Give the folks at the Division of Administration (DOA) credit: they obviously had a mole infiltrate our operations who then successfully foiled one of our more brilliant schemes.
A second memorandum was sent out on Wednesday by the patricians of paranoia, otherwise known as those in the Division of Administration who remain convinced they are above the law and who see no need to respond to public records request by such lowly creatures as reporters.
That’s right, reporter, Michael Diresto’s volunteered opinion notwithstanding. I’m also a blogger, of course, but in addition to my blog, I cover state government for a couple dozen newspapers throughout Louisiana.
A little over a year ago I attempted to obtain a copy of Gov. Bobby Jindal’s executive budget from Diresto, Assistant Commissioner for Policy and Communications, who was handing out copies of the budget to the media. He informed me I was not getting one. He first said it was because I didn’t have an office on press row in the basement of the Capitol. When I pointed out that he had just given a copy to a reporter who did not have office space in the Capitol, he said, “You’re not getting a copy because you’re not legitimate press.”
For Mr. Diresto’s enlightenment, I hold a bachelor’s degree in journalism. I spent some 30 years as a full time reporter for newspapers in this state as a reporter and editor. My career has included reporting jobs for the Shreveport Times, the Monroe News Star and the Baton Rouge Advocate and I also served as managing editor of the Ruston Daily Leader. I even managed to pick up an occasional award for news reporting (two), feature writing (two) and investigative reporting (three) along the way. Given those facts, I would be most interested in hearing Mr. Diresto provide his definition of “legitimate.”
But back to the issue at hand.
On Wednesday, a second email went out that addressed the issue of visitors to state buildings—buildings you the taxpayer paid for and which are filled with overpaid executives who share one thing in common: an over-inflated sense of their own importance by virtue of their being appointed to jobs for which they possess few, if any qualifications. (I’m not talking about the rank and file employees who perform the grunt work that keeps the state running. They are the most unappreciated, underpaid, most dedicated people I have ever had the pleasure of knowing.)
The first email, sent out on Tuesday, referenced an “incident” and directed that visitors were not to be allowed on the seventh floor of the Claiborne Building where DOA’s hallowed offices are located. The incident, of course, was the sudden, unexpected and unwelcome appearance of yours truly to request copies of public records I had first requested more than a month before. https://louisianavoice.com/2013/04/17/unexpected-visit-in-search-of-public-records-causes-panic-doa-ordered-into-virtual-louisianavoice-lockdown-mode/
The second email was sent out a day later by Ronnie Gilbert, Operations Division Manager, Office of State Buildings, and expanded the crackdown. It read thusly:
• Please inform your employees that all food deliveries for any events, meetings, conferences, etc., are to be picked up at the security desk in your facility. Upon receipt of the food the security desk will contact the agency for their representative to come and retrieve the food items from the security desk. At no time will security desk personnel allow the food vendor delivery personnel on the floors of the building.
So there you have. They’re onto us.
Our ingenious plan to wear a Domino’s Pizza shirt, slip a recorder into the pizza box and eavesdrop on top secret conversations while waiting for our tip is thwarted, nipped in the bud. Alas, what will we do now for a story?
There’s no official word, but the strong rumor is that additional emails will be forthcoming in short order that will further tighten lax security at state buildings.
For example:
• If a state employee should suffer a coronary or go into a diabetic coma on one of the upper floors, first responder personnel will be required to check in at the security desk and the guard will call the appropriate office on the phone. Someone from the victim’s office will then ride down the elevator, retrieve the defibrillator or insulin from EMS personnel and take it back upstairs. EMS personnel will be required to wait on the main floor in full sight of the security desk.
• If there is a fire on an upper floor of any state building, fire fighters will be allowed to pull a hose into the building’s foyer and then wait while the guard calls upstairs for someone to come down and get the hose. That person would then pull the hose up the stairwell to the affected floor while firefighters wait—in full view of the security desk.
• Visitors to the State Capitol will no longer be allowed to take the elevator to the observation deck some 24 floors up. The elevator, after all, necessarily goes right by the fourth floor, and that’s where Jindal is—sometimes—and where Timmy Teepell runs his Southern headquarters of OnMessage. We simply cannot have the great unwashed, the despised riffraff, common citizens, passing this close to an office of such prestige and towering intellect.
Some might call this paranoia and perhaps it is. But one can’t be too careful with crotchety old illegitimate reporters snooping about, sneaking around and writing the truth.
After all, no less an obsessive distrust authority than Nixon Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said, “Even paranoid people have real enemies.”
