Louisiana Voice

There was an interesting story in Friday’s Baton Rouge Advocate that correctly identified the problem of a growing backlog for mental health treatment for persons accused of a crime but who are deemed mentally incompetent to stand trial. You can read that story here:

It’s a legitimate problem, no doubt. But the burning question, besides the problem of how are nearly 200 of these people going to receive the treatment they so desperately need, is how did we get to the current situation of having only a single forensic psychiatric facility in the state of Louisiana?

For that answer, we have Bobby Jindal to thank.

The LSU Reveille said on APRIL 16, 2015, as Jindal’s eight years in the governor’s office were winding down (and as he pursued his silly quest for the Republican presidential nomination), that his legacy “leaves out the mentally ill.” The article cited a report by the American Mental Health Counselors Association that said that in 2014, there were 18,400 mentally ill Louisianians who went without treatment.

Jindal and the Republican legislators, the article said, “trapped them within a health care coverage gap when they refused the program’s expansion.”

But going back to 2012, when Jindal was just beginning his second term, he CLOSED the Greenwell Springs Hospital which had been serving as a mental health facility. The closure was done in the name of budgetary cutbacks and cost savings.

That was in March 2012. Four months later, in July, it was announced that SOUTHEAST LOUISIANA HOSPITAL, a psychiatric facility that became somewhat famous as a stopping-off place for then-Gov. Earl Long during his 1959 historic, if not hysterical, mental breakdown, would be SHUTTING DOWN. That closure denied care for 176 patients who had to go elsewhere for treatment.

To no one’s surprise (except perhaps to Jindal, who was most likely oblivious and/or uncaring) a totally predictable SPIKE in the demand for mental health services occurred as those seeking treatment found there was no room available for them as one treatment center after another shuttered its doors as a direct result of the Jindal budget cuts.

Of course, Jindal attempted to shift the blame by DENYING that his administration requested any specific cuts to mental health or substance abuse programs at LSU Interim Hospital but the fact is $150 million was slashed from the facility’s budget, necessitating cuts. The closures of Southeast and Greenwell Springs that followed that February 2012 denial belied any pious posturing on Jindal’s part.

Oh, he attempted to mitigate the damage by privatizing Southeast but like everything Jindal touched, that, too, proved disastrous to mental health patients when the facility, operating under the new name Northlake Behavioral Health System, lost its Medicare eligibility just nine months into its operation as a private hospital because of serious deficiencies.

That information came courtesy of a LouisianaVoice POST way back in July 2013. We tried to tell you what he was doing 10 years ago, yet here we are.

So, as for yesterday’s ominous revelations by The Advocate about the shortage of beds for those needing mental health treatment notwithstanding, it’s not like we weren’t warned ahead of time.

All the red flags were there for us to see but the state was apparently too infatuated with Bobby Jindal to fully comprehend what he was doing to this state. We felt the effects on mental health care then and we’re feeling them now, in spades.

And all the signs are indicating that we are in for more of the same for at least the next four years.

Quite frankly, I don’t see the likelihood that the new Republican administration of Jeff Landry will place a high priority on the needs of the mentally ill – especially those accused of crimes.

It’s just not in the cards for this cadre to exhibit compassion for anyone but those who can help the party with their checkbooks. They would much rather attack such hot – but safe – issues as libraries and some abstract issue they call woke.

It’s ironic that every time there’s a mass shooting, Republicans deflect the blame away from the easy access to guns by proclaiming in unison that the shootings are a mental health problem. Yet, guns and mental illness are conjoined issues the GOP consistently refuses to address.

Shawn Wilson as president of Grambling State University? That’s the skinny we’re picking up from the Rumor Mill, a fine-tuned source perfected by the late John Hays, publisher of the now-defunct Morning Paper of Ruston.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Jones, one of five members of Southern University’s 1925 graduating class, was hired by mistake that same year by Louisiana Negro Normal and Industrial Institute founder Charles P. Adams. Eleven years later, he would be elevated to president of what would later become Grambling State University. He remained in that position for 41 years.

Jones played the white legislators in Baton Rouge like a fiddle in order to build Grambling from little more than an afterthought backwater glorified high school to a real college. He employed his special brand of humor in order to get the school’s name changed to its present identity.

