Legal, probably, Moral, questionable!

I promise you that I really don’t like to continually bash our governor, but his continual actions that border on questions of morality must be noted.

Upon cruising the local news media this weekend I found a small blip that I feel deserved local front page news.

My understanding concerning Federal grants allocated to states was that the monies had to be totally used for the purpose of their intent.   Apparently this is not true from Governor Jindal’s perspective. 

Last year, the Federal government allocated $5.4 million to our state for use to help fund local Offices of Emergency Preparedness operations.  The key word here is LOCAL.   In other words, tax payers’ dollars were intended to provide financial assistance to each parish in our state.

Of those funds, the governor allocated $3.4 million to the parishes, but kept $2 million for use supposedly by the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security.

This year, same grant, but ‘Bobby’ has decided to keep $3.5 million leaving only $1.9 million for the 64 local Offices of Emergency Preparedness.  Offices will see their funds cut 30% to 53% on top of the partial funding put in place last year.  Remember this when an emergency weather situation hits and your parish can’t respond appropriately.

The irony of all this is, that when citizens complain about reduction in services they mostly likely will falsely blame the present Federal administration, starting with the President on down.   This plays right in to ‘Bobby’s’ plan.  He gets to spend the money the way he wants, and the Federal government gets blamed for the reduction in services.  This is not something new.  Jindal continually alters the intent of Federal grants to this state with his political party rhetoric that state governors should have the final say on how Federal dollars should be spent because they best know what the needs are in their localities.

This would be ok with me if we had a governor who proved himself as a competent fiscal manager interested in bettering the lives of the citizens who elected him.  So far, the evidence to support this is suspect.

This whole scenario is pretty slick if you ask me.  However, the downside of all this trickery is the Feds might come to the conclusion that the local offices don’t need all this money after all, since apparently the state doesn’t feel they need it, so they end up cutting the funds permanently