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Archive for the ‘Layoffs’ Category

Administraton sends a message: another dissident employee ‘Teagued’ one day after Appropriations Committee testimony

Posted in Governor's Office, Layoffs, Teague on March 7, 2012| 15 Comments »

The Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH) has been a state agency abuzz with commotion this week—commotion that more closely resembles Larry, Moe and Curly trying to shovel water with a pitchfork than productive activity.

And it’s all part of the Bobby Jindal School of Good Government.

Martha Manuel has been Teagued and DHH has retreated for the moment from its efforts to put 69 information technology (IT) employees out of work in favor of contracting its services to the University of New Orleans (UNO).

Manuel, 63, was fired from her position as executive director of the Office of Elderly Affairs on Wednesday just one day after testifying against the transfer of her agency to DHH.

What’s more, the firing was done by her supervisor Tammy Woods, Director of Community Programs—by telephone.

If the pattern seems familiar, that’s because it is—beginning back in October of 2009 when Melody Teague, a Social Services grant reviewer, was fired one day after testifying against Jindal’s program to streamline government.

It took her six months but she got her job back but then last April 15, her husband Tommy Teague was fired as executive director of the Office of Group Benefits (OGB) when he didn’t jump on board the Jindal Privatization Bandwagon quickly enough, particularly when it came to the agency he had taken from a multi-million-dollar deficit to a $500 million surplus.

Thus the term Teagued.

Those were just two. Others included a Board of Elementary and Secondary member who didn’t kowtow to Jindal, the director of the Highway Safety Commission who opposed Jindal’s repeal of the state motorcycle helmet law.

Gone.

Jindal, through DHH Center for Health Care Innovation and Technology chief Carol Steckel, tried to fire the 69 IT employees last December in favor of handing off the contract for their work to UNO under the state’s Medicaid program.

The employees were called in for a teleconference at which time they were told they would be unemployed in January. Upon their return to their work stations, the employees found they were locked out of their computers.

But the State Civil Service Board vetoed Steckel’s proposal on Feb. 1. She first cited a savings of $2.1 million, then $7 million, prompting one member to say he had “zero confidence” in her numbers.

Steckel came to Louisiana from Alabama where she served as that state’s Medicaid Commissioner. In was in that capacity that she inferred that Alabama’s indigent amputees did not need artificial limbs. Her budget for 2008 cut programs that pay for prosthetics and orthotics (used to correct deformities) because, she said, the programs were optional, not mandatory.

The Civil Service Commission was scheduled to take the matter up again on Wednesday of this week but DHH withdrew from the agenda on Monday. One source said that UNO decided to opt out of the contract agreement. Another said that questions arose about the use of Medicaid funds for non-Medicaid costs in the contract, a practice that is strictly prohibited.

The fate of the IT employees, meanwhile, remains uncertain. “We have been misinformed on future employment by DHH executives on three occasions,” said one of the workers. “At each meeting we had, we felt as though we were being threatened with furlough without pay.”

If the administration felt it was punishing Manuel, however, it may have miscalculated. She had already retired once and when the directorship of the Office of Elderly Affairs opened a year ago, she applied and was appointed by Jindal. She now simply moves back into retirement, albeit involuntary.

She testified on Tuesday that senior citizens would be better served by leaving the Office of Elderly Affairs where it is.

Jindal’s executive budget calls for transferring the $45.3 million agency and its 51 positions to DHH where Manuel feels her agency will become lost in the DHH bureaucratic shuffle. “At no time was I asked for my input on this transfer,” she testified to the House Appropriations Committee.

Commissioner of Administration Paul Rainwater disagreed, saying that senior citizens would receive more, not fewer services. He said more federal funding can be generated through DHH’s guidance.

Manuel, contacted at home on Wednesday, said DHH plans to funnel Office of Elderly Affairs’ $45.3 million through nursing homes and hospitals in order to qualify DHH for additional federal funding.

“That almost sounds like money-laundering,” she said. “DHH calls this leveraging but there’s no guarantee that the dollars will keep coming back to the local councils on aging,” she said.

“They (the administration) said they have a vision, but when pressed by the committee, they admitted they had no real plan. Well, we (her former agency) have a vision and we have a five-year plan.”

She said she had her cell phone turned off during her testimony but when she turned it on after she spoke to the committee, “it was full of voice mails and each one was angrier than the last.” She said the messages were from Woods and her assistant.