“We won our conference in football last year and as much as we respect our friends at Louisiana Normal, in Natchitoches (known today as Northwestern State University), we’d prefer to get our congratulatory mail instead of it going to them first,” he began in his petition to lawmakers. “Besides, during football season, by the time our cheerleaders could yell, ‘Louisiana Negro Normal and Industrial Institute, hold that line,’ the other team done scored.” When they finished laughing, the name change to Grambling was approved.

But while Jones was amusing the white politicians in Baton Rouge, he always got the last laugh as he quietly built the school into turning out alumni like New York Times columnist Charles Blow, Grammy Award-winner Erykah Badu, actress Natalie Desselle-Reid, former Oregon legislator Margaret Carter, Ohio politician Alicia Reece, former U.S. Attorney Stephanie Finley, Missouri politician Raychel Proudie, retired LSU professor Alma Dawson, major league baseball players Ralph Garr and Tommie Agee, and NBA legend Willis Reed.

Eddie Robinson was another example of Grambling’s reputation of stability, having served as the school’s head football coach for an unprecedented 56 years, from 1941-1997, with only a two-year break during World War II to interrupt his tenure. More than 200 of his former players would go on to NFL careers.

Grambling’s Tank Younger became the first player from a historically black college to play in the NFL when he signed with the Los Angeles Rams in 1948. Dozens more would follow and at one point, in the early 1970s, Grambling had more active players in the NFL than any other school in the U.S. – including such powerhouses as Alabama, LSU, Oklahoma, Notre Dame, Ohio State, USC, and Michigan. Former GSU quarterback Doug Williams was the first black quarterback to win a Super Bowl in 1989 and was the first quarterback ever to throw four touchdown passes in a single quarter in a Super Bowl on his way to being named the game’s MVP.

Ruston Daily Leader sports editor, the late O.K. “Buddy” Davis helped put Grambling and Robinson become national household words and Howard Cosell featured the schools legendary football program in Jerry Izenberg’s ABC-TV special titled “Hundred Yards to Glory” in 1967.

Since the retirements of Jones (1977) and Robinson (1997), the offices of both head football coach and school president have had to install revolving doors to accommodate the arrivals and departures of both positions. There have been, for example, eight different presidents of the school since Jones retired – an average stay of only 5.75 years.

The latest, Rick Gallot, president of the school since 2016, has been named to head the University of Louisiana System, leaving the president’s office vacant once again. His seven years there, set him apart as one of the longest-tenured GSU presidents since Jones retired. It may have helped that he was a native of Grambling and that his father, Richard Gallot, Sr., was a respected Grambling businessman and former mayor of the town of Grambling. His mother was also a professor at GSU for more than 35 years and was a member of the UL System Board of Supervisors from 2005-11.

But fear not, LouisianaVoice has learned from usually reliable sources that Department of Transportation and Development Secretary and unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate Shawn Wilson will succeed Gallot as Grambling 11th president and the school’s 9th since 1977.

Here’s hoping when they do, they’ll spell his first name correctly, something that I failed to do before being corrected by a couple of sharp-eyed readers.

Hindsight is 20/20 and it’s oh-so-easy to be a Monday morning quarterback, second-guessing decisions and non-decisions.

But. It just seems that someone in charge should have known that conditions on I-55 were not conducive to safe travel Monday morning. Those conditions included:

• Heavy fog, described by officials as a Super Fog, and
• Smoke from area fires.

In my 23 years of teaching defensive driving to traffic offenders, one of the things I stressed was the dangers inherent in driving in areas where smoke blanked the roadway.

Fog is bad enough as a visibility inhibitor, but dense smoke cuts visibility to zero. The combination of fog and smoke creates a lethal blanket and should have prompted the closure of I-55, the interstate highway that begins in LaPlace in St. John the Baptist Parish and runs north through Hammond and on to Jackson, Mississippi and points further north.

The area in question here is an elevated 20-mile portion of interstate that runs over swampy waters of Lake Maurepas.

Monday morning, 168 cars and trucks were involved in a massive wreck that claimed eight lives, injured 63 more and left twisted, burned out, unrecognizable cars clogging the interstate which remains closed as this is being written. When viewing the carnage, it seems a miracle that more weren’t killed.

