The Jindal administration showed its true colors in the waning days of the current legislative session when it singled

out long-time State Treasurer John Kennedy for cuts in his office expenses as retaliation for his criticism of the Governor for using non-recurring revenues to cover recurring expenses in Jindal’s budget.

Some might call it good, hard ball politics. But that sort of politics takes big league players to pull it off with aplomb. Little leaguers come off as petty, per-sonal, and vindictive.

Here are the facts. You be the judge. Big leagu-ers? Or little leaguers?

I’m really not sure when it all started, this business of the Senate loading up the state’s two primary budget bills, HB1 and HB2, with projects and putting no money in to pay for them. I can remember the Sen-ate Finance Committee in 1969 huddled in a little conference room off the chamber behind the wall still marred with the bullet holes from Huey Long’s murder. Inside that classic smoke-filled room, the Committee members, chaired by Sixty Rayburn, would rewrite the budget according to their own tastes. But never, ever, did the Senate Finance Committee pass a budget bill on to the floor that was out of balance. The Finance Com-mittee did that job. That was their power.

Slowly, over the years, probably under pressure from the oil bust of the late 1980s, the Finance Committee began to load up HB1, the general expenditure bill, with projects where there was no money provided to pay for them. After all, the general appropriation bill would have to go to a conference committee with the House which, by law, had already originated the bill and passed it. A balanced budget could be worked out there, right?

Wrong.Today, habitually, HB1, the general spending

bill, comes out of the Senate and goes to a confer-

ence committee where it always … always … is sent on to the Governor with more expenditures than projected revenues. The Louisiana Governor, like most state governors, must sign a balanced budget by law. In order to achieve that end, he is given a power that the President of the United States lacks. That’s the so-called “line-item veto power,”the authority of the Governor to veto specific line items in the budget presented by the Legislature.

When the Legislature, led annually by the Sen-ate, stacks the budget with spending items beyond projected revenues, the Legislature, in effect, ab-

dicates its power of the purse over to the Executive

Branch of government, and, in particular,

to the Governor himself. It helps individual mem-

bers of the Legislature who can

claim “I got your project in the budget,” but that claim is a hollow one until the Governor decides what to do with it.

Meeting on Memorial Day, the Senate Finance Committee once again loaded HB1 with projects matched by phantom funding on the revenue side. In the end, the committee sent to the Senate floor a spending budget containing $300 million in Sen-ate wish-list additions, and the restoration of $267 in cuts made by the House because the spending was financed by non-recurring revenues.

At the same time, the Senate Committee on Rev-enue and Fiscal Affairs, which oversees the state construction budget in HB2, added $300 million in deficit projects to what the House had presented, and sent it on to the floor.

Add it all up, and it’s nearly $900 million in funny money loaded on the state budget by the Senate. Enter state Treasurer John Kennedy who has vocally criticized the Jindal budget’s use of non-recurring revenues. At the Senate Finance Committee Meeting on Memorial Day, Kennedy

testified to the committee, once again offering his opposition to using the non-recurring funds. As a reward, the Jindal-controlled committee cut Kennedy’s office budget. The committee made no corresponding cuts in any other office of the Exec-utive Branch, making it very clear that Kennedy was being punished for speaking out in opposition to the Governor.

The only way left open for Kennedy to restore his office budget is with an amendment on the

Senate floor, or have it added be-hind the closed doors of a Con-ference Committee meeting. In either instance, he is now

open to the criticism that he insisted on cuts, but is

howl-

ing be-cause they were made in his office.

That criti-cism may work among the political class, but it won’t work with those of us out here in the hinterlands asking only that good public administration prevail. Petty moves by Governor Bobby Jindal that, in effect, eliminate one job in John Kennedy’s office, do not speak well for Mr. Jindal.

To his credit, the Governor may be unaware of all the pettiness now being unleashed on legis-lative opponents in his name. If so, he needs to make himself aware. Because at the moment, Mr. Jindal looks like a big league wannabe with a little league swing.

OpinionA4 Thursday, May 31, 2012 The livingsTon parish news

We’ve been down this road before. Parish politicians grandstand against an unpopular develop-ment, knowing they have no legal authority to stop it ultimately,

but wishing to “represent” the views of their constituents.

The latest example is Watson Heights, which the Parish Council quietly moved toward approving last week. They did not discuss their backflip — would not even com-ment on it afterward, on advice of attorneys defending them from a lawsuit triggered by

their repeated de-nials of the same project in the past. Somehow after two years, with prospects of federal court action hanging over them, they discovered mean-ing to the phrase, “a government of laws, not of men.”

It is probably true that the majority of Watson residents oppose any project that might lead to low income, federally subsidized housing in their midst. They might even disagree with federal laws that bar housing discrimination.

Regardless, refusing to permit a project because you are afraid of what kind of people may live there is against the law and denying a permit to developers who have met all the requirements under parish ordinances to obtain one is grounds for civil court action.

