Posted in Politics on April 2, 2012| Leave a Comment »
“I just wonder how much they look at them.”
–State Ethics Board member Cedric Lowrey of Alexandria, commenting on the legislator’s lack of action on proposed reforms on how campaign funds may be spent. His comments came after learing that campaign funds are used for country club and Mardi Gras krewe memberships, for the purchase of LSU athletic event tickets, to pay baby sitters and, in one case, to purchase a Jaguar automobile.
Posted in Politics on February 27, 2012| Leave a Comment »
“It’s just dumb luck that no leak has occurred at, say, 7 p.m. on a Friday after everyone had gone home for the weekend.”
–Office of State Lands employee, commenting on Monday’s leak that dumped raw sewage through the office’s ceiling tile, narrowly missing irreplaceable state land title records, some of them dating back to the 1700s.
Posted in Politics on February 27, 2012| 1 Comment »
When several state offices moved into the brand new Claiborne Building just a stone’s throw southeast of the towering State Capitol Building back in 2002, the Office of State Lands was designated for the basement, ostensibly because of the weight of its volumes of documents and records prohibited its being on an upper floor. Others say that former Commissioner of Administration Mark Drennan wanted the top floor for the Division of Administration. The citing of the weight of the volumes doesn’t carry much weight when one considers that much heavier volumes are housed on the second and third floors of the Louisiana State Library a couple of blocks to the south.
But it was located directly beneath the building’s cafeteria kitchen.
Turns out that was a typical, if fateful, bureaucratic decision.
A half-dozen buildings were constructed within a few blocks of the Capitol Building toward the end of former Gov. Mike Foster’s second term. The Claiborne Building was constructed almost directly atop a municipal sewage pumping station and that fact is never more evident than on hot summer days.
At times the stench is so strong one can almost see it—like heat shimmering off a hot asphalt highway.
Gov. Bobby Jindal briefly floated the idea of selling state buildings, including Claiborne, and leasing back state office space but that idea apparently didn’t pass the smell test and was quickly flushed.
Before the $54 million Claiborne Building was even completed, a heavy rain caused flooding in the basement where State Lands, the Office of Risk Management, a state printing office and a few Department of Education offices were to be located.
Even after tenants moved in, the water line from the flood was still visible on the walls.
Then, after tenants were settled in, another torrential storm blew rainwater horizontally and water poured into the basement area through, of all places, the buildings steps that front Third Street.
But on Monday, a brand new water invasion left employees of State Lands feeling pretty crappy: a sewage leak from above dumped raw sewage water through the State Land suspending ceiling tile, narrowing missing irreplaceable historical records, some of them dating back to the late 1700s.
The State Lands Office houses priceless, one-of-a-kind land title records and Monday’s incident was only the latest of about a dozen incidents in which water has leaked through its ceiling from the kitchen above.
This is the first time, however, that sewage has leaked into the office.
The Bureau of Land Management office in Washington, D.C., does have duplicates of State Land’s records and the records kept by State Lands have been scanned, but it is the originals that are state treasures and impossible to replace.
They are kept on hand because occasionally scanned documents do not pick up penciled in notations and workers have to refer to the actual documents.
Even though all the previous leaks, as well as the latest one, have missed dumping water directly onto the files, the misses have been extremely close, in some cases, only inches away.
On Monday, the precaution of spreading plastic sheeting over the file cabinets was taken.
“It’s just dumb luck,” said one employee, “that there have been no leaks occur at say, 7 p.m. on a Friday when everyone had gone home for the weekend.”
Posted in Governor's Office, OGB, Office of Group Benefits, ORM, Office of Risk Management, Politics, Teague, Transparency on January 2, 2012| Leave a Comment »
It is a long-held tradition at all levels of government that anytime an agency does not want attention drawn to any official action, make the announcement late on a Friday afternoon when most of the “working” media have left for the weekend.
If that Friday just happens to be on the eve of a major holiday like Christmas or New Year’s, so much the better.
That’s what happened with the Division of Administration (DOA) and two news releases about major personnel changes recently. We waited until now to assist DOA in disseminating the stories.
DOA actually issued its official announcements not on Fridays but toward the close of business on Thursday, Dec. 22, and Thursday, Dec. 29 because, well, both Fridays were official state holidays for Christmas and New Year’s, respectively. It had the same effect, of course, as a Friday release on a normal work week: near zero media attention and less than zero media follow-up.
On Thursday, Dec. 22, the official news release went out announcing the appointment of Charles Calvi, Jr., to serve as Chief Executive Officer of the Louisiana Office of Group Benefits (OGB).
The following Thursday, on Dec. 29, it was announced that Mark Brady was leaving as DOA Deputy Commissioner of Administration.
Both announcements were made by Commissioner of Administration Paul Rainwater.
Actually, the second news release was not so much to announce Brady’s departure as to proclaim the appointment of Assistant Commissioner Ray Stockstill as his successor. In fact, Rainwater devoted precisely two sentences to Brady:
“Rainwater also thanked and praised outgoing Deputy Commissioner Mark Brady, who will assist the Division in transition through January before returning to the private sector,” the news release said. The release quoted Rainwater as saying, “‘Mark’s contribution has been invaluable, and I am grateful for the integrity, intelligence, and passion that he brought to the job and that I’m sure will serve him well in his next endeavors.’”
That’s it. Nothing about his tenure at DOA, nothing about his previous background, nothing about his reasons for leaving or his future plans except that he was “returning to the private sector.”
There were no mentions of the previous two OGB CEOs, both of whom left or were fired in 2011. Nor was there any explanation of how the two moves may be inter-connected or how Brady was at the forefront of last spring’s efforts to sell off OGB to private investors.
