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Archive for the ‘Governor’s Office’ Category

With π-yush, the word ‘friends’ has become synonymous with the word ‘cash’ when it comes to state board appointments

Posted in Boards, Campaign Contributions, Commissions, Governor's Office, Louisiana Purchase on January 6, 2013| 3 Comments »

Never let it be said that Piyush Jindal doesn’t remember his friends. As long as the word “friends” is synonymous with the word “cash.”

Of the seven new appointments and one re-appointment to the University of Louisiana System board, six of those combined to contribute nearly $147,000 to Jindal political campaigns from 2003 through 2011, according to state campaign finance records.

The terms of seven of the 16 member board expired on Dec. 31. The eighth position was vacated when attorney Jimmy Faircloth, Jindal’s former executive counsel, resigned after two years on the board and was replaced by his wife, Kelly Faircloth, a chiropractor.

Faircloth, while serving on the board, recently was contracted by Jindal to represent the State Department of Education in a pair of lawsuits challenging the state voucher system and the teacher tenure revisions, both enacted last year by the state legislature as part of Jindal’s education reform package.

Faircloth contributed $14,000 and his former Alexandria law firm contributed an additional $9,000 to Jindal campaigns in 2003, 2006 and 2010. Of that total, Faircloth and his firm each contributed $5,000 to Jindal on the same date in December of 2006.

Only one of three re-appointees, Jimmie “Beau” Martin, Jr. of Cut Off, contributed to Jindal. Martin, family members and three family-owned businesses combined to contribute $34,278.30, records show.

Jimmy Long, Sr. of Natchitoches and Winfred Sibille of Sunset were also re-appointed to new six-year terms but neither was found to have contributed to Jindal.

The other four new appointees and their contributions include:

• Gary Solomon of New Orleans, chairman of Crescent Bank and Trust (replacing Renee Lapeyrolerie): $35,000 from Solomon and family members in 2003, 2007 and 2008 and another $7,199 from Crescent Bank in 2007 and 2009;

• Mark Romero of New Iberia, executive vice president of Brown & Brown Insurance (replacing Paul Aucoin of Morgan City): $1,000 from Romero in 2008 and $9,000 by his insurance firm in 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011;

• Robert Shreve of Baton Rouge, CEO of Gulf South Business Systems and Consultants (replacing Russell Mosely of Baton Rouge): $11,000 in 2007 and 2009 and $1,000 by his firm in 2011;

• John Condos of Lake Charles (replacing Louis Lambert): $20,500 by Condos and his wife.

No one expects any governor to appoint political opponents to state boards and commissions but some elected officials might choose to appoint small-time contributors; appointment considerations with this governor, however, just don’t work that way.

Instead, Piyush has displayed a disturbing propensity to favor the big-dollar contributors in making his appointments and the same old names keep popping up, indicating that his solid core support base may be a smaller fraternity than one might assume.

It’s either that or he simply chooses to bestow appointments on only his biggest contributors and ignore the rest.

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ATC’s Troy Hebert apparently just a poor innocent victim of a series of unfortunate circumstances and vindictive people

Posted in Civil Service, Governor's Office, State Agencies on January 6, 2013| 115 Comments »

Poor Troy Hebert. He just can’t catch a break.

If he’s not placing a former business partner on the payroll of the Alcohol and Tobacco Control Commission (ATC) but who is not required to report to work, he’s placing a person on the payroll specifically for the purpose of visiting lawmakers in the area.

If he’s not requiring employees to stand as he enters a room and greet him with a cheery, “Good morning, Commissioner,” he’s issuing a new directive prohibiting agents from criticizing other agents to the public and media—a clear violation of the First Amendment.

If he’s not cracking down on state cellphone use by ATC agents—even after explicitly informing them that they were free to use the phones for personal use because of their unusually long working hours across the state (and because the phones come with unlimited minutes), he is putting his agency in such a state of disarray that other law enforcement agencies now exclude ATC from participation in raids—a radical departure from past protocol.

If he isn’t taking off to St. Lucia for a week in December of 2010 without taking leave or leave without pay, he’s using state equipment to haul materials to his home currently under construction in Baton Rouge.

And if he’s not purchasing a $10,000 dog ostensibly for the purpose of sniffing synthetic marijuana even though no drug sniffing canine is qualified to locate synthetic drugs (because the chemical ingredients are constantly changing) and then reassigning the agent who went through training with the dog, then he’s pursuing trespassing charges against a person who rescued an emaciated dog from his vacant, unfinished home.

