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Archive for the ‘House, Senate’ Category

Vitter charges $4K per seat for access to donated Superdome luxury suite for 2012 LSU-Alabama BCS championship game

Posted in Campaign Contributions, Congress, Elections, House, Senate on January 9, 2014| 23 Comments »

While the Alabama Crimson Tide was beating LSU 21-0 in the BCS national championship game in the Mercedes Benz Superdome on Jan. 9, 2012, U.S. Sen. David Vitter was entertaining a number of guests in one of the Superdome’s 152 luxury suites—at a hefty cost, LouisianaVoice has learned.

Vitter, who apparently gained access to the suite through corporate largesse, took full advantage of the occasion to charge guests $4,000 per seat, according to one person who was there.

Ticket scalping laws vary from state to state and in Louisiana:

  • Tickets cannot be sold at more than their face value price except on the Internet;
  • Tickets for university sporting events cannot be sold online by Louisiana legislators or university students;
  • Tickets can be resold online at greater than their face value price if approved by both the event operator (NCAA) and the venue operator (the Louisiana Stadium and Exposition District).

The Louisiana Stadium and Exposition District (LSED), the governing board of the Superdome, owns one of the suites and the remaining 151 are owned not by the State of Louisiana, but by the New Orleans Saints (a windfall of some $10 million to the Saints) and leased for annual lease fees ranging from $50,000 to $100,000 per year, a LSED spokesperson told LouisianaVoice. All 151 suites are under lease to private entities, according to information obtained from the Saints office.

Sixty-four suites are located on the 400 level of the Superdome and offer a range of 22 to 40 seats per suite. The remaining 88 suites are located on the 300 level and offer 16 to 20 seats per suite, according to the stadium’s web page.

Vitter failed to respond to three email inquiries from LouisianaVoice that asked:

  • Who (corporate entity or individual) provided you access to a luxury box for that game?
  • What was the seating capacity for that luxury box at that game?
  • How many guests did you entertain in that luxury box for that game?

He also was asked to identify those in attendance as his guests in the suite for the game.

Depending on the number of seats available and allowing that all seats except for those for Vitter and his family were sold, he could have netted between $50,000 and $150,000 for that event.

Federal election laws place a cap on individual political contributions. That cap varies but in 2012, it was $2,500. Federal laws also prohibit direct contributions to federal candidates from corporations. The $4,000 price would have exceeded the maximum allowable contribution.

While Vitter’s campaign contributions for the time period encompassing the LSU-Alabama game list no individual contributions that would appear to be connected to the sale of seats, corporations may make unlimited contributions to the so-called Super PACs.

Vitter’s Super Pac, the Fund for Louisiana’s Future, raised $1.5 million last year, according to Washington, D.C., fundraiser Charlie Spies.

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Notable Quotables (in their own words)

Posted in Contract, Contracts, Ethics, House, Senate, Judges, Legislature, Legislators, Notable Quotables, Office of Workers' Comp, Politicians on January 8, 2014| 1 Comment »

“My service as vice chair of the Labor & Industrial Relations Committee in no manner alters my duties or the constraints placed upon me under the Code of Governmental Ethics.”

—State Rep. Chris Broadwater (R-Hammond), in an email letter to LouisianaVoice last year. Broadwater, former Director of the Louisiana Office of Workers Compensation (OWC), took a job in 2010 with a company that was awarded a $4.2 million contract by OWC only weeks before his resignation.

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Legislator, former OWC Director took job with firm within weeks after his office awarded company $4 million contract

Posted in Contract, Contracts, Ethics, House, Senate, Judges, Legislature, Legislators, Office of Workers' Comp, Politicians on January 8, 2014| 4 Comments »

The vice chairman of the House Labor and Industrial Relations Committee who once oversaw the Louisiana Workforce Commission’s (LWC) Office of Workers Compensation (OWC) went to work for a consulting firm within weeks of his office’s awarding a $4.2 million contract to the firm, LouisianaVoice has learned.

State Rep. Chris Broadwater (R-Hammond) served as OWC director and concurrently as interim executive council for the executive director of the LWC, previously known as the Department of Labor.

He announced his resignation as OWC Director in an email to a number of recipients on Oct. 28, 2010, with his resignation to become effective on Nov. 12, 2010.

A $4.28 million contract with SAS Institute to deploy a contractor-hosted fraud detection software platform was approved on Oct. 7, just three weeks before his resignation. The contract was made retroactive to Aug. 31, 2010 and expired on Aug. 30, 2013.

“Today I have tendered my resignation as the Director of the Office of Workers Compensation, effective Nov. 12, 2010,” his email said. “I will be returning to the private sector to work primarily in the area of governmental relations.”

A LouisianaVoice story last July said that Broadwater resigned in February of 2011 but the email, which surfaced just last week, indicates he left OCW three months prior to that. https://louisianavoice.com/2013/07/10/vice-chair-of-house-labor-committee-represents-insurance-clients-before-office-of-workers-comp-that-he-once-headed/

He went to work for the Baton Rouge law firm of Forrester and Dick and his curriculum vitae linking him to SAS later appeared as part of an SAS application for a contract with the state of Minnesota. WorkersCompSAS (PAGE 29)

That CV cited his work with Forrester & Dick since 2010 and touted his work with LWC from 2008 to 2010, his serving as Chairman of the Governor’s Advisory Council on Workers’ Compensation and as Chairman of the Louisiana Workers’ Compensation Second Injury Board during that same time period.

