Because That's How Insurance Companies Roll

I don't know what havoc Ms. Irene will have wreaked by the time this weekend is over, but I do know this: If you live anywhere between South Carolina and Maine, and if they have not already, your insurance company will drastically raise premiums for your wind and hail coverage or altogether drop your coverage regardless of whether your home sustains any damage this weekend or not.

Mark my words.

The Real Story Behind Unpaid Sanitation Fees

UPDATED 8/28/2011: Through checking my phone bill and a little internet sleuthing (this nola.com story from April 2011), I'm pretty sure the collection agency that hit me up for "unpaid" sanitation fees that I already paid is Alpat Company, Inc. in Slidell.

Fox 8 ran this story tonight about Councilwoman Hedge-Morrell owing more than a couple of thousand dollars in sanitation fees.



Sadly, no one featured in this story -- not the outraged citizen, not Bureau of Governmental Research President Janet Howard, not Councilwoman Head, not the person who crafted the statement from Mayor Landrieu's office, and not even Councilwoman Hedge-Morrell -- seem to have a clue what's going on.

I think I do, and these folks should too. Have you ever directly paid your sanitation fee directly to the Sanitation Dept.? No. You pay it to the Sewerage and Water Board.

At the beginning of this year, I received a notice from a debt collection company hitting me up for about 3 months of unpaid sanitation fees. (Of course, the only thing I've thrown away in 25 years is the piece of paper with this company's name on it, but I do remember the company was in Slidell.) I spoke with a customer service rep at the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board who explained that when you pay your water bill late, they do not forward that month's fee for trash collection to the Sanitation Department. Thus, if you pay your bill even one day after the due date, SWB keeps your $24/month sanitation charge (+ your late fee, of course). You are still on the hook for the sanitation charge even though SWB has never informed us of this payment arrangement they have with the Sanitation Department and even though your next and subsequent bills don't show an unpaid sanitation fee balance.

The customer service rep, who was quite courteous and merely communicating SWB's policy, explained to me that, no, they do not show this on your bill. SWB, however, does keep track in your account file.

So, to sum it all up, because of a clandestine payment agreement between SWB and Sanitation:

So tell me, why don't any of the government officials featured in this story seem to know this? And why did Mayor Landrieu's office say they are working with SWB to improve collection efforts when the problem seems to largely be one of internal policies dictating how SWB applies payments it has already received -- not a problem of receiving the fees?

Vitter's Balanced Budget Amendment and Other Stupid Ideas

I was pondering this Balanced Budget Amendment idea and kept coming to the conclusion that it would be a horrible way to run the country, and that was before I read The Pelican Institute's post stating: "Despite a balanced budget requirement, Louisiana has still managed to acquire $21 billion more in liabilities than it has assets to offset them."

It was also before I read that Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute said: "It is about the most irresponsible action imaginable. It would virtually ensure that an economic downturn would end up as a deep depression, by erasing any real ability of the government to pursue countercyclical fiscal policies and in fact demanding the opposite, at the worst possible time."

I think good ole Norm was getting at what I was thinking. I was thinking: where will Louisiana get federal disaster help the next time a levee or an oil well explodes? Given the state's Republican leaders' non-stop pleading for help cleaning up the oil and making the fisherman financially whole again, we'd be up shit bayou if we need those funds if while operating under a federal Balanced Budget Amendment we have a disaster at a point in the fiscal year when all federal disaster funds have already been allocated.

I emailed Senator Vitter and posed this very question to him when I learned of his refusal to vote for a debt ceiling bill unless it is tied to a Balanced Budget Amendment, but he didn't respond. Which brings me to the point of this post. Why does Senator Vitter keep wasting his time on stupid legislation that even other conservatives consider stupid? We all champion lost causes now and again, but Vitter seems to have made a career out of being on the wrong side of issues, being ineffective, and even worse, being consistently counterproductive.