| Article Index |
|---|
| Pooyie 2011 |
| Pooyie 2011 pg. 2 |
| All Pages |
Wednesday December 28, 2011
Pooyie 2011
It's Good, It's Bad, It's Just Plain Crazy
By The Independent Staff
As years go, 2011 was fairly unremarkable, but it did have its remarkable moments, perhaps none more so than the flat-out surprising and inspiring success of the Ragin’ Cajun football team closing out the year with a heart-stopping win in the New Orleans Bowl. Practically nothing brings a community together like athletic success, and we at The Ind are huge UL athletic supporters.
Kidding. But the year was indeed bookended and peppered by UL athletic success, with the Cajun men’s basketball squad engineering that monster “Fear the Beard” win streak to close the regular season in late February and the Lady Cajuns softball unit fielding another stellar performance in the spring.
But we’re a newspaper devoted more to news and politics, and in that respect 2011 was kind of “eh.”
The ugly Lafayette Housing Authority saga spilled over from 2010 with the release in January of an independent audit showing just how dysfunctional the agency is. Three of its board members fired by City-Parish President Joey Durel and later reinstated by Judge Ed Rubin continue to hold “meetings,” although they may have absolutely no authority to do so since HUD has taken over the beleaguered agency.
State Rep. Joel Robideaux, bless his heart, switched from independent to Republican, certain he could secure the speaker gig in the GOP-controlled state House of Representatives. Then Gov. Bobby Jindal’s countenance shined upon Lake Charles Rep. Joe Kleckley as his favored candidate.
Robideaux threatened a roll call vote come January, but later backed off. All he had to show for his party switch was an R, which in Louisiana is increasingly synonymous with white.
The Lafayette area did pick up an extra seat in the state House thanks to redistricting, but it was mostly the usual suspects running for re-election or sliding up to the Senate, with few contested races this fall. Boring, save for the somewhat unexpected ouster of Rep. Rickey Hardy in District 44, pushed out by old guard standard bearer Vince Pierre.
The property tax proposition that would have bankrolled the first half of the school system’s $1 billion facilities plan was brought behind the electoral wood shed, vigorously spanked by voters and sent to bed without supper, as was the proposition to undo consolidated government and return to separate governments for the city and parish — a prop borne of the idea that while the country folk would still be allowed to come to town, they shouldn’t get a say in how we run things.
Last spring we began a running series, “Fair Share,” highlighting valuable property in commercial corridors in Lafayette that’s being taxed at an insanely low agricultural rate — a loophole many prominent, affluent land owners and developers have taken advantage of for years to the detriment of local government’s revenue stream.
One of the developers exploiting that loophole, Glint Skewer I think his name was, did a swan dive off sanity and, well, it got pretty ugly for a while there.
Arguably the most uplifting story, and the one that occasioned the most pleas
ant surprise by this paper, was the way a reform majority coalesced on the Lafayette Parish School Board, highlighted in last week’s cover story and underscored by the hire of Dr. Pat Cooper as our next superintendent. The way a simple majority on the board — black and white, Democrat and Republican, old and young — gelled into a positive force was something few saw coming.
On the flip side of the “Gang of Five” was the “Sore Four,” as we labeled them, led in volume by Tommy Angelle, who embarrassingly characterized Cooper as a “carpetbagger.” There’s definitely some reconstruction to do in Lafayette public education, but carpetbagger? Really?
It’s why Angelle is the honorary grand marshal for this year’s Parade of Couillons. His candidacy for the board — and now his residency on it — seems in retrospect all about Tommy Angelle’s need for playing politics and not at all about education.
Last year we debuted the Pooyie issue, a compendium of news highlights pulled from the eponymous weekly news feature covering the good, bad and just plain crazy that is local, regional and state news.
We’re doing it again. Enjoy. And here’s to 2012.
Couillon
 |
|
Lafayette Parish School Board |
January
City-Parish President Joey Durel pours gasoline on a fire by referring to former Lafayette Housing Authority case manager Chris Williams, with whom Durel had a widely publicized row a few years before in the MLK Parkway fight, as a “piece of garbage” in an article in The Daily Advertiser.
March
State Rep. Rickey Hardy, famed for such whackadoo legislation as banning saggy pants and barring senior citizens from seeking public office, one-ups the bigots by co-sponsoring — with Metairie Republican John LaBruzzo, heir to David Duke’s old district — a bill that would require recipients of state welfare to take random drug tests. The bill fails in the session.
April
City-Parish Council candidate Craig Spikes mails a fundraising letter accusing his presumed opponent, District 7 incumbent Don Bertrand, of taking LCG “in the same direction as our Federal government has gone in the past few years.” But two days before the letter is mailed, the CPC votes on a redistricting plan that moves Spikes’ residence into District 8, where incumbent Keith Patin handily whooped him on Oct. 22.
June
Wa$hington Mayor Joseph Pitre, who is black, suggests his town — and towns run by black mayors in general — is being racially targeted by the state, which insists the little town with the big speed trap return to state coffers the more than $200,000 in illegal speeding fine revenue it pocketed.
