48 states) by local school boards has been re-scheduled for a second time because parishes did not receive expected training from the Department of Education. The local training, originally scheduled for June, was re-set for July and now has been postponed once again.

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Remember that $80M broadband internet grant that Piyush rejected? Well, it seems that John White needs it for DOE

Posted in ALEC, American Legislative Exchange Council, BESE, Broadband, Internet, Education, Governor's Office, Grant, Grants, Higher Education, Regents, Supriya Jinda Foundation on July 12, 2012| 8 Comments »

Remember last year’s incredible fiasco precipitated by Gov. Piyush Jindal when he spurned that $80.6 million Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) grant to provide high speed broadband internet to rural areas of Louisiana?

Well, it’s back—perhaps to bite him in the gluteus maximus.

State Superintendent of Education John White has released a report that shows Louisiana public school students and teachers are lacking the technology to enter the digital age.

The Louisiana Technology Footprint report discusses technology guidelines that provide a snapshot of the current state of digital readiness of school districts and campuses in the state.

Louisiana Believes, the highly-touted plan by the department includes, among other goals, one for all schools to be digital-ready by 2014-2015.

The report provides districts with an initial footprint picture of network, bandwidth and device requirements need to fully implement online assessments by the 2014-2015 school year and full digital readiness thereafter.

“Data and technology specifications…indicate school campuses in Louisiana have 197,898 devices available for online testing but only 67,038 (33.9 percent) met new device standards,” the report says.

Only five districts—Ascension, City of Bogalusa, Red River, St. James and FirstLine Schools of New Orleans—meet the minimum device readiness requirements and only two—Ascension and St. James—meet both device and network readiness guidelines for online testing, it said.

It was last Oct. 26 that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Division (NOAA) issued its final termination letter for the grant after repeated efforts to get the state to comply with its request for additional information.

The project, which LouisianaVoice learned was opposed by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), would have created 900 miles of cable over 21 rural parishes in Louisiana and would have supported several Louisiana universities with expanded optical fiber networking capacity.

That could have complimented the Board of Regents’ $20 million Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI) project, designed to extend high-speed networking capabilities in the state.

But Jindal, whose wife’s charitable foundation received considerable funding from AT&T, apparently preferred that the project be carried out by private companies—such as…oh, say AT&T, for example.

The governor refused to re-apply for the grant because what he termed a “heavy-handed approach from the federal government that would have undermined and taken over private business.”

U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu call Jindal’s stated reason “hogwash.” She said the grant would not have interfered with private enterprise and in fact, would have granted money for private companies to lay the cable. “We weren’t trying to create a government broadband system,” she said.

Almost a year before the final rejection of the grant, ALEC, at its annual meeting in San Diego in August of 2010, passed a resolution opposing initiatives targeted at providing universally accessible broadband service because of “the unnecessary, burdensome and economically harmful regulation of broadband internet service companies, including the providers of the infrastructure that supports and enables internet services…”

Looks like someone forgot to tell White about Jindal’s opposition to expanded availability to that evil internet.

In fact, White, in his report, encourages school districts to join a statewide consortium that will aid in consolidated purchasing and contracts as well as providing technology services and support.

Wonder who’ll get the contract to form that consortium?

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RSD delinquent on $6.6M student transportation costs–most of which occurred under Superintendent John White’s watch

Posted in BESE, Education, Recovery School District on July 11, 2012| 10 Comments »

The news coming out of the Department of Education just keeps getting worse.

Like $7.8 million worse.

Even as the Louisiana Department of Education and State Superintendent John White hunker down in efforts to deny the release of public information that might shine a less than favorable light on Gov. Bobby Jindal’s education reform package, LouisianaVoice has learned that the Recovery School District (RSD) in New Orleans may be as much as $6.6 million in arrears on payments to an Illinois company contracted to provide transportation services to RSD students.

The company contracted to provide transportation services has submitted a bill of $7.8 million, of which $6.6 million is said to be nearly a year past due. Transportation costs are factored into the annual allocation to local school systems, leaving unanswered the disposition of the RSD’s appropriation for that purpose.

White was the RSD superintendent during much of that time, being promoted to state superintendent last January one month before Jones Walker sent the letter.

