Louisiana Voice

State Rep. Jim Fannin (D/R-Jonesboro) may have inadvertently exposed the Jindal administration’s $178 million “surplus” for the fraud it is in a brief conversation with one of our readers from north Louisiana who knew the right questions to ask, LouisianaVoice has learned.

Fannin, Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, delivered a “State of the State” address at the Fall Meeting of the Louisiana Retired Teachers Association in Baton Rouge on Monday and afterwards was confronted by retired teacher Kay Riser Prince of Ruston.

Rubbing her forefinger and thumb together, Riser asked Fannin, “Is Jindal’s new-found money real—that is, can the light bill be paid with it, or is all on paper?”

“I don’t know,” answered Fannin initially before he finally said it is money that was assigned to various agencies but not spent.

“When I taught at (Louisiana) Tech,” Riser responded, “we were told that if we did not spend money that had been allocated by June 30, it went back to the state.”

Fannin then admitted to Prince that was where Jindal’s “discovery” of some $320 million originated.

Prince was able to obtain an answer to a question no one else has been able to get—probably because Fannin was sent a list of funds Jindal had supposedly “swept” from some 17 agencies to arrive at his bogus surplus and when asked point blank, he acknowledged that the surplus was, at best an illusion, an accounting sleight of hand.

So now it would appear that the surplus so proudly proclaimed by Jindal is not cash after all, but an accounting entry and any available cash at the time of the under-budget expenditures (reportedly dating all the way back to 1997) has long since reverted back into the General Fund and has been spent.

In fact, if the state kept books like a business, this shell game might well have affected the retained earnings of owners’ equity and may have even resulted in Enron-like indictments.

In standard business practice, such funds would have been included as a carry-forward asset but never as revenue leading to a subsequent accounting period budget surplus. You can ask Enron’s now defunct accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, about that.

But Gov. Bobby Jindal and Commissioner of Administration Kristy Nichols have each seen their shadows and have retreated back into the fantasy world in which they now reside—but not before Nichols fired off a broadside at State Treasurer John Kennedy for not knowing of the existence of a nonexistent bucket of cash lying around for all these years—and they’re not scheduled to emerge until the Legislative Auditor’s report sometime in late December.

By that time, of course, Jindal will be in Iowa or traipsing around in the snows of New Hampshire in search of caucus and primary votes he hopes will catapult him into semi-serious contention for the Republican presidential nomination—an exercise our crystal ball tells us will give him the distinction of having less a chance at the nomination—or even of being picked for VP— than Alf Landon had of beating FDR in 1936 or of Barry Goldwater upsetting LBJ in ’64. Meanwhile, the looming legislative session will be but a mere distraction, and Louisiana’s financial troubles will start to become a fading bad dream for him and a mess to be sorted out by his successor.