Louisiana
Lawmakers advance bill to intervene in land dispute for wealthy drug distributor • Louisiana Illuminator
State lawmakers advanced a bill Tuesday that intervenes in a land dispute and threatens to block construction of an interstate power line at the behest of a small group of north Louisiana landowners, including the wealthy owner of a large pharmaceutical company that made billions during the opioid crisis.
Paul Dickson Sr. is a principal owner and former board chairman of the Shreveport-based Morris & Dickson Co., one of the largest wholesale pharmaceutical distributors in the nation. It was the target of a federal investigation that revealed one of its own agents was secretly negotiating with the company to preserve its federal license.
Senate Bill 108, sponsored by Sen. Alan Seabaugh, R-Shreveport, stands to benefit Dickson in his dispute with a Texas power company. It cleared the House Committee on Civil Law and Procedure without objection and will head to the House floor for consideration.
The bill is tailored in ways that would effectively prohibit a single business from exercising its expropriation rights, which allow governments and certain companies to force the sale of private land for public use. It’s typically used for development of a project that serves a public need, such as a new highway or, as in this case, a power line. In exchange, the owner must be paid, at minimum, fair market value for their land.
Proponents of Seabaugh’s measure tout it as a way to protect landowners from businesses and projects that don’t benefit the people of Louisiana.
“We’re here because of one project,” Seabaugh told the committee.
The project Seabaugh targets — Pattern Energy’s Southern Spirit Transmission line — would deliver electricity to the regional power grid that covers most of the state.
The Southern Spirit Transmission project is a 320-mile line that will begin at a power station in DeSoto Parish and deliver wind power from the Texas grid to a power station in Choctaw County, Mississippi, crossing through North Louisiana. Onshore wind has been the cheapest source of electricity for the past several years in the United States and around the world, according to a study by the financial firm Lazard.
Although the line would end in Mississippi, it would feed electricity into Louisiana by way of the regional Midcontinent Independent System Operator grid. The MISO grid covers most of Louisiana, and Mississippi and spans into a large swath of the Midwest and into Manitoba, Canada.
Dickson told the committee Seabaugh’s bill won’t kill Pattern Energy’s project but will merely give the landowners a better advantage in their negotiations.
“It needs to be negotiated in the private sector,” Dickson said. “It will get done well… Right now, the landowner’s hands are tied behind his back. Senate Bill 108 gives the landowner the ability to negotiate by removing the threat of expropriation.”
Pattern Energy has claimed the project will bring economic development to towns and parishes in North Louisiana, but Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell, D-Bossier City, said he hasn’t heard from any of those local officials. Campbell is against the Pattern transmission project but has not taken a position on Seabaugh’s bill.
“I’m troubled by the way they do business,” Campbell said in a phone interview, referring to Pattern Energy. He said it has been difficult to get straight answers from the company.
Seabaugh told the committee the power line would not deliver “one watt of electricity” to Louisiana and that the company would claim lucrative state tax incentives such as the Industrial Tax Exemption Program (ITEP). When it was his turn to testify, Pattern Energy executive Adam Renz failed to give concise answers in response to Seabaugh’s accusations, neither of which were accurate.
Instead, Renz gave lengthy, detailed explanations on the concepts of inter-regional interconnection, the history of the Southern Spirit project and the geography of the MISO grid. His long discourse continued even after lawmakers specifically pointed it out, asking for shorter answers.
Louisiana legislation could jeopardize flow of power from Texas
When Renz finally did say electricity would indeed flow to Louisiana and that “we’re not using ITEP — you have my word,” half of the committee members had long ago left the room.
Pattern Energy land director Shannon Gwen and attorney Scott Keaty were more concise in their testimony. Gwen explained how the company has nearly acquired 60% of the land needed for the project and that it begins land negotiations with offers of at least 120% of market value. Keaty said he had deals worked out with the two landowners until Seabaugh filed his bill.
“We have not taken anybody’s property,” Keaty said. “We have not initiated any expropriation proceedings.”
The company has rerouted the transmission project 11 times at the request of one landowner who is still not satisfied, he said.
Even if Pattern Energy were to initiate expropriation proceedings for the land, it would have to do so through lawsuits filed in the landowner’s parish and would have to show the judge why the project is in the best interest of the public. Gwen said the company also includes value for any timber on the land and even pays the landowner’s legal fees if they hire an attorney to negotiate.
Many others testified against Seabaugh’s bill, including Public Service Commissioners Mike Francis, R-Crowley, and Davanté Lewis, D-Baton Rouge.
Lewis said the bill is a big solution for what is a small contested issue. He said it will have “significant ramifications” for improving Louisiana’s grid and signal to other companies that Louisiana will change the rules on them at the finish line.
The Louisiana-based utility Southwestern Electric Power Cooperative (SWEPCO) currently imports cheap electricity from wind turbines in Oklahoma — in the same way Louisiana would benefit from the Southern Spirit line — through the MISO grid, Lewis said.