Tommy Teague was fired by Brady last April 15 when Brady and Rainwater concluded that Teague was not sufficiently enthusiastic about the administration’s proposed selloff of group benefits and its $500 million surplus.
He was replaced by Scott Kipper, who resigned effective June 24, after a controversial report by Chaffe & Associates of New Orleans did not square up with the administration’s insistence that the OGB sale and accompanying elimination of 149 jobs would be good for the state, 62,000 state employees and even more retirees and dependents.
When the Chaffe report did not say what Gov. Jindal desired, the administration subsequently retained Morgan Keegan to conduct a financial analysis of OGB preparatory to a second effort to sell off the agency despite vocal opposition from retired state employees, retired teachers and a state district judges’ association.
The Morgan Keegan report is expected to be finalized and submitted to the state in February but if events play out the way they did with the Chaffe report, don’t expect Rainwater to be forthcoming with contents of the report. Rainwater, despite harsh criticism from legislators, steadfastly refused to release the Chaffe report to lawmakers.
Rainwater did not hesitate to throw Brady under the bus during Brady’s testimony before the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee. Committee members, lead by Sen. Ed Murray, subjected Brady to withering criticism over the administration’s refusal to release the report as Rainwater busied himself texting even as Brady twisted in the wind.
Following the Chaffe debacle and Jindal’s embarrassing setback in his efforts to sell three state prisons, the administration pulled back on its privatizing efforts. In the interim, the Office of Risk Management (ORM) has been transferred to a third private firm in apparent violation of the state’s contract with F.A. Richard & Associates (FARA).
The state paid FARA $68 million to take ORM off its hands and then amended that contract by another $6.8 million less than two weeks before FARA was sold to Avizent Risk Management Solutions of Ohio which was in turn recently purchased by York Claims Service of New York.
The state’s original contract with FARA specifically prohibits any transfer of contractual services without prior written consent. When a public records request was made for written consent to transfer the contract, DOA responded that no such documents exist.
Rainwater announced nothing further will be done toward the sale of OGB until early 2013. And while OGB proposed a rate increase of about three percent for the coming year, the administration insisted on at least a five percent bump. The bigger increase will obviously make the agency far more attractive to potential buyers.
Calvi has more than 40 years of experience in the healthcare, insurance and employee benefits fields. For seven years he worked for Gulf South Health Plan. He also worked eight years as CEO of BestCare, Inc., where he developed and owned the first Physician Hospital Network in the state.
Stockstill is a retire-rehire employee who had previously worked in DOA as state director for planning and budget until being named assistant commissioner in February of 2010. He retired from that $180,000 per year position, effective Christmas Day of 2010 and returned as a re-hire two days later.
Posted in Politics on November 22, 2011| 3 Comments »
There are a lot of telemarketing scams out there but there’s one that is particularly annoying—and illegal.
You get this call and a pre-recorded message tells you that you have been sent several messages. The authoritative woman’s voice then says, “This is the last notice you will get” to lower your credit card rate.
If that “last notice” bit were only true, it would not be necessary to be writing this post right now. I get the calls on my land line and my cell phone on virtually a daily basis.
They move around, so it’s all but impossible to track them down or to even file a complaint about them. Most of the calls originate from area codes in Utah and San Francisco and it does no good to put the number on the “do not call” list, because they simply ignore that. It also is futile to block the number because each call originates from a different number.
The calls are almost as irritating as all those automated political campaign calls during the recent election cycle, but at least you know the political solicitations are fraudulent. The credit card scam almost sounds convincing in its pre-recorded promise to lower your card’s interest rate to as low as 6 percent. All I have to do is press “1” to speak to a representative.
It’s nothing more than an identity theft scam designed to obtain your credit card number. Never, and I do mean never, give any personal information such as your social security number, bank account number or credit card number to any telephone solicitor. Repeat: any telephone solicitor. You’d do just as well by taking that Nigerian up on his email offer to dump $10 million into your bank account or falling for that European lottery you never entered but somehow managed to win.
There’s an old adage that says necessity is the mother of invention, so out of necessity, I had to either find a way to stop the calls or at least have some fun from it all. Since it is impossible to stop the daily afternoon nap interruptions, I had to find a way to make it fun, or at least somewhat entertaining.
At this point, it is probably useful to say that while my ploy was devised as a response to this particular scam—and it is a scam, make no mistake about it—it’s good for any telemarketer who has the audacity to interrupt Dancing with the Stars to pitch some product or service to you.
I first tried a tactic with female telemarketers only. I would let them get about halfway into their spiel and then interrupt in the sleaziest voice I could conjure with, “What are you wearing?” It always worked with female solicitors; they couldn’t hang up quickly enough, but unfortunately, most of the calls came from males, so I changed to a practice I now use with all unwanted callers.
I went to the local Holy Shrine (Wal-Mart, to the less erudite) and purchased a cheap referee’s whistle—the same kind that football and basketball officials use—and put it on my key chain.
Now, I actually look forward to the calls. I always press “1.”
As soon as someone comes on the line, I deliver an ear-piercing blast right into the phone. They usually hang up immediately but occasionally, they will respond. On one recent call from the friendly credit card scam people, a man’s voice offered to place my whistle in the nether regions of my anatomy “if I knew where you lived.” Ironic, isn’t it, alluding to his inability to determine my location when they depend on anonymity for survival–and to avoid prosecution?
On another, a woman came on the line and, after the initial blast, said simply, “That’s really cute.” I blasted again. “Cute,” she said again.
“Well, I can do this as long as you can,” I responded. Another blast.
She left me with a verb and a pronoun before hanging up.
It’s nice to know we can get under their skin, too.
The only problem is when I get one of those calls while I’m driving. With the key in the ignition, it’s difficult to get to the whistle without wrecking.
