Political corruption with ties to Lafayette. The GOP capturing both houses of the Louisiana Legislature. Gov. Bobby Jindal coasting to re-election while helping to orchestrate a purge on BESE. Lawmakers struggling with redistricting and a tight budget.
“And those were just the headlines,” Gambit Publisher Clancy Dubos writes in his Top 10 Political Stories of 2011. “The stories behind those headlines made this another year to remember.”
The No. 1 story — it is Louisiana — centered around multiple federal political corruption investigations, a couple stretching into Lafayette:
1. Federal Corruption Investigations — The indictments and convictions can’t come fast enough for citizens who are sick and tired of corrupt politicians, but the feds move at their own deliberate pace. Given the track record of U.S. Attorney Jim Letten & Co., you can’t fault the feds for taking their time. This year saw the convictions of some major political kingpins, and the indictments of several more:
• Plaquemines Parish Sheriff Jiff Hingle and post-Katrina contractor (and political hustler) Aaron Bennett pleaded guilty to a bribery scheme in connection with a Plaquemines jail. Ultimately, both men may wind up providing information about corruption cases in other parishes, which will makes their case worth watching in 2012.
• Former New Orleans City Council member Renee Gill Pratt was convicted of conspiring to rip off more than $1 million from taxpayer-funded charities. She got a seven-year sentence while her co-conspirator-turned-government-witness, former Assessor Betty Jefferson, got house arrest. Gill Pratt’s conviction was the final nail in the political coffin of former Congressman “Dollar Bill” Jefferson, kingpin of the Jefferson Political/Crime Family. (Dollar Bill, meanwhile, remains free on bond while he appeals his conviction and 13-year sentence for racketeering and other crimes in Virginia.)
• Former City Hall tech contractor Mark St. Pierre was convicted of all 53 counts of bribery and conspiracy — and later sentenced to more than 17 years in jail. (During the trial, former New Orleans Chief Technology Officer Greg Meffert testified that St. Pierre struck a quid pro quo in 2005 with then-Lafayette Chief Information Officer Keith Thibodeaux, under which LCG would hire one of St. Pierre’s companies, NetMethods, if Meffert would hire Thibodeaux’s wife. Read more here.)
• In Jefferson Parish, former parish prez Aaron Broussard and his ex-wife, along with former parish attorney Tom Wilkinson, now face payroll fraud charges — and that’s the low-hanging fruit.
• In other Jefferson Parish news, former Wildlife Commissioner Henry Mouton pleaded guilty to one count of accepting bribes from an unnamed (read: River Birch) landfill company. Mouton’s plea, along with Broussard’s indictment, are probably just the first steps toward a possible indictment of River Birch owner Fred Heebe.
Other investigations are thought to be focused on former Mayor Ray Nagin and various officials in St. Bernard Parish. As you can see, federal corruption cases could have accounted for most of the Top 10 stories. For Letten, southeast Louisiana is truly a target-rich environment.
2. GOP Gains — Republicans now hold all seven statewide elected offices and a majority in the House and Senate. For the Louisiana GOP, these are the days of miracle and wonder. Now comes the really hard part: governing. The big question that 2012 will answer is whether the party can handle success — or will Republicans, as Caroline Fayard famously gaffed, eat their young?
Read the rest of Gambit’s Top 10 picks here.
MAY 21 Gambit columnist Clancy DuBos writes about the Mother's Day shooting, and how the stages of shock and blame and healing mirror those traveled by the same city following Hurricane Katrina. The city will recover, just as it did following the storm, by reaching out to help the people injured most seriously by the event, DuBos writes. It's how we heal, he says.
MAY 21 Here's a post on the Advocate (but buried on a subpage, not on the front) that reports something Louisiana Voice reported some time ago: a top DOE official lives in Los Angeles and "commutes" to Baton Rouge. The positioning of the story caused a stir on Facebook Monday, with several posters asking if the Advocate was covering someone's hiney. Sentell's stories on DOE are notoriously soft, and this one is no different: don't expect any hard questions in here.
MAY 21 Here's another post from blogger Tom Aswell about the "course choice" program. He's already reported on kids being signed up without their consent or knowledge, and has more here: For example, he tells of a six-year-old who was signed up for high school Latin. He also digs a little deeper into the sister companies of the main one operating in Louisiana; all of them seem to have complaints against them. Stinky.
MAY 21 Given the 80 percent cut in higher ed funding since he's been in office, it's clear Gov. Jindal would rather give tax cuts to out of state companies than have a functioning system, blogger Dayne Sherman argues in this post. The cuts have been such a disaster, Sherman says, that it will take 30 years to fix what's been broken. He says he believes the aim is to shut down most of the schools before Jindal leaves in 2016.
MAY 21 Blogger CB Forgotston says there are too many elections in Louisiana, and they're costing us too much money. The proof is in the pudding: turnout for most of these nonsensical pollings gets worse and worse, CB opines, even as millions of dollars that could be spent on health care or higher ed go down the tubes. The legislature must take action to stem the tide of pointless elections, he says.
MAY 21 Here's an interesting investigative piece by WVUE on the retirement benefits of some Jefferson Parish public employees. According to the story, the taxpayers are paying 100 percent of the retirement contributions of employees who started work prior to a certain date in April 1986 -- and have done for more than 30 years. It costs the parish millions annually, and might not be legal, the story reports.
MAY 21 This post on Bayou Buzz provides insight from Louisiana's intrepid pollster, Bernie Pinsonat, on the winners and losers from this year's legislative session. But to hear Bernie tell it, there's almost nuttin but losers: Jindal, the Republican party, the Fiscal Hawks all get big goose eggs in his win column.
MAY 20 This post on The Lens takes a look at a huge (either $500K or $250K) bill that one NOLA charter now has for school lunches. The RSD says the charter group didn't fill out the proper paperwork for federal reimbursement, but the story details how the RSD didn't ensure the people running the charter had the proper training, despite requests from hapless charter employees trying to fill out forms. Either way, somebody's asleep at the wheel.
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