“I took the rest of the afternoon off and they continued to barrage my office with calls, even though they were told I was not in. They apparently didn’t believe it, so they actually came to my office at 6 p.m. to check to see if I was in.”

Manuel said she called in sick the next day because she simply didn’t feel like facing all the hassle. “The general council (of the Office of Community Programs) called me at home today (Wednesday) and Tammy Woods was also on the line. She told me I was not in line with the governor’s thinking and she fired me over the phone.

“This (Woods) is a person who refuses to return telephone calls and who cancels meetings with no advance notice. She once had an appointment with people from New Orleans. They drove all the way into Baton Rouge only to be told the meeting was cancelled.”

Manuel said she has received flowers from several local councils on aging as a result of her dismissal. “I’m gratified at the response of the local councils but I have to say I’m very disappointed in our governor. I really believed there would be transparency in government.”

Jindal said simply that the administration had decided to “go in a different direction.”

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Office of Student Financial Assistance next on Jindal hit list; Outsourcing projected to cost 50-60 employees their jobs

Posted in Civil Service, Governor's Office, Higher Education, Layoffs, Privatization on February 28, 2012| 5 Comments »

The Louisiana Office of Student Financial Assistance (LOSFA) is the latest state agency to be scheduled for privatization by Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration, LouisianaVoice has learned.

LOSFA, the administrative arm of the Louisiana Student Financial Assistance Commission and the Louisiana Tuition Trust Authority, has been instructed by the governor’s office to outsource the office’s loan program.

The agency comes under the organization umbrella of the Board of Regents. Jindal, in presenting his executive budget to the Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget, targeted 2,837 jobs in higher education for elimination. Many of those are vacant positions that will not be filled.

In all, Jindal is proposing to eliminate 6,371 authorized positions, again meaning that an unspecified number may be vacant positions.

LOSFA will lose between 50 and 60 positions in the outsourcing action, according to Gus Wales, director of public information for the office. The affected employees are scheduled to be laid off by June 30.

Like the privatization of the Office of Group Benefits, the latest outsourcing move makes little sense in that the office’s loan program is funded from self-generated revenues, not the State General Fund.

What’s more, after June 30, students with questions about their loan repayment will probably have to talk to someone in another state instead of in Baton Rouge as before meaning Jindal will have taken jobs from Louisiana residents and given them to citizens outside Louisiana.

Many of the employees scheduled to lose their jobs have as much as 20 years of service but three unclassified staff members, reportedly making in excess of $100,000 each, will be retained, according to information provided to LouisianaVoice.

Unclassified personnel in the office include Executive Director Melanie Amrhein, Deputy Executive Director Sujuan Boutté, Assistant Executive Director of Marketing and Outreach David Roberts, Assistant Executive Director for Fiscal and Administrative Affairs Jack Hart and General Counsel George Eldredge.

The administration reportedly was approached by Great Lakes Higher Education Corp., a student loan servicing company in Madison, Wisconsin. The company was said to have told the governor’s office that the state could cut a significant number of employee positions by giving them the portfolio.

The agency has forwarded an invitation to bid (ITB) to State Purchasing for public release, sources said.

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Notable Quotables (in their own words)

Posted in Governor's Office, Health Care, Layoffs, Notable Quotables, Transparency on February 28, 2012| Leave a Comment »

“Every year in the state of Alabama, people make tough decisions about what they can and cannot afford.”

–Former Alabama Medicaid Director Carol Steckel, explaining her decision to cut a Medicaid program that paid for prosthetics for poor residents in Alabama because they were optional, not mandatory. She was appointed in November 2010 to lead health care reform efforts in Louisiana and is spearheading efforts to terminate 69 information technology employees in DHH by contracting their services out.

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Doing the two-step on one leg: it takes twice as long but if it’s doing more with less, it fits nicely into Jindal’s agenda

Posted in Civil Service, Layoffs, Privatization, Teague on February 28, 2012| 5 Comments »

The Department of Health and Hospitals apparently is moving forward with its plan to contract out its information technology (IT) services to the University of New Orleans, the State Civil Service’s objections notwithstanding.

That’s the word received by LouisianaVoice from one of the IT employees who is one of the 69 employees scheduled to lose their jobs in the move touted to the Civil Service Board on Feb. 1 by Carol Steckel, chief of DHH’s Center for Health Care Innovation and Technology.

