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Jindal mainstays Teepell, Bautsch said to be going to work on behalf of State Sen. Neil Riser’s Congressional campaign

Posted in Congress, Governor's Office, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, Politics on August 9, 2013| 12 Comments »

BATON ROUGE (CNS)—The word out of Baton Rouge is that OnMessage, the political consulting out of Alexandria, VA., that made Timmy Teepell head of its newly established Southern office, is a little disenchanted with Gov. Bobby Jindal’s alter-ego.

Teepell was hired after Jindal won his re-election in 2011 to drum up business for OnMessage and he immediately signed up Congressman Bill Cassidy who subsequently fired Teepell before paying him or OnMessage a dime.

Teepell was supposed to be the Grover Norquist of Louisiana—able to get his candidates to leap tall political polls in a single bound and to attract money like vultures to a rotten meat wagon (a somehow appropriate analogy).

But something no one counted on occurred: Jindal’s poll numbers tanked and suddenly Teepell couldn’t scare up any bidness for the partners back in Virginia and things began to get a little testy.

Of course it’s difficult to be a rainmaker when you spend all your time on the fourth floor of the Capitol, controlling Jindal’s every move and mood.

Coinciding with the rumored parting of the ways in the future between Teepell and OnMessage is the Rodney Alexander exit from Congress. Enter State Sen. Neil Riser in one of the most transparently-orchestrated political moves in recent history. Oh, sure, spokespersons for both Alexander and Riser (and Jindal, for that matter—if one could ever pen them down long enough to get them off Twitter) will deny that the fix was in but, c’mon, we may have been born at night but it wasn’t last night.

Of course Alexander had to have something to fall back on; he couldn’t be expected to make it on his congressional pension and social security.

The fact that Jindal was waiting in the wings to offer Alexander that $130,000-a-year job as Secretary of the Louisiana Office of Veterans Affairs that could bump his state retirement from about $7,900 to $81,900 per year was just a little too coincidental. Our friends at another blog, The Daily Kingfish, pointed out that the skids had been greased some time ago by State Sen. Mike Walsworth (R-West Monroe) and Alexander’s fellow Congressman John Fleming. (Walsworth, you might remember, was the one who asked a teacher during a committee hearing if her class was growing humans from cultures in her science lab.)

Now, word is, both Teepell and Jindal’s chief fundraiser, Alexandra “Allie” Bautsch, will be working on Riser’s behalf for the next couple of months until the election—but for her firm The Bautsch Group (which is still in good standing with the Secretary of State) and not OnMessage. That should sound the death knell for the Teepell-OnMessage partnership. You can probably expect the announcement of their transfer to Riser’s campaign any Friday now. Jindal prefers making those kinds of announcements late on Fridays so as not to attract too much media attention.

Bautsch at one time held the dual role of chief fundraiser for Jindal and treasurer of the Supriya Jindal Foundation for Louisiana’s Children.

She apparently is more proficient at fund-raising than Teepell is at attracting new clients. Since Jindal’s re-election, she has pulled in more than $1.2 million—and this for a lame-duck governor who insists he has no aspirations to higher office.

Of course, Jindal could, if he wishes to do so, pour much of that money into the campaign of a preferred candidate—like Riser.

So, with the Jindal crowd actively working on behalf of Riser, better known for his whack-o gun rights bills than anything else he’s ever done in Baton Rouge (a conflict of interest, we might add, given that he runs a couple of funeral homes), it would appear that he might be a shoo-in for the position, right?

Maybe not.

There is also word that Monroe’s Harris Brown might challenge Riser. The former President of the Tensas Basin Levee District, Brown is a capable politician who has—and can raise—money, is likable and who knows his way around well enough to be a viable opponent

There are other potential candidates as well—one, Louisiana Tech alumnus Adam Terry, who would have the important backing of Ruston’s James Davison who is a former Jindal ally but who became disenchanted when the governor stopped taking his phone calls.

Terry is Alexander’s chief of staff, so he ran and won, he would enter office already knowing the important contacts inside the Beltway.

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Notable Quotables (in their own words)

Posted in Politics on July 22, 2013| 1 Comment »

“I got the tower and the transmitter set up and then I was told not to flip the switch.”