So what about protecting the interests of property owners in the community? There are ways that local governments can regulate land use to minimize the adverse impacts of growth, but Livingston Parish politicians have yet to embrace them. They talk the same talk about zoning year after year and do nothing more. Then they play chicken with developers until they are hauled into court. It’s happened before whenever apart-ment complexes or other unpopular develop-ments come to the table and politicians want to play to the crowd. It happened this time.

However, regulating land development in Livingston Parish requires regulations on the books before those projects get to the table. Afterward is too late. All else is grand-standing.

Grandstand fizzles again

Regulating land devel-opment re-quires reg-ulations.

waysand means

Jeff M. david

Little League politics at the Capitol

‘… the Legislature abdicates its power of the purse over to the executive Branch.’ Jeff David column.

I editoriaL ___

Since its difficulties with Huey Long, Big Oil has sought to develop warm relations with Louisiana governors and vice versa, if they knew what was good for them.

In order to advance nationally within the Republican Party, whose last national con-vention erupted into chants of “Drill, Baby, Drill,” contenders must at least be accept-able to the energy industry. To the broader electorate, however, Gov. Bobby Jindal, as an oil-state governor under consideration for the GOP vice presidential nomination, can’t afford to be seen as an industry toady.

Early in his term, the governor and the oil companies got along swimmingly, as an industry journal praised his administration’s “improved” permitting process. The state’s boom in exploration, from the Outer Conti-nental Shelf to the Haynesville Shale, led to economic development that he could share credit for, despite the national recession.

Then came BP. The massive oil spill that ravaged the Gulf, the coast and its economy offered Jindal a golden opportunity: to whup up on an oil company, with the state and the nation cheering him on. He also lashed out at the response of the Obama administration, through which he restored his GOP star qual-ity that he damaged in his national speaking debut the year before.

Yet, while singling out BP, the governor championed the industry as a whole by lead-ing the protest of the exploration moratorium imposed by the president, thus supporting the GOP’s job-killer line of attack against Obama.

As a bonus, the governor was able to con-nect the state’s legal claims against BP to a long-awaited, long-term plan for coastal restoration. Up for legislative approval is the administration’s 50-year, $50 billion coastal plan, the most comprehensive and science-based to be written. Its principal funding pieces, covering up to half the costs, are expected Gulf spill fines and offshore revenue sharing, beginning in 2017, for which Sen. Mary Landrieu gets credit.

Through his first term, Jindal struck a state and national profile an as overall de-fender of the industry while a lead critic of its worst actor, but also the man with the plan for the coast.

All of which made the oil guys wonder why he would risk rupturing that relationship by his politics at the Legislature this spring. The companies looked to the governor to broker a favorable solution to their long-run-ning legal battle with landowners and trial lawyers over oilfield pollution caused de-

cades ago, when regulatory standards were lax to non-existent. The legal actions are called legacy lawsuits for the chain of leases that plaintiff’s lawyers went back through to reach the deep-pocketed majors.

The oil companies grew increasingly impatient and concerned that Jindal, through his negotiator Natural Resources Secre-tary Scott Angelle, would not fully back their posi-

tion. They wanted a process for having the state submit remediation plans in court that would both get the sites cleaned up and limit the companies’ exposure to broader damage claims made in cookie-cutter lawsuits filed throughout south Louisiana. It more than peeved oil executives that Jindal seemed sympathetic to his friends, major landowners Mike Foster and Roy O. Martin III, as well as small independent oil operators, who wanted to be let off the hook on damage claims. It further alarmed them that Jindal had col-lected $280,000 from trial lawyers in the last election cycle.

Much of this would have gone unnoticed by the general population but for Sen. David Vitter, who jumped in four-square behind the oil companies and called out Jindal for not forging a deal. Failing to do so, charged Vitter, maintained the status quo of the “trial lawyer bonanza.” Without saying so, he was putting Jindal’s vice-presidential possibili-ties on the line by casting him as an ally of trial lawyers and a foe to industry.

The matter dragged on until, suddenly, with state senators pressing for a resolution and with Jindal’s assent, the agreement came to-gether. The companies got what they wanted, the landowners and small operators got something, the trial lawyers got nothing.

Had Jindal fallen in line early with the oil companies, he may have been labeled their lackey. Instead, he stuck with the local mil-lionaires against the corporate billionaires, for a while, before making his deal and his peace with the petro giants. If anything, the resolution enhances his VP stock by having him appear as a friend but no tool of Big Oil.

For whatever it gets him, one can best describe Bobby Jindal’s oil politics as pretty slick.

Jindal slick with oil politics

JohnMAginnis is a louisiana political commentator and author and publisher of the louisiana political Fax weekly. his web site is lapolitics.com.

poLitiCs John Maginnis

JeffM.DAviD is the publisher of The livingston parish news.