Clinging to hope and waiting for recovery, he kept track of the state Legislature and their special sessions from an RV in New Orleans and a rented apartment in Baton Rouge. Gerica says there wasn't much accomplished during those gatherings that lifted his spirits.
As the regular session prepares to convene on March 27, Gerica is again looking to the state for answers. But all he can find are pre-filed bills dealing with an official state poem, promises of more money for teachers and professors, and unexpected budget priorities.
"I don't see nothing that is coming up that is going to help us," Gerica says. "All I see is a lot of money being wasted."
Gerica isn't a government expert; he just keeps track of bills that might impact his fishing business. But even those who are inside the political machine don't see a whole lot of effort being devoted to hurricane recovery this go around. Butch Speer, clerk of the House of Representatives, says while the number of bills being filed is on par with previous regular sessions, only a small percentage of the measures to be debated will deal directly with hurricane recovery.
"We'll be arguing about the same kind of stuff we normally do in a regular session," he says.
What Speer means by "stuff" is virtually anything. For instance, Rep. Mert Smiley, a Republican car dealer from Port Vincent, wants the state to have an official poem and has filed House Bill 177 to anoint "I Love My Louisiana" by James Ellis Richardson with that designation. The House Judiciary Committee is actually expected to spend time on the matter.
Rep. Bryant O. Hammett, a Ferriday Democrat and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, wants lawmakers to debate his House Bill 52, which prohibits computer-assisted hunting. This is the latest fad for hunters, found on Web sites like www.Live-Shot.com, where hogs and other critters can be gunned down through the Internet using webcams and mechanical rifles.
There are also a few bills making a return to the Legislature that always take up lively hours of debate, like bans on flag burning and human cloning. The regular session is scheduled to last 85 calendar days.
This year's $20.7 billion budget as proposed by the governor has the potential to eclipse all else. The monumental spending plan is $1.6 billion larger than the budget approved last year. It might seem irresponsible to increase spending in the shadow of an unprecedented natural disaster, but the administration argues the extra load is due to the large sums of federal relief cash flowing into the state.
The devil is in the details. Lawmakers are already rallying behind the idea of resurrecting the urban and rural development funds through the budget. Before being abolished, they were widely referred to as slush funds because governors have historically doled them out to select lawmakers for pet projects back home. Rep. Francis Thompson, a Democrat from Delhi, has vowed to personally carry out the mission.
"I'm not surprised by any of this," says Barry Erwin, president of Council for a Better Louisiana, a nonprofit group that monitors state government. "Those pots of money have been there for years, and when you have a budget that looks fat and happy on the surface, it's inevitable that we go back to that discussion."
That misconception will likewise confuse other budgetary issues, he adds. The governor has a $135 million proposal on the table to boost pay for teachers and college faculty, and there are major shortfalls in the public hospital system's needs.
For state officials, it will be a challenging balancing act. But for people like Gerica, it's a return to politics as usual while hurricane recovery takes a backseat.
"That's all this is," Gerica says. "But I'm still hoping there will be a couple of champions up there for us that will keep things moving along."
MAY 17 Here's a column from James Gill, this time in the Advocate. Gill, who has jumped ship from the Picayune, writes about the absurdity of dueling polls in this post. The numbers are so wildly different, it is obvious that both sides are "cooking the books," he writes. In particular, he looks at Sen. Mary Landrieu, and how her recent actions in DC have been received by those polled. Gill's acerbic, amusing prose is a welcome addition to a paper so conservative as to be occasionally lacking in personality.
MAY 17 Blogger Tom Aswell continues delivering bombshells about the state education department and Gov. Jindal's education "reform" efforts. In this post, he reports that students in the Shreveport area have been signed up for a charter school without their knowledge or consent. Most interesting to Aswell is how this Texas-based charter (with ties to GOP types) got the personal student information it has, if the students didn't give it.
MAY 17 This post by JR Ball in the Baton Rouge Business Report is an interesting tongue-in-cheek look at recent Baton Rouge economic development efforts. Among the items he examines is the idea that gaining a Costco makes BR a "world-class city." (Really? All you need is a different brand of Sam's? MK!) This effort, and other recent ones, are all built on the taxpayer's back, with tax zones, tax incentives and tax rebates, Ball writes.
MAY 17 Blogger CB Forgotston is critical of the legislature's reliance on a revenue-estimating committee's decision to include projected tax amnesty income in this year's forecast. That's a problem, CB posts, because the deadline for these people to pay their taxes is June 30, 2014. So when do you think these people who haven't paid taxes in years are going to pay their taxes? Surely not before June 30, and that means the money won't be there for this year's budget, he argues.
MAY 17 Here's an interesting blog out of California by a Hollywood writer, attorney and academic named Brian Alan Lane. He blogs about higher ed, and was a whistle-blower in a scandal over false credentials. In this post, he takes aim at LSU's new top dog, King Alexander. It's convoluted and a little confusing, but it sure makes Alexander a lot more interesting than he was yesterday.
MAY 17 Blogger Robert Mann writes about the LSU Board's refusal to allow Dr. Fred Cerise to testify before the legislature about Gov. Jindal's plan to close down all the state's charity hospitals and dump the poor on the private system. It's hard to imagine anyone more qualified than Cerise to testify about that, so why would anyone try to prevent him doing so? Mann thinks it is because the powers that be aren't interested in hearing any truth about the plan.
MAY 17 This post on the Louisiana Sinkhole Bugle, a blog that notes developments in the Bayou Corne and Jefferson Island salt domes, talks about a proposed expansion of the salt dome storage under Lake Peigneur in Iberia Parish. Residents are working against it for several reasons, including two biggies: the sinkhole disaster in Bayou Corne and the continuing, unexplained bubbling on the surface of the Lake.
MAY 17 NOLA police arrested more people Thursday accused of either being involved in the Mother's Day shooting or hiding the suspect afterward, this Gambit story reports. The NOLA police chief said he suspects the whole thing was gang-related and throws out a challenge to the gangs: he's got informants now, he says, and he knows a lot more than the gangs want him to know. The people who live in the neighborhoods terrorized by gangs are ready to talk, he says.
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