—Former Department of Public Safety (DPS) radio maintenance technician Rusty Whittington, in his accusation that DPS Director of Information and Technology Jeya Selvaratnam ordered him not to place an emergency radio transmitter into operation in the hours following landfall of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in August of 2005 even though normal State Police radio communications had been knocked out by the storm.

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Another Jindal Swindle in trouble: SELH, aka Northlake, loses Medicare eligibility nine months after privatization

Posted in Contract, Contracts, Governor's Office, Health Care, Layoffs, Politics, Privatization, Public Records, Transparency on July 11, 2013| 21 Comments »

It’s been all of nine months since Meridian Behavioral Health Systems took over operation of Southeast Louisiana Hospital (SELH) in Mandeville in what we like to call the Jindal Swindle and already the facility has been notified that it has been found to have deficiencies serious enough to threaten its eligibility to continue participation in Medicare.

Meridian, a Florida-based company chosen to run SELH after Gov. Bobby Jindal chose to close the hospital, has been running the 58-bed facility under the name of Northlake Behavioral Health System.

Jindal announced last year that he was closing the hospital, effective Oct. 1, a move that left mental patients in all of southeast Louisiana, including the New Orleans, Houma and Thibodaux metropolitan areas, with no access to any state mental treatment facility. The move threw more than 300 SELH employees out of work.

Formed as a company less than a year before taking over the Mandeville hospital, Meridian had never handled a facility the size of SELH and in fact, listed no facilities it had ever run on its application.

And it didn’t take long for that inexperience to surface.

Northlake Behavioral Health System CEO Richard Kramer was notified by the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) on June 3 that Northlake no longer qualified for participation in Medicare.

“After a careful review of the May 23, 2013, survey report, we have determined that Northlake Behavioral Health System no longer meets the requirements for participation in the Medicare program,” wrote Greg Soccio, manager of the CMS Non-Long Term Care Certification and Enforcement Branch.

“Although the deficiencies do not constitute an immediate threat to the health and safety of patients, the deficiencies have been determined to be of such a serious nature as to substantially limit your hospital’s capacity to render adequate care and prevent it from being in compliance with all the conditions of participation for hospitals,” Soccio’s letter said. “Consequently, we plan to terminate participation in the Medicare program if compliance is not achieved within the given timeframes specified.”

Soccio, in his letter, gave Sept. 1, exactly 11 months after Meridian took over the facility, as the date of its termination in Medicare. “CMS will monitor your progress in correcting the deficiencies cited,” he said. “You must submit by June 14 a plan of correction with acceptable time schedule.” His letter, while imposing a July 3 deadline for completion of corrective action, listed criteria Northlake must meet for recertification:

• The plan must address correcting the specific deficiency cited;

• The plan must address improving the processes that led to the deficiency cited;

• The plan must include procedures for implementing the acceptable plans of correction for each deficiency cited;

• A completion date for the implementation of the plans of correction for each deficiency cited;

• All plans of correction must take a QAPI (Quality Assurance/Performance Improvement) approach and address improvements in its systems in order to prevent the likelihood of the deficient practice reoccurring;

• The plan must include the monitoring and tracking procedures to ensure that the plan of correction is effective and that specific deficiency cited remains corrected and/or in compliance with the regulatory requirements;

• The plan must include the title of the person responsible for implementing the acceptable plan for correction.

Subsequent to Soccio’s letter, Kramer submitted a 43-page plan of correction to CMS on June 14, the deadline given by CMS.

As serious as the letter may have been to Northlake and as welcome as it may have been to those opposed to the privatization, it did leave one gigantic loophole for Jindal:

“The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH) will conduct a focus Medicare survey of your facility to assess your hospital’s compliance with the conditions of participation that were found out of compliance and assess your corrective actions,” Soccio’s letter said.

“Compliance must be achieved at the time of this revisit if further action is to be avoided. If you remain out of compliance at the time of your revisit, you can expect to receive another letter advising you of the continuation of the termination process and your appeal rights.

“You will again be asked to submit an acceptable plan of correction to our office and we may conduct one final revisit before the termination date,” it said.

That July 3 deadline was more than a week ago and a CMS spokesperson in Dallas said on Wednesday that no new paperwork had been received on Northlake by his office.