Additionally, a New Orleans television station recently aired a story that showed RSD’s $10.5 million contract with Durham School Services is costing the district up to three times as much per student for transportation of RSD students as in some other parts of the country.

LouisianaVoice has learned that Durham has retained the services of the politically-connect Jones Walker Law Firm of New Orleans and that Jones Walker attorney Michael DePetrillo in February sent a letter of demand to the Louisiana Department of Education (DOE) and RSD for payment of $7.8 million, of which $6,568,694 was said to be past due. The last payment made to the company was on September 20, 2011, and the past due amount is now said to be $6.6 million.

DePetrillo did not return a call to his office.

Former RSD Superintendent Paul Vallas said he inherited a “terrible” bus transportation system when he was hired in 2007 and he promptly hired Durham which, in the 2008-09 school year bused 7,500 children. For the school year just completed, only 5,700 children were transported by Durham, placing the cost at $1,800 per student.

That was the same Paul Vallas, of course, who took some three dozen personal trips to Chicago in a state vehicle and on one of those trips, wrecked the vehicle. His boss at the time, Paul Pastorek (White’s predecessor), said he didn’t realize the use of the state vehicle for personal out-of-state trips–including one during which he announced on a local television station that he planned to run for mayor of Chicago–was wrong.

The Hinds County (Jackson) Mississippi School District contracts with Durham to bus 4,000 students at a cost of $3.6 million, or $900 per student—half of what the RSD-NO pays, or is contracted to pay. Indianapolis also contracts with Durham, as does Memphis. In Indianapolis Durham transports 28,000 under a $15 million contract ($535 per student) and in Memphis, it buses 35,000 students at a contract price of $18 million ($514 per student).

In addition to its $10.5 million contract with Durham, RSD-NO also has a $500,000-a-year contract with Transpar Group of Memphis to design bus routes and to provide oversight.

Transpar, a Missouri company, worked with Vallas when he was chief of schools in Chicago and questions arose then about inflated contracts with the company.

Transpar, in addition to receiving $500,000 a year to draw up bus routes and to provide oversight, also is housed in the RSD New Orleans offices.

School officials in Memphis, Indianapolis and Hinds County, Mississippi, said oversight and route planning is either handled in-house or worked out with Durham and that the additional services of a company like Transpar are not needed.

In retaining Jones Walker, Durham sent signals that it is serious about obtaining payment of funds due the company. Jones Walker is a major player in Louisiana political circles. The firm itself contributed at least $22,000 to Jindal and Paul Cabon of Washington, D.C., the firm’s Director of Governmental Relations, and his wife Susan also contributed more than $28,000 to Jindal. Various other law partners also contributed between $500 and $1,000 each to the governor.

Jones Walker was also the firm retained by the Sabine River Authority in its aborted attempt to sell 600,000 acre-feet (196 billion gallons) of water from the Toledo Bend Reservoir to a group of investors that included Donald T. “Boysie” Bollinger of Lockport.

The controversy over the money Durham says it is owed by RSD raises an even bigger question about the state’s Minimum Foundation Program (MFP) funding for the Recovery School District.

Transportation costs are factored into the MFP appropriation for each school district, meaning the state appropriated funds to be used for the transportation of students in the RSD.

LouisianaVoice has submitted public records requests to DOE in an attempt to ascertain what happened to the funds appropriated to RSD for transportation and why those funds were not used to pay the Durham contract.

CNS previously requested copies of applications for education voucher/scholarships received by the department. DOE denied that request, saying that the applications were in the “pre-decisional status.”

No such exception for public records exists under the state’s public records statute.

The governor’s office does have an exemption that qualifies as part of his “deliberative process.” That exemption provision prevents disclosure of records that are intra-office communications of the governor, relate to the deliberative process of the governor, relate to the governor’s schedule or security (or that of his family), or contain “pre-decisional” advice and recommendations to the governor concerning the budget—none of which qualifies under the reason invoked by DOE.

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Notable quotables (in their own words)

Posted in Notable Quotables, Privatization on July 11, 2012| Leave a Comment »

“You must be an employee of the Office of Student Financial Assistance in order to be considered for this position.”

–one of the requirements of applicants for a new position at the Louisiana Office of Student Financial Assistance (LOSFA) that pays up to $76,000 per year. The position was posted only days after 58 employees were laid off by LOSFA in an administration privatization move.

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