More about her background later.

An email received on Monday from the IT employee announced, “I have already been Teagued,” a reference to Gov. Bobby Jindal’s firing of Social Services grant reviewer Melody Teague in October of 2009 a day after her legal testimony against Jindal’s proposed streamlining of state government and that of her husband, Tommy Teague, 18 months later.

Tommy Teague was the director of the Office of Group Benefits who took the agency from a multi-million dollar deficit to a $500 million surplus. But his hesitancy in jumping on board Jindal’s privatization “sold train” cost him his job last April.

“My last day is March 2,” the employee, whose identity is being protected by LouisianaVoice, said in his email. “We have been scrutinized so much since this has happened back in December.”

He was referring to the conference call in December during which the IT employees were told their jobs would be gone in January. The Civil Service Board, however, shot down Steckel’s proposal, saying she had done a poor job of showing there would be a true savings by laying off employees.

The State Civil Service Board must approve any proposed contract before it can be implemented. To get that approval, agencies must show that the contract work is a task that cannot be performed by state civil service personnel and that any layoffs are not the result of political decisions.

That regulation stems from a 2003 State Supreme Court decision that said the City of New Orleans could not contract out services which could be performed by existing employees and that the city could not lay employees off for political reasons.

Following that conference call, the IT employees returned to their work stations only to learn that they had already been locked out of their state computers, leaving them with nothing to do until the date of their terminations. They regained access to their computers a few weeks later, however.

“There is no security anywhere in DHH,” the employee said.

That is fairly evident across the board in agency after agency by now. The Civil Service Board, which voted unanimously on Feb. 1 to reject the contract proposal, is scheduled to meet March 7 at which time the IT contract is expected to be presented again.

Another IT employee also emailed LouisianaVoice earlier to say, “I am one of the 69 DHH Information Technology staff that is affected by the UNO contract.

“Basically, we have been misinformed on future employment by DHH executives on three occasions. At each meeting, we felt as though we were being threatened with furlough without pay, having to pay 100 percent of COBRA to maintain our insurance, (and) being threatened (with) not receiving our 300 hours of saved annual leave.”

Steckel first said the proposed contract would save an estimated $2.1 million over the next three years but later revised that upward to $7 million. But member after member challenged her numbers with one saying he had “zero confidence” in the figures she provided.

While her proposal to contract the IT services would chop the legs out from under the 69 employees, that apparently is nothing new for her. In fact, it appears to be her style.

Before coming to DHH in November of 2010, she served as Alabama’s Medicaid Commissioner from 1988-1992 and again from December of 2003 until her departure for Louisiana.

It was in that capacity in Alabama that in 2008 she implied that poor residents of Alabama apparently did not need artificial limbs.

In January of that year, she submitted the state’s Medicaid budget that cut programs that pay for prosthetics and orthotics (an orthopedic apparatus used to provide support and alignment to prevent or correct deformities) because, she said, the programs were optional, not mandatory.

Saying she wanted to present a budget that was realistic in the face of state budgetary problems, she said, “Every day in the state of Alabama, people make tough decisions about what they can and cannot afford. State government must do the same.”

Rep. Barbara Boyd of Anniston sounded a chord that has come to have a familiar ring in Louisiana when she said Alabama is at a disadvantage because it does not appropriate the kind of money that would attract more than the bare bones federal matching funds.

“With the high rate of diabetes in this state (Alabama), cutting a program that pays for prosthesis could be devastating to amputees,” she said.

One Alabama observer described the move as a trifecta: “penny wise, pound foolish and heartless to boot.”

Well, folks, that’s the nature of compassionate conservatism. Or passionate, anyway.

And Louisiana, it would appear, has franchise rights.

In case you’ve ever wondered why Jindal keeps going out of state for these people who parrot his philosophy with such consistency, there’s a reason: they don’t have to live with us. They’ll be gone as soon as he leaves office.

But we’ll be stuck with the cleanup.

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To Teague or not to Teague: in this case, there is no question

Posted in Civil Service, Governor's Office, Layoffs, Privatization, Teague on February 23, 2012| 10 Comments »

One of Gov. Bobby Jindal’s former teachers at Baton Rouge’s McKinley Middle Magnet School recently provided revealing insight into his mental makeup when she confided that he was a difficult student who simply could not accept the fact that he might be wrong. About anything.