But allowing DHH to make the determination of compliance? This is the same agency that, under former Secretary Bruce Greenstein, was allowed to manipulate specifications to allow Greenstein’s former employer, CNSI, to bid on and win a $280 million contract that is now the subject of a federal investigation.

Greenstein may be gone but his successor, like Greenstein, was appointed by Jindal and does anyone really doubt that the governor maintains an iron grip over DHH? And Jindal doesn’t like to admit he ever made a mistake.

Anyone care to take any bets on the outcome of that DHH focus Medicare survey of Northlake?

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It’s a 30 for Ruston’s Morning Paper; sadly, tough-minded, independent publishers like John Hays the exception today

Posted in Politics on July 6, 2013| 19 Comments »

Appropriately enough, the headline on Friday’s final issue of Ruston’s Morning Paper was simply “-30-.” It is the universally recognized (for those of us who’ve been around newsrooms for a few years) indication of the end of a news story.

The indication was tacked on at the end of a story in part because in the old days, reporters pounded out their stories on manual typewriters and the copy generally ran more than a single page. Thus, at the bottom of the first page, the reporter would type “more,” and at the top of ensuing pages he or she would type “add one” to indicate the second page, “add two” for the third page, etc. To let the copy editor know when he’d reached the end, the reporter would type the number 30.

Certainly, the newspaper industry is in decline, thanks in large part to the proliferation of online news services. Not only have circulation numbers plummeted, but so have ad revenue and the actual size of newspapers—both in terms of page size and page numbers.

For those of us who grew up in newsrooms, who learned at the feet of demanding editors like Tom Kelly (Ruston Daily Leader), Jimmy Hatten (Monroe Morning World, now the News Star), and Jim Hughes (the now defunct Baton Rouge State-Times, an afternoon paper that gave way to its sister publication, The Advocate several years ago), editors for whom I was privileged to work, it has been a painful process to witness. Nothing is more traumatic, career-wise, than watching a once-vibrant, influential voice of the people silenced forever.

The State-Times was actually the senior paper in Baton Rouge but like afternoon newspapers everywhere, it began to feel the pinch even before the dominance of online news radically altered subscribers’ reading habits. Despite its longtime status as the official legal journal for the State of Louisiana, it closed shop in 1991.

Hughes earlier had been elevated from managing editor of the State-Times to executive editor of both papers, so he stayed on until his retirement. When necessary, he could bore holes in you with those eyes. I still suspect he was the real inspiration for the Loggins and Messina hit Angry Eyes. No one could reduce a reporter to a quivering mass more quickly than Hughes. No one came away unscathed from a private woodshed session with him.

Once, when I was investigating a church-affiliated school for girls in Bienville Parish, the school’s superintendent/principal/minister/father figure and his attorney appeared at the State-Times office to meet with Hughes and me. Near the end of that meeting, the superintendent/principal/minister launched into fervent—and loud—prayer. Hughes glanced over at me and mouthed, “I’ll get you for this.”

He was not one to be found in church on Sunday. In fact, at his funeral, the minister opened the service by telling those in attendance, “Jim Hughes once told me he never met a preacher who was worth a damn. So I stand before you today under a lot of pressure to be worth a damn.” It was, to say the least, an interesting service.

Hatten was a tough old boot, as well, but he was also a man who appreciated a good practical joke—even when he was the victim. He had an ancient manual typewriter at his desk, a Royal with blank keys that he had must’ve salvaged as surplus property from a high school typing class. Hatten was not a touch-typist; he never bothered to learn the location of the keys. He was a two-fingered, hunt-and-peck typist who found it necessary to place stick-on letters on each of the keys in order to see what he was typing.

As wire editor, I worked the desk next to him. One evening, while he was at dinner, I peeled all the labels off his typewriter keys and switched them around. When he returned from dinner, he took dictation over the phone on a rather long story from one of the paper’s correspondents (they were called stringers in those days).

He had a box of yellow folded teletype paper beneath his desk which fed paper in a continuous roll into his typewriter. He never took his eyes from the keyboard to check his copy until he had finished taking the story and ripped it from his typewriter. A string of invectives soon flowed in my direction when he saw the gibberish he had typed. He knew the perpetrator without asking. It ended in his throwing the copy at me and telling me to call the stringer back and take the damned story myself. He was laughing the entire time, however, which betrayed his attempt at anger.

