“For the first time since Reconstruction, Republicans outnumber Democrats in the Louisiana House of Representatives. On behalf of the Republican Party of Louisiana, I welcome Representative Hines to the GOP and thank him for his service to Louisiana. I invite all Louisiana citizens who share our commitment to limited government to join our cause. Prior to the 2007 legislative elections, Democrats held a 16 seat majority in the House. This dramatic shift is more evidence that the freedom loving people of Louisiana have rejected the Democratic Party’s liberal agenda.”

Hines’ switch gives the GOP a 51-50 advantage in the 105-member Louisiana House of Representatives. Four members are independents. The gain is symbolic, however; House Speaker Jim Tucker, a Republican, has been in charge of that body since the 2008 legislative session. The move doesn’t confer any more power on the party than it previously had. Most observers think a blowout in the legislative elections will be a key feature in next year’s cycle is inevitable, which will lead to lopsided Republican numbers both in the House and the Senate (Democrats currently hold 22 seats to the GOP’s 16 in the Senate).

Thus it’s not a surprise that little is said about Hines in the GOP release. While it’s true that his recent voting record isn’t terrible – LABI scored him as a 100 in the 2010 legislative session, which brings his lifetime score up to 80 – Hines has a history of bill authorship which would hardly endear him to the statewide Republican electorate. In our previous piece on Hines today we outlined several rather egregious examples of nanny-state legislation issuing from his pen. A further sampling…

• Co-authored and passed repeal of law which allowed for a 17 or 18-year old student to drop out of school without any legal consequences with the permission of their parent, tutor, or legal guardian. Louisiana has one of the highest high school dropout rates in the nation. This law was long outdated. (Are we going to put parents in jail if their kids don’t graduate from high school now? Who’s going to pay for that?)
• Authored legislation to create green building standards in new construction projects financed with taxpayer money. By adopting the LEED standards, the State would save money over time by reducing energy costs. (That’s a dubious proposition, and any energy savings the state might realize over time will be paid dearly for up front)
• Authored legislation requiring banks, lending institutions, and mortgage companies to offer credit counseling prior to buying a home. (Which imposes greater costs on all consumers of financial products doing business with Louisiana providers; fundamentally a tax increase)
• Authored legislation which would have banned trans fats in Louisiana restaurants. (enough said)
• Co-authored and passed legislation requiring that new gas stations in Southern Louisiana purchase generators to ensure that power remains on during natural disasters. (more nanny-state government, another government imposition of costs on Louisiana businesses and a hidden tax on Louisiana consumers)
• Co-authored and passed legislation creating the Louisiana Intrastate Rail Compact, which would facilitate the construction, financing, and operation of a high speed transit or railroad if monies become available. (another big-government solution and probably boondoggle in the works)

Hines might be the newest Republican in the House, but he’s no conservative. Perhaps he’ll “grow” in the legislature, but if he carries through on his threat to run for Secretary of State it’s hard to make a case he deserves the conservative vote over incoming interim Secretary Tom Schedler, a long-time Republican state senator with a solid record who’ll be running to hold the job next fall.

And he definitely doesn’t look like Gerard Depardieu.

But he does come off as a pretty good Edmond Dantes nonetheless. And after a figurative banishment to the Louisiana legislature’s Chateau D’If, in which Schroder found himself bounced off the House Appropriations Committee by Speaker Jim Tucker in retaliation for the unpardonable sin of voting for someone else other than Tucker’s hand-picked candidate for the Speaker Pro Tempore job, thanks to the latest bombshell investigative report by Fox 8 New Orleans’ Lee Zurik Schroder might end up coming back to haunt Tucker as a latter-day Count of Monte Cristo.

Northshore State Representative John Schroder did more than question the numbers we showed him. He criticized the Legislature for what he thinks is allowing the number of employees and the salaries paid to them get out of hand.

“I don’t think it’s good. If I’m a taxpayer at home, I’d question it,” Schroder said. “If you go down the list and go down those salaries you shown me. I’m in the wrong business.”

Last year alone, four employees of the House and Senate made over 200-hundred thousand dollars.