Broadwater was first elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives in 2011 and was immediately made vice chairman of the House Labor and Industrial Relations Committee. Last October, he appeared on a video in which he hyped the services of SAS Institute during its Business Leadership Series in Orlando. http://www.allanalytics.com/video.asp?section_id=3427&doc_id=269491#ms.

LouisianaVoice over the past week twice sent emails to Broadwater asking who paid his travel, lodging and meal expenses for attending that Orlando conference. Those emails read: “Rep. Broadwater, could you please tell me if you attended the SAS Business Leadership Series event in Orlando last October and if you did, who paid your travel, registration, lodging and meal expenses?”

Read receipts indicate he opened both emails, but he never responded.

In a four-minute video made during the leadership conference, Broadwater provided a background in problems OWC was having with fraudulent claims and the decision to contract with SAS. He said the firm “was able to take a state that was data rich and solutions poor and compile all of that data in a single location so that we could then have multiple applications.”

In the video, he said that while Louisiana has used SAS to address fraud, “we’re starting to move into an area in Louisiana where we evaluate our accounts receivable. “In Louisiana we had about $8 billion in outstanding accounts receivable that were less than five years old. When we’re running an annual deficit in our budget of about $1.5 billion, it makes sense instead of raising taxes or eliminating some tax credits or tax for businesses that drive the economy or cutting services to existing citizens, let’s go collect the money that’s owed to us anyway.”

Broadwater also represents three clients, Qmedtrix ($275 per hour), the Louisiana Home Builders Association, and LUBA Worker’s Compensation ($135 per hour each) in matters pending before his old agency, according to documents filed with the State Board of Ethics in December of 2012.

Moreover, Broadwater has attended meetings between Qmedtrix and Wes Hataway, his successor as director of OWC, to discuss the disposition of numerous cases involving Qmedtrix. Those discussions centered around efforts to get the cases stayed and transferred to another judge, according to supervisory writs filed with the Third Circuit Court of Appeal in Lake Charles last March in the case of Christus Health Southwest Louisiana, dba Christus St. Patrick Hospital v. Great American Insurance Co. of New York.

That writ application concerns procedures and conversations which took place involving numerous pending workers’ compensation cases. “In what may be the pinnacle of irony,” the writ application says, “Mr. Broadwater actually disclosed this ex parte meeting on his state ethics disclosure form.”

The writ application cited Broadwater’s own comment from the disclosure form: “Met with Director of OWC discussing process of resolving disputes over medical billing.”

Broadwater admitted to meeting with Hataway “three or four times in person” (always with a Qmedtrix attorney present) and speaking with him 10 or 15 times on the phone.

Broadwater, in an email letter to LouisianaVoice, said he has never received compensation from a private source for the performance of his legislative duties. He said he approaches his duties as an attorney and as a legislator “with humbleness and with the highest sense of honor and ethical behavior.”

He said state statute “prohibits me from receiving compensation from a source other than the legislature for performing my public duties, from receiving finder’s fees, from being paid by a private source for services related to the legislature or which draws substantially upon official data not a part of the public domain.

“My service as vice chair of the Labor & Industrial Relations Committee in no manner alters my duties or the constraints placed upon me under the Code of Governmental Ethics,” he said.

And while technically correct in his assertions, his employment with a state contractor only weeks after approval of that $4.2 million contract and his continued close association with the head of his old agency in discussions of the outcomes of pending cases do tend to bring into question the propriety of his involvement in those matters.

His negotiations with his old agency while simultaneously serving as vice chairman of the legislative committee that oversees that agency coupled with his representation of SAS in Minnesota and in Orlando do seem to suggest a relationship that is less than arms-length and one that at least skirts the edge of serious ethics questions.

And his refusal to reveal the identity of the person or entity that paid his expenses does nothing to alleviate growing concerns over the coziness between public officials and current or former employers. And it certainly does little to foster confidence in the Louisiana Board of Ethics that Gov. Bobby Jindal successfully gutted six years ago.

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Notable Quotables (in their own words)

Posted in Campaign Contributions, Education, Elections, Ethics, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, Notable Quotables, Politicians, Retirement on December 30, 2013| 5 Comments »

“If I closed my mind when I saw this man in the dust throwing some bones on the ground, semi-clothed, if I had closed him off and just said, ‘That’s not science, I am not going to see this doctor,’ I would have shut off a very good experience for myself and actually would not have discovered some things that he told me that I had to do when I got home to see my doctor.”

—State Sen. Elbert Guillory (R/D/R-Opelousas), defending Louisiana’s Science Education Act, the 2008 law that allows creationism to be taught in public school science classrooms during a Senate Education Committee hearing last May. 