I worked at the Daily Leader four separate times, starting out as sports editor, then as general assignment reporter, city editor and ending as managing editor. While sports editor, I decided to return to Louisiana Tech and major in physical education with aspirations of becoming a baseball coach. In fact, I was a constant source of consternation to Tom Kelly because I was as devoted to my sandlot baseball team at that time as I was to my job. In spite of that lack of dedication, I learned a lot from Kelly about community journalism.

Wiley Hilburn, who had recently come to Tech as head of the journalism department, read my stories and convinced me my future was as a reporter, not a coach. Reluctantly, I took his advice and changed my major to journalism where I spent the next quarter-century. I once told Hilburn, facetiously, of course, that I hoped someday to find it in my heart to forgive him.

I recently returned to writing following my retirement from the State of Louisiana.

Somewhere in all of that, beginning 37 years ago in April of 1976, a Ruston native who spent most of his adult life to that point in San Antonio before moving to Ruston, got himself an IBM Selectric typewriter and he and his wife set up shop in their living room to launch the weekly Morning Paper to compete with the Daily Leader, which John Hays was convinced had become too much a part of the local power structure.

The establishment laughed at him when the first issue of his crude publication rolled off the presses but John and Susan Hays persevered.

Before it was all over, Hays had broken stories on three separate investment scams. The first was a $5.5 million swindle sweeping through north Louisiana that became known as the Pine Tree Caper. Another was the $55 million ALIC rip-off and the third was a story on Towers Financial, then the largest ($550 million) Ponzi scheme in history. The upshot of his investigative journalism was people went to jail; Forbes magazine did a story on the Morning Paper’s investigative work on the Pine Tree Caper; The Atlanta Journal & Constitution likewise gave Hays a lot of ink on the ALIC exposé and the New York Times gave him a two-page spread on the Towers Financial story. He also received a Loeb Award for the Towers stories. Along the way, he even got a nomination for a Pulitzer Prize.

Fast forward 37 years. Hughes and Hatten are both dead. They, like Hays, were the last of a breed. Kelly publishes a monthly newspaper called the Piney Woods Journal in Winn Parish, a publication geared to the forestry industry. Hilburn, beset by a bout with cancer, retired from Tech after 40 years, succeeded by Reginald Owens, one of his star students of the late 60s (and, I’m proud to say, a contemporary of mine). Thankfully, Hilburn is cancer-free today and I still have coffee with him and Hays at the Huddle House when I make one of my infrequent visits.

Hays, sadly, is another story. He was diagnosed with cancer in 2006 and by all appearances, beat the disease. A couple of weeks ago I was passing through Ruston and dutifully met Hilburn and John Sachs at the Huddle House. Hays was absent because he had another meeting—with a doctor.

The cancer, we later learned, had returned and at age 71, Hays believes it would be patently unfair to burden Susan with the dual responsibility of taking care of him and continuing to publish the Morning Paper.

Thus, Friday’s edition was the final issue of the Morning Paper. A flood of thoughts and emotions rushed through the misty memories of my mind as I read his last issue in my email Saturday. The finality of it all is mind numbing. That happens with someone who was alternately a competitor, an adversary, a colleague and a friend through nearly four decades.

Another era has passed. A part of me passes with it. Sometimes nostalgia is painful. Very painful.

This is one of those times.

-30-

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Notable Quotables (in their own words)

Posted in Politics on May 16, 2013| 4 Comments »

“There are safeguards in place within the Course Choice program but if these behaviors are occurring, we will take steps to ensure it’s either not happening or the behavior is corrected.”

—State Superintendent of Education John White, in addressing news than 1,100 students in Caddo and Webster parishes have been registered for Course Choice courses—without their knowledge or approval. The company, FastPath Learning of Austin, Texas, has as its chairman the former Secretary of Education under former President George W. Bush and who served as an education adviser to recent presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

“This goes back to all of the education reforms that were passed within eight days during last year’s session. This is what you get.”

—State Rep. Gene Reynolds (D-Dubberly), commenting on the apparent lack of oversight of Course Choice providers who get one-half of their tuition upon registering students for Course Choice courses.

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