Jerry Guillot Senate Chief of Staff $214,324.08
Glenn Koepp Secretary of the Senate $201,890.55
Thomas Tyler Senate Deputy Chief of Staff $200,814.17
Alfred Speer Clerk of the House $204,429.59

“You just can’t have an unlimited ceiling on salaries and that looks what we’re doing,” Schroder said.

Video of Zurik’s report:

The astronomical salaries found by Zurik are generally the result of gradual pay raises over the course of 20-25 year careers, Tucker said, and a decent-sized portion of the pay comes from overtime. Tucker also said that on the House side he’s held the line on staff size and pay in the two years he’s been Speaker, which is true. But Schroder, who might be the pre-eminent fiscal hawk in the state legislature, argues that at some point it’s gratuitous to keep doling out raises for legislative staff making already-gigantic salaries, and that when those staffers are already making six-figure incomes the idea of overtime is inappropriate.

There are two relatively reasonable points of view here. Tucker – and for that matter, Senate President Joel Chaisson (D-Destrehan) – didn’t create this problem; he inherited it from the old-line legislative leadership who ruled the Capitol before the advent of term limits. And it’s hard to argue with the logic which says the current salaries are built over long periods of service; most people even in the private sector expect to get a little bit of a raise each year if things are going well and they’re doing a good job.

But when the state’s budget is in the hole to the tune of a billion dollars and folks are scrambling to try to figure out where the fat is, having secretaries making 95K and 41 members of the legislative staff drawing six-figure salaries is going to be a scandal regardless of how long they’ve been around. When you’re a billion in the hole, you’re in no position to continue paying 200K a year for staffers that Georgia and Tennessee are getting by paying 120K or 140K for.

So Schroder wins this round. And while the conventional wisdom says that his political career is imperiled due to Tucker’s Nancy Pelosi-style tap dance on his head on the Appropriations Committee and the controversy he’s generated about state worker pay – controversy which brought to light his vote as a rookie in 2008 in favor of a legislative pay raise, which he has said was a regrettable mistake – his efforts in helping to bring a staggering waste of state dollars to light could put him back on the political map. It’s not exactly the treasure of Monte Cristo, but it’s better than nothing.

And now that Tucker is on the hot seat as one man responsible for what will be considered grossly out-of-line salaries for legislative staffers, he might consider that perhaps he should have listened to those who asked him not to come down so hard on his Republican colleagues who didn’t go his way on the Speaker Pro Tem vote.

The Baton Rouge Business Report’s Daily Report reports Schroder actually considered resigning from the House in the aftermath of Tucker’s stripping him from Appropriations over the weekend. Schroder, a fiscal conservative who has made waves about structural changes to the Civil Service system, has not spoken publicly about last week’s events to date. Tucker, Ellington and newly-elected Speaker Pro Tem Joel Robideaux (I-Lafayette) have all spoken out in favor of moving on and putting the controversy behind them, but it isn’t going away any time soon.

The nub of the problem isn’t just that Tucker humiliated Schroder; it’s that in doing so he put out as justification that Schroder lied about his vote for the Pro Tem job. Schroder hotly disputes that, and those kinds of slights don’t get swept under the rug so easily.

So for us, fireworks. And while Schroder will run the risk of becoming a pariah in the House should he speak out too harshly this afternoon, the idea that comity will prevail in the House in the aftermath of last week’s flap is likely an example of wishful thinking and not much more. Tucker’s overreaching has cost him dearly from a leadership perspective.

To set the stage for those who might not be familiar with what is happening, the beginning of the current legislative session saw a hotly-contested election for the job of Speaker Pro Tem in the House, which became open after New Orleans Democrat Karen Carter Peterson ran successfully for the state Senate and Baton Rouge Democrat Avon Honey passed away last month. The contestants were Noble Ellington (D-Winnsboro) and Joel Robideaux (I-Lafayette); Ellington, an old-time North Louisiana conservative Democrat (remember when we actually used to have those?) was the first guy on the scene, and the long-time legislator lobbied hard for support from legislators on both sides of the aisle. But Robideaux, who isn’t a Republican but more or less functions like one, was the choice of House Speaker Jim Tucker and Gov. Bobby Jindal – and Tucker whipped up enough votes for a small majority to get his man elected.