The Cars have been cleared out, but the cleanup of debris is ongoing and then the Department of Transportation and Development (DOTD) will have to inspect the roadway way to be sure its integrity isn’t compromised by the hundreds collisions and dozens of fires.

Who should’ve been responsible for closing the highway? It’s apparently DOTD’s job to determine when conditions warrant closure of the highways of the state. The Bonnet Carre Spillway and Lake Pontchartrain Causeway were closed for a time Monday morning. Who made the decision to close those elevated highways? Why not I-55?

DOTD maintains that it is just not feasible to make such determinations given the frequency of foggy conditions and the number of elevated roadways and bridges in the state.

But the National Weather Service had warned of heavy fog on Sunday afternoon, according a story in today’s Baton Rouge Advocate.

The spate of lawsuits that is certain to follow in the next few days, weeks and months will most likely name both DOTD and LSP as defendants. Lawyers generally throw everything against the wall to see what will stick. No matter which one is ultimately held responsible, the state is likely to be shelling out a lot of money in judgments and settlements – but not before the defense attorneys get a chance to run up their tabs filing the usual denials, objections and interrogatories.

The arguments in defense of the state will likely be that common sense should have dictated that one should not have ventured onto the roadway in such treacherous conditions and that the state did not have sufficient notice in which to act. It will be an opportunity for attorneys from both sides to get well on hourly fees, settlements and judgments before this mess is concluded.

And it will be you, the taxpayer, who ultimately will foot the bill for somebody’s indecision.

And lest someone take it upon themselves to accuse me of encouraging litigation against the state, I am certain that Morris Bart, Gordon McKernan, Spencer Callahan, Dudley DeBosier, et al, are fully capable of functioning without my assistance.

You can pretty much bet that lawyers all over Southeast Louisiana have already begun diving into the law books and state regulations pertaining to hazardous driving conditions.

It didn’t help when a state official said DOTD would be considering protocols that could be implemented to address foggy conditions. That raises the immediate question of why hasn’t that already been done in a state as prone to hazardous foggy conditions as Louisiana?

It was just on September 5 that LouisianaVoice published a story about the Livingston Parish School Board filing a lawsuit against social media giants Meta, Instagram and TikTok, as well as cable television providers Charter Communications and Cox Communications for poisoning children’s minds and otherwise inflicting permanent damage to their psyche, their grades, and…well, their futures by making the social media platforms addictive.

If you will recall, LouisianaVoice made the not-to-difficult prediction that this would be the next big class-action litigation to rival the tobacco and opioids legal battles and to a lesser extent, the BP litigation. The prognostication was made then that other states and other school districts would become co-plaintiffs in the effort to take down the evil predators.

Well, today, the  STORY broke that 41 states have filed suit against Meta, claiming the tech giant has built “addictive features into Instagram and Facebook. For the time being, at least, TikTok has not be named a defendant but just wait, it likely will be added.

Anyway, it’s playing out pretty much as predicted and Louisiana, with our litigious attorney general soon-to-be governor is, of course, one of the 41 states listed as a plaintiff.

The one thing that is difficult – no, impossible – to comprehend is why there is so much redaction on the copy of the LAWSUIT that The Washington Post linked to in its article and to which we’ve attempting to link. Hope you can open it.

There should be no redactions in any public document like a lawsuit. Copies of lawsuits are supposed to be fully accessible to anyone who wants to go to the trouble of pulling them up and reading them.

Something smells here.

But it does cite a study by the AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION entitled Health Advisory on Social Media Use in Adolescence, published last May which supported the claims of the lawsuit.

Here are the states that have signed on thus far:

Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, George, Hawai’i, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

The states of Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Hawai’i, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey. New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia each listed its respective attorney as representing his or her state.

Just can’t figure out how Jeff Landry, who adores seeing his name in the media, managed to let that opportunity slip by.

Be that as it may, this is playing out just as we predicted less than two months ago. Look for a pretty big payout when the dust has settled.

All five Republican members of Louisiana’s House delegation voted for Gym Jordan for Speaker and Troy Carter joined the other 211 Democrats to vote for Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

The good news is no one as yet has voted for Clay Higgins as Speaker.

Here’s the BREAKDOWN for the entire House Vote.