Louisiana Voice

Remember way back on Monday, WE WARNED YOU Gov. Squeaky Toy Landry and the Repugnantcan legislature was conducting an all-out assault on public records?

That’s why we know so little information, for example, about DHS’s intention to purchase a couple of huge warehouses in Port Allen and Hammond to house thousands of undocumented detainees—and maybe even a few bona fide American citizens, if past performance is any indication.

That determination to keep us in the dark also extends to these mega-data centers being planned in the Shreveport area, St. Francisville and in Richland Parish. It’s a pretty simple philosophy: the less we know, the fewer hard questions we know to ask.

And now the HOUSE EDUCATION COMMITTEE, by a unanimous vote (at least two Democrats who are members of the committee, along with HOUSE BILL 608 author Rep. Tehmi Chassion (D-Lafayette were complicit) by the committee that says you have no right to see how your tax dollars are being spent.

HB 608 exempts universities under the dubious guise of privacy protection from having to account for the of money being paid to college athletes through the university via a $2.8 billion legal settlement that allows schools to share up to $20.5 million for athletes yearly.

Augmenting that is the so-called Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) payment program underwritten by corporate sponsors that has seen some high school jocks come to college programs already overnight millionaires.

Universities nationwide, with the lone exception of James Madison University, have refused to divulge any income data for students, claiming it (a) violates students’ privacy or (b) it’s a trade secret necessary for the success of a given athletic program. But is student privacy really so sacred in this case? For the most part, these are men and women at least 18 years of age and it would seem if they are old enough to vote, they’re old enough to account for the receipt of public money–just like any other adult.

The salary of every professor, administrator, instructor, custodian and groundskeeper at every public college in Louisiana is readily available. What’s the difference?

The real inequity here is that a hardworking couple who pays into a college savings fund for their children may eventually see some of that money going to pay some athlete while their kid struggles to pay for books. Maybe that’s part of the reason New Orleans attorney Scott Sternburg sued LSU on behalf of three reporters seeking records.

The bill will now go to the House and Governmental Affairs Committee for further consideration.

But remember, if this bill becomes law, it will be the first public records exemption for public spending in the gloried history of the gret stet of Loozianer.

But not the last.

Rest assured, if this bill passes, it’ll be so much easier to move to similarly exempt other records and you’d better believe once the genie is out of the bottle, it ain’t going back in.

There will be other elected officials and bureaucrats down the road who will decide their records rare sacrosanct, that they should not be bothered answering questions from the public—you know, like Jeff Landry complaining that as attorney general, his office had to spend a lot of time responding to public records request.

“During my time as Attorney General, we had to hire two lawyers that worked full-time answering sometimes senseless requests from people with no connection to our state,” Landry complained, forgetting, apparently, that goes with the job of working for the public. 

And, by golly, you will have no right to know how your tax dollars are being spent.