Donnie Picou and Bas Clas performing his original composition, "My Louisiane," at the Blue Moon Saloon in Lafayette, Louisiana, on the night of November 1, 2008. Performers are: Donnie Picou — lead vocals, rhythm guitar; Steve Picou — lead guitar, back-up vocals; Geoff Thistlethwaite — bass guitar; Ted Cobena — drums; Mike Picou — back-up vocals.
Showing posts with label Louisiana. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Louisiana. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Joey Durel and Lafayette Complacency
It appears that City/Parish President Joey Durel will be handed a second term without a contested election. Using his first term as a guide, even his supporters are going to regret this.
Durel's first term has been characterized by cronyism, war on first responders, a failure to provide community leadership, and isolating Lafayette in the Legislature by repeatedly selling out the long-term interests of other communities for what were falsely believed to be Lafayette's short-term interests.
The tacit approval that the leadership of the community gives Durel despite these lapses indicates a sense of smugness that is not conducive to the continued progress of the community.
Here are examples of each of Durel's failures:
Cronyism: Early in his term, Durel worked hard to convince the Parish Council to change the rules for the hiring of police chiefs in the City of Lafayette. At Durel's insistence, the rules were changed to drop a series of requirements that would otherwise have prevented a lifelong friend from being named chief. The council waived the rules; Durel's pal Randy Hundley was named chief. That sad saga is still playing itself out in the criminal courts.
Had Durel worked as hard to get a proposed parish road tax passed in 2006 as he did to get Hundley named chief, we might actually have a chance for better traffic conditions in the parish. Given the opportunity, Durel worked hard for his friend, but was a slacker when it came to acting on behalf of the public good in the form of the road tax.
Making government work for his friends has been the hallmark of Durel's first term. Nowhere is that more pronounced than the 'welfare for developers' approach to public resources that Durel espouses and defends.
According to public information, Consolidated Government invests more than $3,000 in infrastructure for every lot in every subdivision that developers produce. Despite embracing the warm and fuzzy "smart growth" mantra, Durel staunchly refuses to make his developer friends pick up the tab for the public works that make their ventures so lucrative.
Development impact fees have proven to be effective tools to defray the infrastructure costs imposed by new developments in other communities. Durel will have none of it. Instead, Durel prefers to have Consolidated Government (i.e., the rest of us) absorb those costs and cut other services as a means to protect the bankbooks of his developer friends.
Durel is rewarded in full for his loyalty with campaign contributions (and other amenities) but the community as a whole pays the price through diminished infrastructure investments in other segments of the parish.
War on First Responders: Durel used his 2007 "State of the Parish" dog and pony show to talk about the importance of law enforcement in his administration. Yes, this is after the Hundley matter had come to light! Still, there stood Durel laying down the law and order gauntlet for anyone willing to spend $25 to hear him.
Funny thing is that while Durel was delivering those comments, his administration was continuing to stiff Lafayette police and firefighters over millions in back pay they are owed for money illegally withheld from them. The suit has been hanging out there for eight years, half of those years on Durel's watch.
So, Durel manipulates the hiring process to get a crony appointed police chief while stiffing policemen (and firefighters) on money the Louisiana Supreme Court says they are owed. Meanwhile, out of the other side of his mouth, Durel is championing his commitment to law and order. Sweet.
No doubt the money needed to pay the police and firefighters is a significant chunk of change, but how much is city/parish government subsidizing developers each year? Maybe police and firefighters would have a better shot at getting paid if they called themselves 'developers' instead of 'public servants'?
Failure to Lead: The top elected official represents everyone in the district, whether they like it or not — including those who didn't support the election of that official.
Durel as city/parish president has never gotten this. He won election in 2003 by about 4 percent of the vote. He was elected by the Southside. He has governed as though he is president of the Southside, not the entire parish. Nowhere is that more evident than on the matter of race relations. Durel's greatest failure as city/parish president has been in the area of race relations.
Durel fiddled while the Martin Luther King street naming fiasco burned through the council and, in the process, the community. He let it smolder and consume what precious little good will existed between whites and blacks in Lafayette until that issue arose. In a startling lack of leadership, Durel spent no political capital among council members trying to get them to move (for the good of the community) beyond the petty grudges they held against each other.
This episode demonstrated that Durel has not grown into the office; instead, he's proven that you can take the boy out of the Southside, but you can't take the Southside out of the boy.