On Monday, Robideaux beat Ellington in a 53-48 squeaker. Two Republicans – John Schroder of Covington and John LaBruzzo from Metairie – voted for Ellington. And this is where our story gets interesting and confusing.

The word from Tucker’s camp is that Schroder and LaBruzzo went back on their word in voting for Ellington, and because they busted their commitments to him and didn’t go Robideaux’s way they’re now suffering the consequences. In yanking Schroder and LaBruzzo off the House Appropriations Committee, which happened yesterday, and replacing them with Democrats Rosalind Jones of Monroe and James Armes of Leesville (both of whom went for Robideaux), Tucker has done something which makes almost zero sense on paper. Namely, he’s changed the makeup of Appropriations from 13 Republicans and 10 Democrats to 11 Republicans and 12 Democrats.

Now, to give Tucker a little credit one would imagine Jones and Armes would have been given the rules from the beginning – namely, that regardless of the letter next to their names they’re to vote as dictated on the Appropriations Committee and probably on the floor as well unless they want to get fired like Schroder or LaBruzzo did. Even so, Schroder and LaBruzzo are actual fiscal conservatives. And when the state has to close a billion-dollar budget shortfall (with another $2 billion in cuts yet to come next year), you would seem to need as many fiscal hawks in key places as you can find. Hard to imagine Armes and Jones would work as hard as LaBruzzo and Schroder – Schroder in particular, who is an aggressive reformer with a growing reputation for taking heat on Civil Service restructuring – on finding places to cut spending.

It gets weirder. Ellington swears neither Schroder nor LaBruzzo had said they were voting for Robideaux, and as such neither switched. The two Republicans are keeping quiet, but the word out of their camps is they deny ever breaking a commitment to Tucker on their votes. As you might imagine, they’re both red-hot about the slap.

Tucker also apparently has yanked Ellington and Charmaine Stiaes, D-New Orleans, who voted with Ellington, off the House Governmental Affairs committee, which is a plum assignment. And he also has threatened to cancel Ellington’s lease of an apartment at the Pentagon Barracks, which he’s had for 14 years. The Advocate had Ellington’s reaction:

“I’m sick about my colleagues. I’m not sick about me,” said Ellington, who has been a state senator or representative since 1988.

“I don’t think anybody in America — maybe in Iraq or Iran — but not in America should anybody be punished for voting for the candidate of their choice.”

Ellington said he was irked by a sentence in Tucker’s letter concerning the Pentagon apartment that said: “Your continued occupancy will be evaluated each month.”

“Here is a redneck from north Louisiana and my vote has to be suitable to a New Orleans person? Give me a break. If I have to move, I’ll just have to move,” said Ellington.

At this point the temptation probably exists to surmise that all this is driven by the Governor’s office and Tucker is simply carrying out marching orders. Tucker is, after all, Jindal’s floor leader in the House, and getting Robideaux elected was his mission on Monday.

But Jindal’s chief of staff Timmy Teepell told the Advocate that the governor called Tucker last night and asked him not to engage in recriminations – because, as Teepell said, the governor wants the House unified and likely also because they can figure out that Schroder and LaBruzzo are allies in the legislature it doesn’t particularly pay to humiliate.

Jindal’s people can also count. Robideaux needed 53 votes to win, and he got that 53 votes without Schroder and LaBruzzo. While it might have been nice to get 55 votes for your man for Speaker Pro Tem, he’s just as elected at 53 votes. For the same reason that Charlie Melancon was allowed to vote no on the final Obamacare reconciliation bill in Washington after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had crossed the 216-vote threshhold, you’d think that Schroder and LaBruzzo would have been spared major recriminations for votes Tucker didn’t need.

And yet it happened anyway.

So does Teepell’s story add up? The Jindal administration does indeed have a reputation for pulling pins out of grenades, handing them to folks like Tucker and then running for the hills, and if in fact this situation involves Tucker playing the heavy on the part of the governor while the press is distracted with disinformation it wouldn’t be a colossal shock. LaBruzzo has a reputation for making some mistakes, after all; for example he’s gotten himself into hot water for missing meetings at Appropriations just like Stiaes has at Governmental Affairs, so there could be a legitimate reason why he could have been on the chopping block from the start.