August
In an effort to sour the grapes and get a Tea Party library named after him, former state Rep. Ernie Alexander spews bile in a local daily newspaper story about Rep. Joel Robideaux’s switch from independent to Republican. Robideaux is angling at the time — and seems to have a realistic shot — of ascending to House speaker, which would have been a political boon for Lafayette.
 |
| Commercial real estate developer and erstwhile physician Glenn Stewart went ballistic after The Ind exposed his exploitation of a property tax loophole. Stewart waged an ugly, embittered billboard campaign against Ind staff members and even hired homeless people to stage protests, paying them in warm plate lunches and cold cash. |
September
U.S. Rep. John Fleming, R-1%, demonstrates an utter detachment from the reality in which most Americans live. The millionaire physician and restaurant franchisee whose businesses made $6 million in profits in 2010 lays out his opposition to President Obama’s deficit-reduction plan by telling MSNBC, “[T]he amount that I have to reinvest in my business and feed my family is more like $600,000 of that $6.3 million, and so by the time I feed my family I have, maybe, $400,000 left over to invest in new locations, upgrade my locations, buy more equipment...”
October
After going all bat crap over a string of late-night vehicle burglaries, the Ville Platte City Council eats some (Jim) Crow when it elects to suspend a stupid, racially targeted ordinance prohibiting residents from walking the streets after 10 p.m. on weekdays after the ACLU files suit against the city.
November
U.S. Rep Steve Scalise shouts into the Fox News echo chamber when he equates a National Christmas Tree Association push to self-impose on member sellers a 15-cent-per-tree fee to fund a promotional campaign with — all together now — President Obama’s tax-spend-and-regulate War on Christmas. Scalise tells a New Orleans TV station, “This new tax is a smack in the face to each and every American who celebrates Christmas, and may be the best example to date of President Obama’s obsession with taxing and regulating hard-working American families.”
 |
| Cyber douche Christopher Hebert, the 36-year-old mastermind behind the pathetic, bottom-feeder Facebook phenomenon that was Busted in Acadiana, was arrested on stalking/cyber-stalking charges, putting at least a pause on his megalomaniacal reign of error. |
 |
| A handful of Lafayette Utilities System customers donned their figurative tin-foil hats and pushed back against the utility company installing efficient, modern, remotely read “smart meters” on homes and businesses, citing way-out-there health hazards and even more way-out-there “Big Brother” privacy concerns. |
 |
| The Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce, lead by President and CEO Rob Guidry, continued dabbling — badly — in politics, smacking longtime chamber supporter and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Michot, a Republican and dean of the Lafayette delegation, with an F on its first-ever (and likely last-ever) legislative report card. The chamber later outdid itself by endorsing Cajun comedian/attorney Jonathan Perry over chamber member and major Acadiana “job creator” Nathan Granger in a state Senate race. |
MAY 20 This post by blogger CB Forgotston draws parallels between Gov. Bobby Jindal and two individuals he probably doesn't want to be aligned with: President Obama and former governor Edwin Edwards. CB says Jindal's trying to jack up the debt ceiling (an Obama play, according to CB) and buy votes from GOP leges who normally wouldn't go for that (an Edwards play, CB says).
MAY 20 Here's a post in the Baptist Message from an alumnus of Louisiana College. The author, Larry Burgess, calls on the leadership of the private school to take care of some pressing problems. Physical plant issues are critical and unaddressed, some faculty make so little they need government health care, and there is an atmosphere that does not encourage honest discussion, he writes. It's time to get things back in order, he says.
MAY 20 This post in Gambit tells of a benefit concert scheduled to raise money for the 19 people shot during a Mother's Day second line on Frenchmen Street in NOLA. Among them was Gambit blogger Deb Cotton, who spoke frequently about violence in the city and reported on the city's second line culture. Gambit's foundation, along with other NOLA non-profits, also is selling t-shirts to raise money for the victims.
MAY 20 Blogger Robert Mann is critical of the personal interest some legislators take in their work here, sharing the comments one NOLA solon made in explaining his decision to vote against a bill that would require people to stop discriminating against female workers. His wife might lose some salary, so he was going to have to vote against the equal pay bill, Conrad Appel said. Appel and everyone who heard him should have been ashamed, but they weren't, and that's what is wrong in that building, Mann argues.
MAY 20 American Press columnist Jim Beam writes about the budget again here, urging kudos for the House and its efforts to try to fix the budget as opposed to passing on a flawed and messy rubber-stamped document as it usually does. The Senate already is poo-pooing the effort, but instead Senators should be trying to find a way to improve it as well, Beam argues. He also has some predictions in here from LABI and CABL.
MAY 20 Here's a link to the photo gallery from Tulane's graduation this past weekend. Dr. John and Allen Toussaint played together and received honorary degrees. The Dalai Lama was so entranced by their performance he got up from his seat and walked across the stage to stand next to them. He even participated in a second line with his own personal, saffron-colored umbrella. To the graduates, he urged them to think about creating a peaceful, hopeful life and society.
MAY 20 This Picayune story questions the rhetoric of NOLA officials who say the city, aside from having a "murder problem," is safe. The talking points generally are that the criminals are killing each other, but everything else is OK. The police chief there says that even Lafayette is more dangerous than NOLA. But crime experts interviewed here say that NOLA's numbers indicate one of two things: either people are so used to violence they don't report it, or somebody's "fudging the numbers."
MAY 20 The Advocate's Mark Ballard writes about some of the background maneuvering that took place during the development of budget alternatives in the Legislature. From Rep. Joel Robideaux being called a "tax and spend liberal" to robo-call influence, Ballard lets us in on some of the work that happens behind the scenes but usually doesn't make it into the Advocate's daily coverage of the session.
Most Read
in case you missed it