Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Times up for "mendacity, malfeasance and mismanagement"
SHREVEPORT TIMES
BY EMILY METZGAR
(excerpt)
Historians of the future will have many options when choosing how to describe the effects of Hurricane Katrina on Louisiana. The last year has been shaky, but there's still an opportunity for the metaphor of choice to be "Katrina as a force for change in Louisiana's public policy environment." The time for simply tolerating decades of mendacity, malfeasance and mismanagement in Louisiana is over.
Katrina didn't start this growing intolerance for business-as-usual, but it did add an exclamation point to a fact that's been obvious for years: It's time for Louisiana to start living up to its potential as a state with tremendous untapped resources. Katrina opened the window on opportunities for meeting that untapped potential, but unified levy boards and a proposal to eliminate six superfluous tax assessors aren't nearly enough to bring the kinds of substantive policy changes this state so badly needs.