While spotty meeting attendance probably wouldn’t have set Jindal off, in Schroder’s case one might wonder whether his push for more aggressive reforms of Civil Service might be too hot for the governor to handle. Schroder has been outspoken in pushing for an elimination in regular merit raises for Civil Service employees, which has made him a controversial figure in some circles. This is admittedly pure speculation, but it could be that the permanent reforms he’s looking for are a little strong in a year when Jindal has already managed to freeze state salaries.

The calculus would work like this – there are no raises this year, and the state employees are already furious about not getting raises. Right now, Jindal looks like the responsible conservative governor doing the best he can to make tough fiscal decisions amid a brutal economic situation. But if Schroder is on Appropriations and he’s pushing to make permanent some sort of ban on Civil Service merit raises, it could be a little dangerous for the governor. After all, Schroder’s a Republican and an ally of Jindal’s; whether the governor decides to support his initiatives or not, the more press he gets just by working on it the more Jindal might find that the “unraised” aren’t just grouchy but a ready-made constituency of 61,000 classified state employees who will vote for ANYBODY but the governor next year.

I don’t know that this is what’s happening, but it seems a reasonable possibility. Maybe Tucker, whose reputation so far as the Speaker has been that of a very genial, nice guy who manages to make things work pretty smoothly even in difficult circumstances, is now Middle Age Crazy and figures busting a few heads would make him feel better.

But without some sort of deeper explanation for this, which several Capitol insiders we talked to today admitted eludes them, it doesn’t quite make sense. Tucker hasn’t just asserted himself by hammering some people; he’s done so in a gratuitous fashion with some victims who are in a position to help drive a common agenda he and the governor share. It’s one thing to break arms as a legislative leader the way Pelosi does in Congress, but at least Pelosi does so in pursuing a legislative agenda. In this case, the agenda – and the rationale – is unclear.

PINEVILLE — Major changes to benefits for retired state employees would be a “disaster,” a top official with the Retired State Employees Association said Thursday.

“It will be a disaster for our retirement system,” said Allen Reynolds, executive director of RSEA, at a meeting of the Alexandria chapter at the Main Street Community Center in Pineville. “We have to fight this as an organization, because there is a lot of support for it in the Legislature.”

Reynolds was speaking of the possible change from a defined benefit to a defined contribution system for state employees.
Under the current, defined benefit system, state employees are given regular, guaranteed benefits after retirement, based on their years of service.

Under a defined contribution system, employees would pay into a retirement account, similar to the way many people pay into a 401(k). They would be responsible for planning and managing their account, and would be guaranteed benefits after retirement only until their account balance runs out.

“It’s, ‘you get to invest your own money, good luck,’” Reynolds said. “If we go to a defined contribution plan, you are totally on your own. You’re rolling the dice. You don’t have a safety net any more.”

There is more:

“What we’re doing is working,” said Cindy Rougeou, executive director of Louisiana State Employees’ Retirement System. “Frankly, it isn’t broken and doesn’t need fixing.”

And:

Supporters say moving to a defined contribution plan will save the state money. Under the current system, the state accrues liability if benefits paid out exceed funding.

Reynolds and Rougeou point out the state still is responsible for the current unfunded accrued liability, regardless of whether it changes retirement plans, though moving to a defined contribution system would protect the state from accruing more.

“It’s bad for retirees, and I don’t think it’s a good idea for the state of Louisiana,” Reynolds said. “Many believe it will save the state money in the long run, but I just don’t see that being the case. It will hurt the state’s ability to recruit and retain talent. All in all, I just don’t see the benefit.”

So far, it doesn’t appear that a bill to move state employees out of a pension system and into an individual retirement plan has been filed, so it’s difficult to address this concern with specificity. It is clear, however, that something will likely be proposed. According to Louisiana House Speaker Jim Tucker, who spoke on the issue at a Louisiana Association of Business and Industry conference back in January, a restructuring of the pension system has to happen. The state has liabilities of some $2.8 billion for its employees’ retirements and only $2.3 billion in reserves to meet those obligations; leaving a $500 million unfunded liability which Tucker characterized as a gun aimed at taxpayers’ heads.

“Louisiana will be a retirement system that does state services on the side,” Tucker said. “This is a major problem.”

