By cracking down on dissident lawmakers and stripping them of committee assignments, Gov. Bobby Jindal is actually freeing them to publicly question his priorities.
By Jeremy Alford
A second-term lawmaker says it was “horrible” how Gov. Bobby Jindal stripped a vice chairman of his title earlier this month for voting against the administration. “That’s just terrible to me. That’s public intimidation,” says Rep. Truck Gisclair, D-Raceland. “I’ll tell you this, they are not going to scare me into voting a different way.”
Location: 2300 South College Road
Acreage: 6.88 acres
Property taxes paid in 2010: $21.50
Owner: WPM Exploration Inc.
Description: This vacant lot sits between two other empty tracts along South College Road, adjacent to a small row of new industrial companies and near a small industrial complex.
Forget everything you think you know about what’s going on in Baton Rouge.
By Jeremy Alford
Gov. Bobby Jindal and the Louisiana Legislature are focusing on education during this year’s regular session. Partly, it’s so that our children can grow up and be schooled real good like and see increases in their take-home pay.
But by the time the final gavel comes crushing down in early June, we may just learn that the session had a dual purpose: to pad the public salaries of officials far and wide so that their take-home pay increases now. Talk about getting schooled.
Dave Spizale, general manager of KRVS 88.7 FM, is retiring in mid-June.
Christus St. Patrick Hospital in Lake Charles announced last week it is dissolving its partnership with Lafayette developer and retired cancer physician Glenn Stewart in an upscale assisted-living retirement community set to open soon in Lake Charles.
The website for the development, Christus Village, indicates it has 80 individual living apartments and 20 chateaus targeting a 55 and older demographic.
Christus St. Patrick’s involvement in the Christus Village project included marketing services and management of the so-called continuing care retirement community. Operated by the larger Christus Health, a Catholic faith-based group that owns more than 40 hospitals in six states and Mexico, Christus St. Patrick does not identify Stewart by name in the press release announcing the end of the partnership, but an inference to the troubled developer can be gleaned from the hospital’s announcement:
CHRISTUS St. Patrick Hospital’s vision for the project was not entirely aligned with that of the project developer. After careful deliberation and prayerful discernment, CHRISTUS St. Patrick has come to believe that it will be in the best interest of the hospital if the organization is no longer associated with the project.
“As a Catholic organization, what’s most important to us is that our mission, vision and core values align with the companies and projects with which we are involved,” said CHRISTUS St. Patrick Hospital Administrator Donald H Lloyd II.
Laurie Hamilton, a Lake Charles resident whose mother put down a $10,000 deposit to reserve a unit at Christus Village (residents must also pay an up-front cost of $220,000 plus $3,000 per month), asked for a refund when they found out that Stewart, not the Catholic faith-based organization, was the owner. Hamilton says she had heard of the Lafayette developer’s Mardi Gras arrest for second-degree battery on the daughter of the Independent’s publishers and his other infamous exploits from relatives in the Hub City.
A Christus spokeswoman says the hospital began the Christus Village project as owner in April 2007. Stewart, through Lake Charles Gardens LLC, purchased the development in October 2010.
— Walter Pierce and Leslie Turk
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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