“If Oklahoma passed this same law, it would undoubtedly raise the rates for people in Louisiana,” Lewis said.
At the end of Tuesday’s hearing, the committee members who had left the room finally returned, having missed testimony given in support of the project. Even those lawmakers who stayed and voiced some sympathy to Pattern Energy’s position were confronted with one final question from Speaker Pro Tempore Rep. Mike Johnson, R-Pineville, who had returned to his chair just before the bill’s fate was decided.
“Sen. Seabaugh, I have just one question, and I don’t think I heard it in your testimony earlier: Do you know if the governor supports or opposes your bill?” Johnson said.
Seabaugh replied that Gov. Jeff Landry “quietly supports it” but admitted he doesn’t “quite know what that means.”
“If he opposed it, he wouldn’t likely be quiet, would he?” Johnson asked.
“I think that’s probably correct,” Seabaugh said.
When committee chairman Rep. Nicholas Muscarello, R-Hammond, asked if anyone objected to moving the bill favorably to the floor, the lawmakers remained silent.
Paul Dickson Sr., who testified at Tuesday’s committee hearing, is a principal owner and former board chairman of the Shreveport-based Morris & Dickson Co., one of the largest wholesale pharmaceutical distributors in the nation and, according to Dickson, the second oldest company in Louisiana. “I ran a company that currently does $5.5 billion a year in sales,” Dickson told lawmakers. “That’s bigger than Pattern [Energy]. I know who makes decisions in companies, and the people who will decide whether or not this power line goes through Louisiana after this bill is passed will make an economic business decision.”
Dickson was president of Morris & Dickson when it mishandled more than 12,000 suspicious large orders of the highly addictive drugs oxycodone and hydrocodone during the height of the nation’s opioid crisis, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.
Last year, the Associated Press reported on secretive negotiations between Dickson and top DEA officials. The DEA was investigating Morris & Dickson’s distribution of opioids and filed formal charges against the company in 2018 for violating the Controlled Substances Act.
Dickson had met with a DEA official, Louis Milione, on at least two occasions beginning in 2016 to negotiate a way for the company to stave off punishment and keep its distributor’s license. That following year, Milione left the DEA and received a $3 million consulting contract from Morris & Dickson.
Dickson’s company continued operating under its license for over four years after a judge recommended it be revoked in 2019. The DEA’s decision to stall on the judge’s ruling was highly unusual, according to officials quoted in the AP story. DEA Administrator Anne Milgram, a Biden appointee, rehired that same agent in 2021 as her top deputy and continued to stall on the judge’s ruling until the situation made national headlines last year. Milgram revoked the company’s license in May 2023 right after the AP reached out to her for comment on the matter.
The company didn’t stay in trouble for long. In February, the DEA announced it had negotiated a settlement with Morris & Dickson in which the company admitted all wrongdoing, promised not to break the law again and paid a $19 million penalty. In return, Morris & Dickson got its DEA license back.
Dickson also owns Sports South, one of the region’s largest firearm distributors. He is also a major Republican donor, giving $24,999 to Seabaugh and more than $40,000 to Gov. Jeff Landry over the past several years. Landry’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment on this story.
Dickson has also donated smaller amounts totaling $2,000, to Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell, D-Bossier City, who opposes the Pattern Energy transmission line project Dickson wants to stop, but he hasn’t taken a position on Seabaugh’s bill.
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Massive alligator causes chaos, attempts to avoid capture
Officers wrangled and released an alligator after it was spotted near a home in Livingston Parish, Louisiana.
Louisiana may expand its wild alligator harvesting opportunities to recreational hunters if the Legislature passes a bill that secured unanimous approval in a committee hearing March 11.
Franklin state Sen. Robert Allain’s Senate Bill 244 would authorize the Louisiana Wildlife Commission to create a recreational season that would be open to 5,000 hunters annually, each with a two-gator limit.
The state already has a commercial hunting season for alligators, which is chronicled in the popular “Swamp People” TV reality series.
“We think the time is right,” Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Secretary Tyler Bosworth testified during the Senate Natural Resources Committee hearing. “We want to provide a recreational opportunity for the common folk of Louisiana.”
Louisiana’s alligator population has exploded in the past 50 years from fewer than 100,000 to more than 3 million today. Of those, about 2 million are wild with another 1 million farmed.
That’s at least twice the population in Florida, the state with the second most number of alligators.
And their Louisiana numbers have grown throughout the state where they can be commonly spotted from Lake Martin in Breaux Bridge to Caddo and Cross lakes in Shreveport to Caldwell Parish in northeastern Louisiana.
“This is a conservation success story on the highest level,” LDWF general counsel Garrett Cole said during the hearing. “This would create a true recreational opportunity outside our commercial season.”