The latest incident involving the former state senator-cum-highly-paid Piyush Jindal appointee revolves around an 11-month Great Dane that Hebert said he was attempting to nurse through an episode of hip dysplasia—by leaving the animal unattended in a vacant house on Christmas Eve.

Hebert is building a new home on South Lakeshore Drive in Baton Rouge and Angie Brumfield of Denham Springs was walking her own dog around the Louisiana State University lakes with a friend. They stopped at the house which had a sign inviting passersby to photograph the home’s Christmas display.

As they waited for others to finish taking photos, Brumfield looked through a window of the unoccupied home which had no curtains.

Inside, she saw the sick gray-and-white female Great Dane lying on the floor. She described the animal as “emaciated, in distress and with bones protruding where they should not be.”

She said she thought the dog had been abandoned and left there to die.

A photograph by the New Orleans Times-Picayune posted on its nola.com http://www.nola.com/news/baton-rouge/index.ssf/2013/01/sick_dog_found_in_baton_rouge.html
showed an extremely sickly animal lying on a floor, with protruding ribs and hip bones.

She coaxed the dog through a sliding door in the rear of the home but never entered the house, she said. She took the animal home, cared for it over Christmas, looked for lost dog signs, and posted a Cragslist ad in an attempt to locate the owner.

She took it to a veterinarian the day after Christmas and the vet discovered a microchip in the dog which indicated it was owned by Hebert.

Hebert said his veterinarian had given pain medication for the dog and instructed the family to monitor the animal’s progress but the dog, named T-Girl, lost considerable weight because of the illness and was able to walk on only three legs.

Brumfield posted a photo of the dog on Facebook, expressed her distress at its condition and named Hebert and his pediatrician wife Dawn Vick as its owners and that’s when the trouble started.

Hebert, who seems to take undue pleasure at demeaning his employees and criticizing them both privately and in the media, took umbrage at Brumfield’s perceived attack on his reputation. “We have done nothing wrong,” Hebert sniffed. “We’re not going to stand back and allow some stranger who broke into our home, stole our dog and is attacking us on a social website when all we’ve been trying to do is deal with a very sad situation.”

Sure sounds like a vicious crime wave to us.

Sad or not, employees of ATC have confirmed that Hebert regularly brought a Great Dane (it’s not certain if it was T-Girl or another Great Dane owned by Hebert) to ATC last summer and would routinely leave the animal in the back of his pickup truck, exposed to the hot summer sun throughout the day with no food or water.

Now, though, he claims that Brumfield may have harmed T-Girl by moving her and keeping her without medication. “We firmly believe that after she took our dog, it made matters worse,” he said.

Hebert reported the matter to Baton Rouge police and Brumfield and her friend now face misdemeanor charges of unlawfully entering premises and unauthorized use of a “movable.”

Apparently, Hebert can do little more these days than pursue those who attempt to aid an animal in distress now that the Baton Rouge Police Department and the parish Alcohol and Beverage Control Board no longer work with ATC.

Prior to Hebert’s appointment ATC regularly participated in raids with other law enforcement agencies but two recent raids—one in Baton Rouge and the other in Lafayette—were carried out without ATC’s involvement.

A retired ATC agent told LouisianaVoice that Hebert “has destroyed an agency that once took the lead in serious investigations.”

The former agent said that agents spent years building relationships with local, federal and other state agencies. “We constantly worked with the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), U.S. marshals, military Criminal Investigation Command (CID) and other agencies,” he said.

“Many of us were integral members of Joint Terrorism Task Forces; we were teaching classes on alcohol and tobacco laws in police academies. We were one of the leading agencies in our field. We conducted compliance checks for sales of alcohol and tobacco to underage customers. We worked with the Louisiana State Police conducting DWI checkpoints.

“We trained and worked with local police departments and sheriffs’ offices to conduct their own operations.

“I think all that has been destroyed,” he said.

Hebert was appointed by Jindal on Nov. 23, 2010 and less than a month later he and his wife vacationed for a week in St. Lucia. He took neither annual leave (because he had not worked long enough to accumulate a week’s leave time) nor leave without pay.

When later confronted by state officials, he blamed a subordinate and was allowed to correct the “error” which, in some quarters, might be considered payroll fraud and grounds for dismissal.

He also hired Sean Magee of Jeanerette, a former business partner in a Hurricane Katrina debris cleanup business (while Hebert was still a state senator), to work for ATC but several agents say he never appears at the Baton Rouge headquarters.

More recently he has hired a legislative liaison whose only duties are to visit with legislators—even as he has reduced the number of enforcement positions which in return resulted in ATC’s becoming ineligible for certain federal grants. The agency also has lost its eligibility for sending agents to the FBI National Academy.

