A suggestion if you want to understand corruption in Louisiana: keep your eyes on government contracting. Patronage is a strange thing and sometimes you’ve got to wonder what’s the push behind it. Could it just be a setup to gain financial support?

More specifically, what could be driving the effort at the Louisiana Public Service Commission to change their current green energy efficiency program, which has generally been acclaimed as functioning acceptably, to one that requires a contracted for paid “Administrator” and a “EM&V” contractor (whatever that is)?

Follow me here, because something does not smell quite right. And we should begin with a hypothesis that changing a relatively efficient program which is working into something with lots of moving parts is all about creating opportunities for people to skim off the top.

Because when money amounts grow, when a government program starts to get big, the bigger money usually means bigger corruption.

Given that rule of thumb, you aren’t crazy if you apply it to what’s happening over at the Commission.

It seems for the past dozen years or so the PSC has been allowing about $30 million a year to be spent on energy efficiency stuff. And for some time now, half of that has been spent through the utility companies on programs you get in your monthly bill for discounts on equipment and light bulbs, etc. The other half has been spent on government projects at the local level; for example, lighting projects for schools and government buildings. This is done under the concept that those improvements reduce the consumption of electricity.

That sounds pretty good, I guess.

But all of a sudden we have Commissioner Craig Greene, of Baton Rouge, pushing for a massive change in how the Commission runs this program.

His move is to change everything about the energy efficiency program from its current simple form which does not require any outside government paid administrator or manager, to one that does.  (If you like, consider this patronage step 101).

The amount of the cost of such a move is not insignificant. It looks like the Commission is going to increase the cost of this program to potentially over $150 million a year, a fivefold increase. And supposedly the “to be hired” administrator and EM&V contractor will be paid percentages of that budget. (start thinking millions of dollars in contractor fees).

It’s hard to tell because the Commission is about to vote on December 13th at its upcoming meeting in Natchitoches on this issue. Worse, from the looks of things, what they’re voting on is an approval of something that they don’t know what the contents are. They will basically be voting for a program that will eventually hire a contractor who will eventually create a program.

Sounds like you have to vote for the bill to see what’s in it. Nancy Pelosi would be ecstatic.

Why is Greene trying to sneak this one past the general public?  Is this just an old-school setup, or is it graft or simply sleazeball patronage? There is no demonstrated need for a sudden fivefold increase in a program bumping along nicely without a significant impact on anyone’s electric rates, and yet we have to have this now?

It looks like there’s more to this. It’s known there were earlier attempts at this shift in control of the energy efficiency program towards the heavily-politically-connected engineering firm CSRS, through a relationship between Greene and former Bobby Jindal appointee Tim Barfield? It’s hard to tell whether this planned expansion is related to that, but it’s not so hard to tell who’s going to end up being the program administrator if this thing keeps going. You can bet on it.

After looking at the documents it seems that the “to be hired” administrator and EM&V (which I just found is straight off the Biden administration Department of Energy website) contractor will be selected right about August of 2024.

That’s sort of an unusual coincidence as we move into the fall election cycle which will include Commissioner Craig Greene’s re-election campaign. Why would Greene want to push through a multi-million-dollar contract to someone right before his reelection bid? Oh my. Does he think that would get him financial support from the successful administrator?

And would it surprise anybody in Louisiana to see this kind of questionable activity?

This just looks like government making more government for no other reason other than to give somebody’s buddy a job. A big expensive job. A job we, nor government, didn’t need to create in the first place.  Just to help for an election?

Another jewel to think about, for every dollar that gets spent on this program, it must be recovered from consumers bills. And from what I do know about the Public Service Commission that means that you’re going to see a rate increase. Somebody’s friend is going to get a job, right around election time, we get to pay for it and we get a rate increase.

What’s worst about this whole damn thing is that when you read the fine print, that no matter how much money the utilities lose through not selling electricity, they get to recover it later from their customers through rate increases. Therein is the big grift.

It doesn’t save anything. It’s just a giant giveaway program to a hack contractor and the utilities.

I’m sure a few ratepayers may get some value out of the bureaucratic mess they’re building at the PSC, but most people won’t.

I guarantee that Craig Greene and the democratic socialist Devante Lewis are going along with this nonsense. But for the life of me I can’t see the other three (Foster Campbell, Eric Skrmetta, Mike Francis) buying into it. Common sense needs to rule the day on this one. This is one plan that needs to hit the trash can.