Garrett said hunters would compete for hunting tags through a lottery will statewide opportunities. Recreational hunters would be limited to hook and line harvesting from land. No gators could be taken by boat as commercial hunters are allowed to do.
If approved, the first season could take place beginning Oct. 1.
Greg Hilburn covers state politics for the USA TODAY Network of Louisiana. Follow him on Twitter @GregHilburn1.
Responsible Anglers United, LDWF release bass into Lake Bouef
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While Louisiana’s largest lake, the Toledo Bend Reservoir, spans 1,200 miles of shoreline, the state’s deepest lake only spans 1,125 acres.
Lake Peigneur is the deepest lake in Louisiana, with a depth measuring approximately 200 feet.
Lake Peigneur is a brackish lake, meaning it contains saltwater but has less salinity than seawater, located in New Iberia Parish in South Louisiana.
How did Lake Peigneur become the deepest lake in Louisiana?
Lake Peigneur was not always considered the deepest lake in Louisiana, as it was only a 10-foot-deep freshwater lake 40 years ago.
On Nov. 20, 1980, an oil rig crew was attempting to free a 14-inch drill bit when they heard popping noises and the rig began to tilt. Shortly after the crew abandoned the rig and headed for shore, the crew watched the 150-foot oil rig disappear into the 10-foot-deep lake.
Soon, a whirlpool formed in place of the oil rig. The whirlpool grew rapidly until it was able to suck up nearby boats, barges, trees, a house and half an island.
At the same location of the oil drilling site, there was also a salt mine, and when the whirlpool formed after the oil rig collapsed, the mine began to fill with water. As the whirlpool grew, water was able to enter the mine at such a force that it caused a geyser to spew out of the mine’s opening for hours until the lake was drained.
After the lake was emptied, the Delcambre Canal began to flow backward, marking the only time in history that the Gulf of Mexico flowed into the continental U.S. This backflow continued until the entire mine and lake were filled with water, except now the lake was filled with saltwater, according to an article published on Louisiana Tech Digital Commons.
Can you swim in Lake Peigneur?
Before the oil rig and salt mine accident, Lake Peigneur was a popular spot for fishing and recreational activities. However, since the lake is almost entirely surrounded by private property, visitors will have to enter the nearby Rip Van Winkle Gardens in order to get a closer look, according to Atlas Obscura.
While there are no reports indicating the lake is unsafe, the lake is not exactly developed for public access. However, there are things to do around Lake Peigneur, like visiting Rip Van Winkle Gardens on Jefferson Island, or visiting Avery Island to tour the Tabasco Factory.
Presley Bo Tyler is a reporter for the Louisiana Deep South Connect Team for USA Today. Find her on X @PresleyTyler02 and email at PTyler@Gannett.com
PENSACOLA BEACH, Fla. — A local fisherman raised concerns about the substance now coating Opal Beach, citing a recent oil spill off the coast of Louisiana.
WEAR News went to officials with the Gulf Islands National Seashore and Escambia County to find out the cause.
They say it’s not related to an oil spill, but is in fact algae.
The Marine Resources Division says they can understand beachgoers’ concerns, and hope to raise awareness.
“You don’t even want to get near it because it’s so gooey and sticky,” local fisherman Larry Grossman said. “It was accumulating on my beach cart wheels yesterday, and it felt like an oil product.”
Grossman messaged WEAR News on Monday after noticing something brown and oozy in the sand. He says it started showing up by Fort Pickens and stretched down to Opal Beach.
Grossman said a park service employee told him it could be oil from a recent spill in Louisiana. So he took a message to social media, sparking some reactions and raising questions.
“it certainly didn’t seem like an algae bloom because I was in the water, I caught a fish and I put some water in the cooler to keep my fish cool and it almost looked like oil in it,” Grossman said. “I know some people think it’s an algae bloom, but it certainly smelled and felt and looked like oil.”
A Gulf Islands National Seashore spokesperson confirmed to WEAR News on Tuesday that the substance is algae.
WEAR News crews were at the beach as officials with the Escambia County Marines Resources Division came out take samples.
“What I found here washed up on the beach is some algae — filamentous algae, single celled algae — that washed ashore in some onshore winds,” said Robert Turpin, Escambia County Marines Resources Division manager. “This is the spring season, so with additional sunlight, our plants, they grow in warmer waters, with plenty of sunlight.”
Turpin says this algae is not harmful.
He also addressed the concerns that this could be oil, saying he’s familiar with what oil spills look like.
He says he appreciates when people like Grossman raise the concerns.
“The last thing in the world we want is something to gain traction on social media that is faults in nature that could harm our tourism,” Turpin said. “Our tourism is very important to our economy, and we want to give the right information out to the public so we all enjoy the beaches and enjoy them safely.”
Turpin says if you see something or suspect something may be harmful on the beach, avoid it and contact Escambia County Marine Resources.
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