The reason this matters is that Lafayette has put its dollars where Richard Florida's words have been. Florida is the author of "The Rise of the Creative Class," which holds that communities that will flourish in this century are those that can attract the innovators who are driving the new economy. In Florida's formula, in order to succeed communities will have to have what he calls "the three Ts": talent, technology and tolerance.
Lafayette has invested a great deal developing talent and our technology but, as the King street-naming episode illustrated, tolerance here is in short supply. So, too, was Durel's leadership. A true leader would not have allowed the King thing to spiral out of control before getting involved. Lafayette paid a heavy price for the damage that episode did to our image as a progressive community. As a one-time event it's an aberration; but without a concerted effort to heal the rifts exposed and deepened by that episode long-term damage to our prospects to result.
Isolating Lafayette in the Legislature: The LUS fiber project is Durel's claim to fame. It's important to remember that the plan was waiting for him when he took office. To his credit he embraced the idea and his championing of that project is a big reason that the measure ultimately won voter approval and will be built.
However, Durel has cost Lafayette a considerable amount of money as well as good will across the state through his administration's mishandling of the attempts by BellSouth and Cox to kill this project.
The initial attempt to kill the project came in Baton Rouge where BellSouth and Cox worked to pass a law that would have banned municipalities from getting into the bandwidth business. A delegation from Lafayette supporting the LUS project met with Governor Blanco. She reportedly told them that she would veto any bill that Lafayette felt it could not live with.
The problem came when Durel and his advisors accepted a bill (now law as the "Municipal Fair Competition Act") that not only provided a platform for a series of lawsuits against Lafayette, but also erected barriers that will prevent other Louisiana cities with municipally owned utility systems from launching ventures similar to the LUS fiber project.
Durel and his team decided the terms of the bill were not onerous enough to stop their project. They accepted the terms, in effect burning the bandwidth bridge behind them, leaving other municipalities stranded on the far side of the digital divide.
BellSouth, Cox and their allies then used the provisions in the law accepted by Durel and Company to file a series of lawsuits against the LUS project that ended up costing Lafayette tax payers about $2 million in legal fees.
But, Durel was not finished selling out other communities in the state on bandwidth issues.
In 2006, BellSouth/AT&T was pushing for a statewide video franchise agreement, which would have taken control of rights of way away from municipalities and property owners and handed it to the phone company. While the Louisiana Municipal Association, the Police Jury Association of Louisiana and property owner groups tried to fight this bill, Lafayette sat on the sidelines. Why? Because Durel believed he had reached an agreement with BellSouth/AT&T where Lafayette would not to fight the proposed law in exchange for the phone giant not bringing further lawsuits against the LUS project.
To the surprise of no one outside of the Durel administration, the lawsuits continued, but Lafayette succeeded in earning a fair amount of ill will because of its continued willingness under Durel to sell out other communities in the hope of short-term advantage.
Flash forward to the 2007 session of the Legislature when Durel touted an idea to stimulate road building in fast-growing communities by allowing sales taxes from auto sales to remain in the possession of local governments, rather than going to Baton Rouge.
The legislation ties together key elements of the worst aspects of Durel's first term. On the one hand, Lafayette legislators and Durel say they don't want to play the dirty money games in Baton Rouge; on the other hand, they make a grab for state money to build roads. Even after that defeat, Durel seems no more inclined to do the sales job of winning support for local financing for our own road projects here through either taxes or development fees. Who's going to pay for these roads? Santa Claus is booked through December and I hear the Easter Bunny lost a bundle in sub-prime mortgages.
The failure of the road legislation demonstrated the extent to which Lafayette under Durel has become isolated in the workings of the Legislature. Despite the fact that Lafayette had a resident as the sitting governor and with another resident serving as Commissioner of Administration local government has virtually nothing to show for four years of what should have been an ideal political situation.
It's really pretty astounding that the city/parish president couldn't find a way to work with this governor. Just about every other local government leader has figured out how to get local projects funded in Baton Rouge. Not Durel. A better opportunity for progress will not likely present itself for this community anytime soon.
So, cronyism, government for the benefit of the few, war on first responders, failure to lead the community on issues that go to the heart of our ability to advance, and pursuing a strategy that has squandered political advantage in state government are what Durel has given us in his first term.