That certainly explains a lot.

Take, for example, that state Civil Service Commission meeting of Feb. 1.

The commission each month is provided a list of proposed contracts along with justifications of why it is more economical—or necessary—to contract services out than for state employees to perform a job.

(These are the same documents, by the way, that the Division of Administration said did not exist when LouisianaVoice made a public records request for them back on Dec. 19.)

Yes, this more about Jindal’s apparent obsession with privatization.

The contract called for the Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH) to contract out its information technology (IT) services to the University of New Orleans. The proposed contract would have provided IT services currently provided by 69 classified employees.

Approval of the contract would have resulted in the 69 employees being Teagued.

To the less erudite, to be “Teagued” is to be removed from one’s employment with state government by a governor critically short on forgiveness.

The term derives its name from Jindal’s propensity to fire employees, especially those who may have the temerity to question or challenge his decisions. It began early in his first administration when Tammie McDaniel, a member of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, questioned certain budget decisions. Jindal immediately asked for her resignation. She refused at first but eventually resigned.

Then there was William Ankner who was forced out at the Department of Transportation and Development when it was revealed that a $60 million highway contract was awarded not to the low, but the high bidder.

Jim Champagne, executive director of the Louisiana Highway Safety Commission, in a moment of ill-advised level-headedness, disagreed publicly with Jindal’s plan to repeal the state’s motorcycle helmet law. Gone.

Ethics Administrator Richard Sherburne hit the bricks when Jindal gutted the Ethics Board’s adjudicatory authority and gave it to administrative law judges.

But the most high-profile firings, and the namesake of our new terminology, were the dismissals of Department of Social Services grant reviewer Melody Teague in October of 2009 and her husband, Office of Group Benefits (OGB) Director Tommy Teague, 18 months later.

Mrs. Teague testified against Jindal’s government streamlining plan that included calls for massive privatization. It took her six months but she got her job back.

Her husband was not so lucky. He was shown the door when he did not jump on board quickly enough to please the administration when it floated its idea of privatizing OGB.

Thus, the all-too-appropriate term Teagued.

But now, back to those 69 IT employees.

The Civil Service Commission took one look at the contract proposal—and balked.

For one thing, documents submitted by DHH never nailed down the precise cost of the proposed three-year contract, saying it would be for either $35 million of $37 million.

Carol Steckel, chief of DHH’s Center for Health Care Innovation and Technology, said the proposal would save an estimated $2.1 million over the next three years (later revised to $7 million) but commissioners weren’t buying it.

“I have zero confidence in your numbers,” commission member Scott Hughes, of Shreveport said.

“I don’t think you have come close to showing there’s either a cost saving or efficiency,” added member John McLure, of Alexandria.

Member Lee Griffin, of Baton Rouge, said he could not understand the proposal despite his “50 years in the banking industry.”

Commissioner Kenneth Polite, of New Orleans, said he found it difficult to support the proposal because the Jindal administration “has railed against increased spending” and yet DHH is relying on additional federal funds, which the administration also has opposed.

Information submitted by DHH was “woefully inadequate,” said commission Chairman David Duplantier, of Covington.

The commission voted unanimously to disapprove the contract after Hughes observed that the documents submitted by DHH made it clear that instead of saving money, the agency would actually increase spending by up to $8 million with the contract.

That, as we said, was on Feb. 1.

But let’s back up to December. DHH employees were called in for a telephone conference call several weeks before the contract proposal was presented to the Civil Service Commission.

During that conference call, the IT employees were informed that in January, their positions would be abolished.

Following that collective downer, the IT personal returned to their work stations only to discover that during the conference call, they had been locked out of their computers.

Subsequent to the Civil Service Commission’s action, the employees have regained access to their computers. But the issue is scheduled to come before the commission again in March and if the past is prologue, there will have been considerable pressure applied by the fourth floor of the State Capitol by then.

So, what we have here is an administration so cocksure of itself that it notified 69 IT employees that they would be unemployed in a few weeks before it ever got around to making its pitch to the Civil Service Commission, even going so far as to unplug the employees’ computers while their backs were turned.

What could conceivably account for such arrogance, such underhanded Machinations?

For that answer, perhaps someone should ask the governor’s middle school teacher.

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