His most recent innovation is to craft a personnel policy expected to be released within the next few days that prohibits agents from criticizing other agents to the public or media.

As the head of a state law enforcement agency, perhaps Mr. Hebert should take the time to familiarize himself with the Louisiana Whistleblower Protection Act (R.S. 42:1169), the Louisiana State Employee Governmental Code of Ethics and the Bill of Rights, particularly the pesky First Amendment which guarantees citizens the right of free speech.

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Separation of Powers: why does our legislature cede its power to the governor? (LouisianaVoice guest column)

Posted in Ethics, Governor's Office, Legislature, Legislators on December 30, 2012| 9 Comments »

By Stephen Winham ©2012

Because the lines have become so blurred recently, we often forget the reason our founding fathers created three separate branches of government in the 1787 U.S. Constitution. It was simple, really – to protect citizens from an abusive, authoritarian government by spreading and providing checks and balances on power. The separation of powers doctrine implicit in the constitution is applied, in varying measure, by both the U. S. and state governments.

While the judicial branch is responsible for preserving the law and resolving legal issues, the legislature is responsible for actually creating laws, including those making appropriations. The executive is responsible for administering these laws. Though the three branches are considered equal, the legislative branch can easily become the most powerful. If this is true, why is the governor so inordinately powerful in Louisiana?

From my perspective, the clearest example of how the doctrine of separation of powers is disregarded in Louisiana is the way the state’s budget is adopted. In many states the legislature considers budget proposals submitted by the governor (the Executive Budget), but then develops its own proposals, often including a document very much like the one submitted by the governor.

In Louisiana, the Legislature accepts the executive branch budget and the original appropriations bills (which are drafted by administration, not legislative, staff) as submitted. Any changes the legislature makes are by amendments to the bills. This should have the value of making a clear distinction between what the governor is requesting and what the legislature chooses to appropriate for state services. However, to the extent the legislature ultimately rolls over and plays dead, as it has over the last 6 years in ways unprecedented since the late 70s, it has ceded its greatest power – that of appropriation – to the executive branch.

The way the budget is handled is far from the only example of how the executive branch overextends its power via a compliant, and some would say, complicit legislature. Again, why is this so? Is it because the governor actually has extraordinary power by law? No, and remember it is the legislature that makes the law in any event.

I believe the legislature actually enjoys and benefits from being controlled by the governor. No matter what happens in Louisiana government these days, an individual legislator can excuse his/her actions to constituents by claiming s/he could not buck the governor, no matter how hard s/he tried. It’s a win-win situation for the legislature and the governor. The governor continues to wield unbridled power and enjoy positive national press while the legislature can quietly blame him for anything that goes wrong. Both the governor and, ironically, legislators are free to take full credit for anything that goes right.

The governor and members of the legislature are elected to serve the people’s interests. When the bulk of power is in the hands of one person, the value of the separation of powers doctrine is lost, including the extent to which the people’s interests are represented. This was apparently treated humorously when our four previous governors met in a recent forum, but it is no joke.

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ATC’s Troy Hebert throws subordinates under the bus to deflect from his own inadequacies, inept mismanagement

Posted in ATC, Ethics, Governor's Office, Legislature, Legislators, State Agencies on December 20, 2012| 8 Comments »

Office of Alcohol and Tobacco Control (ATC) Director Troy Hebert, one of those former legislators to whom Piyush Jindal appointed to a six-figure state job, made a big production this week of his so-called “audit” of personal use of state cell phones by agents working under him.

Hebert, of Jeanerette, resigned from the State Senate in November of 2010 to accept the appointment as ATC director at $107,000 per year and has conducted a reign of terror in the ensuing two years.

While Hebert claims that only a half-dozen or so employees have left his agency, a survey by LouisianaVoice learned that the number was closer to 50. Some of those were fired only days after being hired by Hebert while others quit out of disgust.

Hebert obviously considers his status in more grandiose terms than most elected officials, much less appointed department heads, though there are rumors floating around that he considers himself as a potential candidate for governor.

Though he is merely a mid-level department head, he nevertheless requires his employees to stand when he enters a room and to address him with a cheery, “Good morning, Commissioner.”

Such courtesy is normally extended only to heads of state, not obscure state bureaucratic appointees.

This is the same guy who expresses such indignation at his employees’ use of state cell phones for personal calls who thought nothing of blowing a couple of thousand on low-profile, 22-inch rims for his state vehicle.