That Durel's record is considered 'good enough for Lafayette' and its business community indicates a lack of imagination that does not bode well for the future of the parish. Progress comes from not being willing to settle for 'good enough,' from not being willing to accept the status quo. Smug self-satisfaction is not the hallmark of a community on the rise.
If this parish does, in fact, believe that we can't do any better than we are now, then we won't. Is this as good as it gets? We had better hope not.
Durel's first term has been characterized by cronyism, war on first responders, a failure to provide community leadership, and isolating Lafayette in the Legislature by repeatedly selling out the long-term interests of other communities for what were falsely believed to be Lafayette's short-term interests.
The tacit approval that the leadership of the community gives Durel despite these lapses indicates a sense of smugness that is not conducive to the continued progress of the community.
Here are examples of each of Durel's failures:
Cronyism: Early in his term, Durel worked hard to convince the Parish Council to change the rules for the hiring of police chiefs in the City of Lafayette. At Durel's insistence, the rules were changed to drop a series of requirements that would otherwise have prevented a lifelong friend from being named chief. The council waived the rules; Durel's pal Randy Hundley was named chief. That sad saga is still playing itself out in the criminal courts.
Had Durel worked as hard to get a proposed parish road tax passed in 2006 as he did to get Hundley named chief, we might actually have a chance for better traffic conditions in the parish. Given the opportunity, Durel worked hard for his friend, but was a slacker when it came to acting on behalf of the public good in the form of the road tax.
Making government work for his friends has been the hallmark of Durel's first term. Nowhere is that more pronounced than the 'welfare for developers' approach to public resources that Durel espouses and defends.
According to public information, Consolidated Government invests more than $3,000 in infrastructure for every lot in every subdivision that developers produce. Despite embracing the warm and fuzzy "smart growth" mantra, Durel staunchly refuses to make his developer friends pick up the tab for the public works that make their ventures so lucrative.
Development impact fees have proven to be effective tools to defray the infrastructure costs imposed by new developments in other communities. Durel will have none of it. Instead, Durel prefers to have Consolidated Government (i.e., the rest of us) absorb those costs and cut other services as a means to protect the bankbooks of his developer friends.
Durel is rewarded in full for his loyalty with campaign contributions (and other amenities) but the community as a whole pays the price through diminished infrastructure investments in other segments of the parish.
War on First Responders: Durel used his 2007 "State of the Parish" dog and pony show to talk about the importance of law enforcement in his administration. Yes, this is after the Hundley matter had come to light! Still, there stood Durel laying down the law and order gauntlet for anyone willing to spend $25 to hear him.
Funny thing is that while Durel was delivering those comments, his administration was continuing to stiff Lafayette police and firefighters over millions in back pay they are owed for money illegally withheld from them. The suit has been hanging out there for eight years, half of those years on Durel's watch.
So, Durel manipulates the hiring process to get a crony appointed police chief while stiffing policemen (and firefighters) on money the Louisiana Supreme Court says they are owed. Meanwhile, out of the other side of his mouth, Durel is championing his commitment to law and order. Sweet.
No doubt the money needed to pay the police and firefighters is a significant chunk of change, but how much is city/parish government subsidizing developers each year? Maybe police and firefighters would have a better shot at getting paid if they called themselves 'developers' instead of 'public servants'?
Failure to Lead: The top elected official represents everyone in the district, whether they like it or not — including those who didn't support the election of that official.
Durel as city/parish president has never gotten this. He won election in 2003 by about 4 percent of the vote. He was elected by the Southside. He has governed as though he is president of the Southside, not the entire parish. Nowhere is that more evident than on the matter of race relations. Durel's greatest failure as city/parish president has been in the area of race relations.
Durel fiddled while the Martin Luther King street naming fiasco burned through the council and, in the process, the community. He let it smolder and consume what precious little good will existed between whites and blacks in Lafayette until that issue arose. In a startling lack of leadership, Durel spent no political capital among council members trying to get them to move (for the good of the community) beyond the petty grudges they held against each other.
This episode demonstrated that Durel has not grown into the office; instead, he's proven that you can take the boy out of the Southside, but you can't take the Southside out of the boy.
The reason this matters is that Lafayette has put its dollars where Richard Florida's words have been. Florida is the author of "The Rise of the Creative Class," which holds that communities that will flourish in this century are those that can attract the innovators who are driving the new economy. In Florida's formula, in order to succeed communities will have to have what he calls "the three Ts": talent, technology and tolerance.