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Chameleon Sen. Elbert Guillory: Republican, Democrat, Republican, runs for Lt. Gov. after consulting witch doctor

Posted in Campaign Contributions, Education, Elections, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators on December 30, 2013| 13 Comments »

State Sen. Elbert Guillory is the first to make it official that he is a candidate for lieutenant governor for 2015 but not before he changed his party affiliation—a second time within a span of seven years—to fit what he must consider to be the state’s demographic profile the same way he changed the first time to fit the St. Landry Parish demographic profile.

Besides his chameleon-like political persona, Guillory is an object of some interest in a couple of other ways, including his abruptly leaving his post with the Seattle Human Rights Department under a cloud, a reprimand by the state attorney disciplinary board and the expenditure of his campaign funds in payments to apparent family members.

Seven separate payments totaling $10,000 were paid in 2009 and 2010 to Yvonne Guillory of Opelousas who happens to be Guillory’s ex-wife. Another payment of $1,000 was made in 2007 to Marie Guillory of the same address as Yvonne Guillory.

Another $2,500 payment was made in August of 2011 to Guillory Window Tinting of Eunice for campaign vehicle signs.

It is his repeated brushes with ethics problems, however, that might be Guillory’s biggest obstacle to being elected to statewide office.

A story in the Dec 31, 1981, Seattle Post-Intelligencer noted that Guillory had dropped out of sight and his office had no word of his whereabouts after it was learned he was under investigation for ethics violations.

After only a little more than a year on the job as director of the Seattle Human Rights Department, Guillory was suspended without pay and subsequently resigned after being charged with five counts of violating the city’s ethics code.

Among the things the investigation found that Guillory had done:

  • Awarded a $9,999 contract (one dollar below the $10,000 threshold requiring contracts to be publically bid) to the Seattle firm of LombardSyferd Communications. One of the partners in the firm, Mona Gayton, signed off on payment for contract work that was never done. She and Guillory took out a marriage license on Nov. 23, 1981 and they were later married.
  • Billed the city for two weeks’ work while he was on his honeymoon in Tahiti (even though he had no accumulated vacation time);
  • Allowed an employee to bill the city for time spent driving Guillory’s car cross-country from his former residence in Baltimore;
  • Hired two friends from Baltimore to teach seminars to his human rights staff at $500 per day plus expenses.

Guillory later claimed he had compensatory time coming even though he was told he was not eligible for vacation. He said the employee who drove his vehicle from Baltimore on work time was attending a conference, though he did not say where the conference was.

He also said he had made Seattle Mayor Charles Royer aware of the potential conflict with the contract to his girlfriend but Guillory later resigned before the official ethics hearing could be held, saying he thought Royer would protect him but instead, turned his back on Guillory.

He later moved back home to Opelousas and in 2002, he was reprimanded by the Louisiana attorney Disciplinary Board for notarizing a succession document for his client, former Opelousas Police Chief Larry Caillier. It turned out there was a minor problem: some of the signatures on the document had apparently been forged.

Guillory admitted he was mistaken in relying on the word of his client that the signatures were valid.

Mistaken? Really? In that case, I have a title to the Atchafalaya Basin I’d like him to notarize.

He also served on the Republican state central committee until 2007, when he ran for and was elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives. Just in time for the election, he coincidentally—or conveniently—switched to the Democratic Party in heavily Democratic St. Landry Parish, explaining that fundamental differences with the Bush administration precipitated his move.

Two years later he was elected to the Senate in a special election to fill an unexpired term. As state senator, Guillory served as Chairman of the Senate Retirement Committee and authored the Senate versions of Gov. Bobby Jindal’s ill-fated sweeping retirement reform bills, all of which eventually either failed in the legislature or were ruled unconstitutional by the courts.

He also raised a few eyebrows earlier this year when he shared his experience with a witch doctor he visited and cited that experience as a bewildering, convoluted defense of the Louisiana Science Education Act, the law that allows creationism to be taught in public school science classrooms through the use of materials that critique evolution.

Guillory explained last May that he would not wish to dismiss faith healing as a pseudoscience because of his encounter with a half-naked witch doctor who used bones in his healing ceremony.

Later that same month, not yet halfway through his first full term in the State Senate as a Democrat, he made the switch back to Republican, becoming the state’s first black Republican legislator since Reconstruction. He explained that he had come to disagree with the direction of the Louisiana Democratic Party. Specifically, he said he took issue with the Democrats’ positions on abortion, the Second Amendment, education and immigration.

Well, guess what? neither the national and Louisiana Democratic parties had altered their positions on those issues since 2007 when he pulled his first switcheroo from Republican to Democrat. So his reasoning for morphing back doesn’t quite pass the smell test.

Then earlier this month, on Dec. 12, 2013, he made the formal announcement that he was a candidate for lieutenant governor because, he said, it provides the best opportunity for him to help more Louisianians.

And of course, The Hayride couldn’t wait to endorse him. http://thehayride.com/2013/12/elbert-guillory-is-running-for-lt-governor-and-he-has-our-endorsement/

His announcement goes a long way in explaining why he suddenly decided he was again a Republican in a lopsidedly crimson state.

Another coincidence? How about political expedience and half-naked, unabashed opportunism?

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