This is the same guy who, though he has zero training as a law enforcement official, demanded—and got—emergency lights installed on his state vehicle so he could play cop.

This is the guy who suspended an employee after her physician refused to provide weekly status reports despite the physician’s prior written certification that she was physically unable to work.

This is the same administrator who more than once transferred an employee from one end of the state to the other with as little as two days’ notice.

This is the same agency head who directed an agent to return to uniform status and to re-enter a New Orleans bar for inspections—after that same agent had purchased drugs during an undercover investigation in that same establishment—a directive that might well have served as the agent’s death sentence had things gone badly.

And this is the same guy who made a big production a few months back over a $10,000 expenditure to purchase and train a “synthetic drug-sniffing canine.”

“ATC Commissioner Troy Hebert says (the) new canine will be a great asset when it comes to detecting synthetic marijuana,” the news release said. ‘“It’s a very, very dangerous substance,’ said Hebert. ‘We think this new addition’s going to help us with some of that.’”

The only problem is, the “certificate of certification” from the National Police Canine Association in Waddell, Arizona, dated Nov. 2, certifies the new dog only for marijuana and cocaine, not synthetic drugs.

There’s a reason for that: synthetic marijuana is virtually impossible to detect reliably because the chemical ingredients of synthetic drugs is constantly changing, meaning there is no reliably consistent pattern for animals to learn.

LouisianaVoice earlier reported his propensity to fire employees with little or no reason and that he has settled a couple of discrimination lawsuits brought by former employees.

Hebert fits right into the Piyush Jindal mold of arrogance that permeates this entire administration, from cabinet members who refuse to divulge the identities of contract winners to administrators who refuse to provide reports to legislative committees to the governor himself, who ignores requests for information.

But back to those state cell phones.

ATC agents are often away from home for stretches of 12 hours or longer and upon their hiring, Hebert informs agents that as long as they handle ATC business, they may use their state phones for personal calls.

There you have it. It’s policy.

And now Hebert is trying to come off as a diligent agency head hell bent on keeping recalcitrant employees in line. This from a guy who consistently disregards civil service rules and regulations and gets himself backed into EEO corners that cost the state thousands upon thousands of dollars in payments to former employees and legal fees.

You do not tell your employees it’s permissible to use state cell phones for personal calls and then throw them under the bus for purposes of painting yourself as the noble guardian of the public trust—especially when your own motives are called into question.

The bottom line appears to be that he is setting up a few agents to persecute through a complicit news media at Press Release Central who simply takes press handouts and runs them with no questions asked.

There can be only one explanation for such action: he hopes to deflect criticism of his own administrative actions and misdeeds by tagging his subordinates with perceived wrongdoing.

To that end, he fits right in with this administration.

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The Hayride, not satisfied with drinking π-yush Kool-Aid, takes the bait on that infant-abducting eagle video hoax

Posted in Governor's Office on December 20, 2012| 3 Comments »

If you need any help identifying the types who drink the Piyush Kool-Aid, you need only log onto The Hayride http://thehayride.com/.

The blog, with the help of ultra-connoisseur of eau de Piyush Jeff Sadow, has consistently stood on the sidelines and applauded attempts by the administration to privatize state agencies, gut state employee retirement, dismantle public education, slash higher education budgets, cripple health care for the poor of Louisiana and even the firing of LSU Healthcare System director Dr. Fred Cerise.

Through their rose-colored glasses, they can see no wrong in what Piyush is doing to the state and, apparently, see no wrong in what he is doing for his political campaign supporters.

But now The Hayride has set itself up for a bit of ridicule. Gentle ridicule, but ridicule, nevertheless.

In today’s blog posting http://thehayride.com/2012/12/in-case-you-arent-freaked-out-enough-about-the-threats-to-your-kids/ includes a video that has gone viral on the internet. The post is entitled “In Case You Aren’t Freaked Out Enough About the Threats to Your Kids…” and includes that now-infamous video of the bird (supposedly an eagle) swooping down to grab an infant playing on the grass in a park only a few feet from an adult, supposedly its mother.

The only problem is, the video is a complete fake and The Hayride got taken in by it the same way it consistently gets taken in by the Jindal administration.

In fact, the bird isn’t even an eagle and the entire sequence is computer-generated. Even Diane Sawyer on ABC News Wednesday night called attention to the flaws in the video that quickly identified it as bogus.

One who watched the video on The Hayride immediately responded with one word: “Fake!”

That viewer was none other than former LSU All-American quarterback Bert Jones of Ruston.

We’ve had more than a few readers say the same about Piyush.

But apparently, however, The Hayride still believes.

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