Lafayette has invested a great deal developing talent and our technology but, as the King street-naming episode illustrated, tolerance here is in short supply. So, too, was Durel's leadership. A true leader would not have allowed the King thing to spiral out of control before getting involved. Lafayette paid a heavy price for the damage that episode did to our image as a progressive community. As a one-time event it's an aberration; but without a concerted effort to heal the rifts exposed and deepened by that episode long-term damage to our prospects to result.
Isolating Lafayette in the Legislature: The LUS fiber project is Durel's claim to fame. It's important to remember that the plan was waiting for him when he took office. To his credit he embraced the idea and his championing of that project is a big reason that the measure ultimately won voter approval and will be built.
However, Durel has cost Lafayette a considerable amount of money as well as good will across the state through his administration's mishandling of the attempts by BellSouth and Cox to kill this project.
The initial attempt to kill the project came in Baton Rouge where BellSouth and Cox worked to pass a law that would have banned municipalities from getting into the bandwidth business. A delegation from Lafayette supporting the LUS project met with Governor Blanco. She reportedly told them that she would veto any bill that Lafayette felt it could not live with.
The problem came when Durel and his advisors accepted a bill (now law as the "Municipal Fair Competition Act") that not only provided a platform for a series of lawsuits against Lafayette, but also erected barriers that will prevent other Louisiana cities with municipally owned utility systems from launching ventures similar to the LUS fiber project.
Durel and his team decided the terms of the bill were not onerous enough to stop their project. They accepted the terms, in effect burning the bandwidth bridge behind them, leaving other municipalities stranded on the far side of the digital divide.
BellSouth, Cox and their allies then used the provisions in the law accepted by Durel and Company to file a series of lawsuits against the LUS project that ended up costing Lafayette tax payers about $2 million in legal fees.
But, Durel was not finished selling out other communities in the state on bandwidth issues.
In 2006, BellSouth/AT&T was pushing for a statewide video franchise agreement, which would have taken control of rights of way away from municipalities and property owners and handed it to the phone company. While the Louisiana Municipal Association, the Police Jury Association of Louisiana and property owner groups tried to fight this bill, Lafayette sat on the sidelines. Why? Because Durel believed he had reached an agreement with BellSouth/AT&T where Lafayette would not to fight the proposed law in exchange for the phone giant not bringing further lawsuits against the LUS project.
To the surprise of no one outside of the Durel administration, the lawsuits continued, but Lafayette succeeded in earning a fair amount of ill will because of its continued willingness under Durel to sell out other communities in the hope of short-term advantage.
Flash forward to the 2007 session of the Legislature when Durel touted an idea to stimulate road building in fast-growing communities by allowing sales taxes from auto sales to remain in the possession of local governments, rather than going to Baton Rouge.
The legislation ties together key elements of the worst aspects of Durel's first term. On the one hand, Lafayette legislators and Durel say they don't want to play the dirty money games in Baton Rouge; on the other hand, they make a grab for state money to build roads. Even after that defeat, Durel seems no more inclined to do the sales job of winning support for local financing for our own road projects here through either taxes or development fees. Who's going to pay for these roads? Santa Claus is booked through December and I hear the Easter Bunny lost a bundle in sub-prime mortgages.
The failure of the road legislation demonstrated the extent to which Lafayette under Durel has become isolated in the workings of the Legislature. Despite the fact that Lafayette had a resident as the sitting governor and with another resident serving as Commissioner of Administration local government has virtually nothing to show for four years of what should have been an ideal political situation.
It's really pretty astounding that the city/parish president couldn't find a way to work with this governor. Just about every other local government leader has figured out how to get local projects funded in Baton Rouge. Not Durel. A better opportunity for progress will not likely present itself for this community anytime soon.
So, cronyism, government for the benefit of the few, war on first responders, failure to lead the community on issues that go to the heart of our ability to advance, and pursuing a strategy that has squandered political advantage in state government are what Durel has given us in his first term.
That Durel's record is considered 'good enough for Lafayette' and its business community indicates a lack of imagination that does not bode well for the future of the parish. Progress comes from not being willing to settle for 'good enough,' from not being willing to accept the status quo. Smug self-satisfaction is not the hallmark of a community on the rise.
