It’s a pretty good metaphor for John Bel Edwards’ time as Louisiana’s governor that Lumen, the company most people in the state know as CenturyTel or CenturyLink, has “donated” its mostly-empty office space to the University of Louisiana at Monroe.

If you haven’t heard about this, here’s the gist of it…

Lumen Technologies (NYSE: LUMN) and the University of Louisiana Monroe announced the donation of Lumen’s local campus to the university. In a departure from corporations selling their unused real estate after moving to remote or hybrid work, Lumen is gifting its property to the university in alignment with its ongoing commitment to both higher education and the Monroe community.

“Hybrid work is the future. Lumen is embracing this work model for employee wellness and flexibility,” stated Chris Stansbury, chief financial officer at Lumen. “We continue to be committed to the hundreds of Lumen employees in the Monroe area, and we’re so excited to partner with ULM on investing in the future of this vibrant community.”

The press conference announcing the donation was held in the current Lumen Technologies Center for Excellence, which will become the Clarke M. Williams Innovation Campus when the transaction is finalized on Saturday July 1, 2023. Williams was the founder of Lumen, then CenturyTel, and was a longtime supporter of ULM.

“Lumen’s impact on our region and university has been remarkable since its humble beginnings in northeast Louisiana,” offered Ron Berry, President of ULM. “A special thanks to Lumen CEO Kate Johnson, Lumen’s board of directors, and the many amazing leaders who have made today’s announcement possible. ULM looks forward to leveraging this historic gift to continue Lumen’s legacy while creating life-changing opportunities for our region.”

Lumen is donating two of its campus buildings, totaling over 800,000 square feet. The company will also lease back around 52,000 square feet of office space from the university for in-person events and meetings.

This is the largest single donation ever received by ULM and among the largest received by any public university in the state of Louisiana.

This is one of the more egregious examples of “hide the ball” we’ve seen, and what we’ve noticed is not a whole lot of people are buying it.

What’s really going on is that Lumen has left Monroe. When it was CenturyTel, the company was one of only three (at the time) Fortune 500 companies headquartered in Louisiana (The Shaw Group and Entergy were the others; The Shaw Group has since sold out to CBI).

But that headquarters is in Denver now, and it’s been in Denver for a long time. A pretense of saying it was in Monroe held up for a few years, and in fact Edwards threw a truckload of your tax dollars at Lumen in order to prevent an announcement that the company was moving out.

They took the money and proceeded to move out. They just didn’t tell anybody.

Now they have. This is all being camouflaged under the banner of “remote work;” the lie is that since Lumen has become more of a virtual office, they don’t really have an executive campus anymore, so their headquarters will still be in Monroe but it’s just “different.”

It’s an insult to our intelligence, but whatever.

And instead of having a headquarters in Monroe, they’ve got an empty building that (1) they don’t want to pay to maintain or have to kick in property tax to the city and parish, and (2) they can’t sell, since Monroe’s economy is in the dumpster just like the rest of Louisiana’s economy is.

What to do? Just unload that real estate on the local university, lease back whatever little piece of it you’ll need to maintain so as to continue claiming a presence in Monroe that satisfies whatever meager requirements are needed not to violate the incentive/swag deal they cut with Edwards, and then soak up the positive media attention being thrown their way for the “generosity” of such a large “donation.”

Sam Hanna at the Ouachita Citizen wasn’t fooled by this flapdoodle…

How else are we to understand what has transpired from the earliest days of Lumen’s earliest predecessor, Oak Ridge Telephone Co., to the “grip and grin” that occurred Tuesday when Lumen announced it was “donating” its “campus” in Monroe consisting of 800,000 square feet of largely empty office space to the University of Louisiana-Monroe. As you might expect, ULM hailed the donation as the greatest since the days of Joe Profit.

The former Oak Ridge Telephone Co. grew from the front parlor of William Clarke and Marie Williams’ home to a telecommunications conglomerate known as CenturyLink in a matter of decades. Thousands of Louisianians were employed by the Williams’ creation. Today, the former CenturyLink — known now as Lumen — is a shell of its former self, having shed thousands of jobs including countless positions held by Louisianians and in recent years the state of Louisiana even paid Lumen through tax breaks and other subsidies to keep Monroe as the company’s corporate headquarters. It was all a shell game and now it’s all for naught.

You see, Lumen’s abandonment of Monroe is indicative of economic development — or lack thereof —throughout Louisiana.

The state must pay companies to operate here, and make no mistake, Lumen’s “donation” to ULM has been paid for numerous times over by the state of Louisiana and its taxpayers.