Getting anything changed, of course, is going to be like fighting a land war in Asia – regardless of what the actual bill might look like when it’s filed. As we’ve seen just recently with teacher pay and working conditions, elementary and secondary school funding, budget changes at the state’s universities and even pay raises for state employees in the midst of recessionary budget cuts, the minute the news is anything but rosy with respect to public-sector workers you’d think the world was coming to an end.

State employees have a valid point in that they’re not part of the Social Security system with the retirement program they’re currently on – so switching to something that looks like a 401(k) would in theory remove the lifetime income portion of their benefits. And so it’s not a lie on their part to argue that they’re being screwed to some extent if the pension system changes.

Here’s the problem, though – taxpayers don’t exist to provide state employees with pensions. State employees exist to provide taxpayers with government services. This is a fact which seems to get lost every time these fiscal-policy discussions come up. So if the taxpayers can’t afford to pony up for lifetime pensions for state employees, then it’s time for Louisiana to come up with the best solution the taxpayers CAN afford.

And that’s what Tucker is saying. You can scream about the legislative pay raise thing two years ago, in which Tucker was admittedly complicit (and Rep. John Schroder, who is absolutely correct in questioning yesterday why it’s even being discussed to give out pay raises to state employees when the overall budget is being cut, was complicit in that debacle as well). And if you want you can blame Tucker for the fact that Louisiana’s government used to have more cash on hand than it does now – his detractors will say that the only reason all these budget cuts have to happen is that he and his allies “stupidly” repealed the Stelly plan; such statements give off a strong whiff of a mentality in which the primacy of government funding is unquestioned. But the fact is the current regime in charge of Louisiana’s government is not going to raise taxes on the people of the state. Period. And since taxes aren’t going up, and federal funding for the state government isn’t going up, and the overall national economy doesn’t show many signs of producing a lot more tax revenue any time soon, the only answer is that spending has to come down.

Is it perhaps the best idea to convert state employees to a 401(k) type program? Well, that’s what private companies do in most cases and it seems to work out well. Can state employees manage their own retirements better than the pension-fund managers at LASERS can? Maybe not, but there doesn’t seem to be a particular reason why LASERS can’t operate as something like a mutual fund for its current clients and therefore continue to manage funds on more of a voluntary basis; not to mention the fact that it seems either an insult or an outrage to make the argument that the folks in charge of the nuts-and-bolts operation on Louisiana’s government are less capable than private-sector workers to handle their own finances – either they’re being unnecessarily babied or we’ve got idiots operating our state agencies. I don’t accept either of those arguments.

I also don’t accept the argument that a pension plan is necessary to recruit quality people into state agencies. Such an argument depends on the old assumption that when someone takes a job they stay in it until retirement. But outside of state employees almost nobody does that anymore; people change jobs and even careers every few years now, and someone coming out of college can be expected to easily have a half-dozen employers before retirement. Given that, a more valid mindset would be to have state employee retirement plans mirror those everywhere else so that someone who takes a job in state government could do it for 5-10 years and move back out into the private sector without having to sweat the dire consequences of losing retirement benefits and so on. The current system largely traps those employees with cushy benefits when the more talented of them might actually serve the people of the state better by applying their skills in job-creating activities like starting businesses.

This whole discussion is of a piece with the glaring need to change the mentality of government in general. The stultified, negative idea of the public-sector employee sees the private sector as a milkcow, his job a life sentence and burden to be thanklessly borne for a pauper’s nickel as compensation – and change as something to be feared. It’s that mentality which demands three-to-five percent budget increases every year or else a political fight to the death, and it’s that mentality which refuses any alteration whatsoever to how things are done.

Tell a state or even local government employee who complains about his or her job and how awful it is that maybe he ought to consider quitting and doing something else, and I’ll lay 8-to-5 odds that either you’ll start a fight or earn yourself a look not dissimilar to what you’d get if you suddenly stripped naked and did somersaults. The same conversation with a private sector employee much more often involves a “yeah, you’re right” and a discussion of other opportunities. And until there is more parity of mentality between the two sides, we’re going to have increasing amounts of howling and nasty political battles over the fact that we as a society in dire fiscal straits simply cannot afford to lavish ever-mounting salaries and benefits on public employees.