If this parish does, in fact, believe that we can't do any better than we are now, then we won't. Is this as good as it gets? We had better hope not.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Blanco Reaffirms Louisiana Commitment to Sanctity of Sperm
Governor Kathleen Blanco signed yet another act of the Louisiana Legislature that reaffirms the second class status of women under Louisiana law.
You can read about the current law here.
As you may recall, last year the Legislature passed and Blanco signed a law that apes a South Dakota law that bans abortions — even when the life of the mother is at stake — without exceptions for rape and incest victims.
Let's see. Among the worst states in quality of education. Among the highest states with the percentage of people not covered by health insurance. The state with the highest rate of incarceration. Among the highest rates of poverty. And the toughest abortion laws in the country.
Looks like that last one is a good fit with the rest of that list.
Saturday, April 21, 2007
The Gospel According to Governor Smug
I went to Tunica, MS, this week for the Third Annual Meeting of the Delta Regional Authority. I had attended a meeting of theirs (held in conjunction with the Southern Technology Council) in January '06 in Jackson, MS. At that meeting, sewerage backed into the hotel, the Health Department shut down the kitchen between breakfast and lunch and Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi addressed the gathering.
He was back on the agenda in Tunica and, in talking about the new Toyota plant his state just won (in the Tupelo area), Barbour blamed New Orleans' response to Katrina (at least as compared to Mississippi's) with helping the state win the manufacturing plant.
Barbour told the 250 or so people gathered for the DRA luncheon that Mississippi had borne the brunt of a great natural disaster, but "the people on the coast did not complain, did not seek to blame anyone; they just picked themselves up and went to work helping each other."
Barbour said that he'd heard people wonder why the media wasn't covering the Mississippi coast as it was New Orleans. He gave this explanation: "The media does not cover the story of a plane landing safely on time." He added that the media were attracted to New Orleans because of the slow recovery there.
Barbour said his wife had been down to the coast "on about 50 of the first 90 days after the storm hit, serving as my eyes and ears." Apparently, only photo ops with the President could draw the Governor down there.
The Governor's smug attitude about Mississippi's recovery versus that in New Orleans conveniently (for him) overlooks several relevant facts that he may or may not know.
First, the disaster in New Orleans was turned into a catastrophe through the combined actions and inactions of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (the people who built the defective levees that failed the city) and FEMA was was infested by the kind of rank cronyism that has come to be recognized as the hallmark of the Bush administration.
Second, for almost 60 days after Katrina hit, water that entered the city through those breached levees stood in the streets of New Orleans (about as many days that Barbour could get his wife to go to Gulf Coast, only consecutively).
Third, Louisiana's recovery effort was being deliberately sabotaged because of the fact that we have a Democratic governor (that fact was revealed in emails between the White House and FEMA and in testimony by former FEMA head Michael Brown). This is a particularly relevant fact in the wake off the revelations about the partisan nature in which the Justice Department has been run. Add to that the fact that Barbour is a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and the whiff of crony-driven favoritism enters into gagging range.
Pete Johnson, federal co-chair of the DRA, called Barbour "the best governor this state has ever had." If so, no wonder Mississippi is such a mess.
This is a governor who has twice vetoed legislation over the past two years that would have raised the tax on cigarattes while eliminating in whole or in part the sales tax on food in a state that ranks among the poorest in the country. Did I mention that Barbour was a lobbyist for the tobacco industry between the time he ran the RNC and the time he was elected governor of Mississippi. One has to ask if he's still being paid by them or has been promised a job by them once he leaves office to veto legislation that is so clearly in the interests of a large segment of his state's population.
So, this smug defender of corporate interests at the expense of the health of the people he allegedly serves thinks Toyota is going to his state because the people on the Gulf Coast didn't complain after Katrina. Well, perhaps if the Governor would have gone down there, he'd have heard the outrage about the insurance companies not paying on losses. Imagine how mad they'd have been and how loudly they would have complained if the federal government in the form of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had failed them like they failed New Orleans.
No doubt if Barbour would have been around during the flood of 1927 he'd have 'tutt-tutted' the folks in his state who lost property, prosperity and lives when the Corps' levees failed on the Mississippi. Governor Barbour's attitude exemplifies the arrogance of ignorance that typifies so much of the conventional wisdom about New Orleans and Katrina. He's got his story and he's sticking to it, let the facts be damned.
Ironically, Barbour's comments preceded an address by Tom Piazza, author of the book "Why New Orleans Matters." Tellingly, Barbour did not stay to hear Piazza's speech.
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