“Why are we, the taxpayers of Louisiana, routinely paying for the mistakes of others?” asks Business Report Executive Editor JR Ball in his latest column.
Why is it, Ball wonders, that “the taxpaying residents of this banana republic” have to pick up the financial tab when some elected official, government worker or university professor “thinks it’s OK to go all Harvey Weinstein with a co-worker or coed.”
Or how about when “some crash-happy tugboat company neglectfully fails to lower the boom on a barge-mounted crane,” causing it to slam into a bridge crossing the Mississippi River and the corporate lawyers can’t scramble fast enough to cap their client’s responsibility?
“Which, of course, means lowering the multimillion-dollar repair boom on taxpayers,” Ball writes.
Ball says the governor and state legislators need to 1) pass legislation shifting the financial burden of settlements, fines and repairs to the guilty, rather than innocent taxpayers and 2) go after these people to pay up with the same zeal in which they chase campaign contributions.
“Shockingly, this isn’t already a thing. Which, in small part, explains why the state’s budget is in constant escalation mode,” Ball writes. “Louisiana, apparently, has scores of lecherous pigs feeding at the public trough who refuse to follow the most basic rules of human decency. Yet, when the subsequent lawsuits fly it’s the public who pays the bulk of the settlements.”
Ball points to a fact that he says should anger everyone: Louisiana has handed over more than $5.4 million since mid-2009 settling claims against public sector sexual harassers.
Read his full column about how the cost of lawsuits falls on Louisianians.
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