Louisiana
Louisiana legislators threaten to remove state ethics board members, issue subpoenas • Louisiana Illuminator
Louisiana legislators threatened to subpoena and remove members of the state ethics board Wednesday in an intensification of the fight over enforcement of the state ethics code.
Members of the Louisiana House and Governmental Affairs Committee lashed out at the ethics board for not heeding legislative requests to hold off on hiring a new administrator until January. At that point, Gov. Jeff Landry gains more control of the board through a new set of appointees.
“I think this is a situation where we should have some action to remove board members,” Rep. Candace Newell, D-New Orleans, said during a public hearing Wednesday at the State Capitol. “There should be some kind of punishments for them.”
Two state senators are suing the ethics board over the same issue and got a judge to issue a restraining order to temporarily block members from filling its administration position. Yet House committee members want to go farther.
“With regards to removing board members, do you think that is a legislative item? A gubernatorial deal? Who would be in charge of removing board members if they’re found to be doing something unlawful?” committee chairman Rep. Beau Beaullieu, R-New Iberia, asked current ethics administrator Kathleen Allen at Wednesday’s hearing.
The ethics board is responsible for enforcing campaign finance laws and preventing conflicts of interest for elected officials, public employees and lobbyists. It can levy fines against politicians for several types of violations, including not submitting campaign finance information and personal disclosure forms on time. YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.
Landry had a fraught relationship with the ethics board long before becoming governor. Under different sets of appointees, its members have reprimanded him multiple times.
In the most high-profile incident, the board charged Landry last year for not disclosing a flight he took on a political donor’s plane to Hawaii as attorney general. The matter is not resolved, with Landry still negotiating with the board about what his punishment should be.
Over the past few months, legislators in both political parties have attacked the board for what they describe as aggressive and abusive investigations. Lawmakers have balked at the board’s interpretation of campaign finance rules that restrict spending from their political action committees.
Unless the board fines or charges a public official for wrongdoing, its inquiries remain private. That confidentiality makes it hard to determine whether legislators who are upset about the ethics board’s actions have ever been investigated by the group.
It’s also difficult to determine to what extent Landry’s activities might have been questioned by the board.
“No one in the public has any idea what you’re doing and why you’re doing it,” Rep. Dixon McMakin, R-Baton Rouge, told Allen, who represented ethics board members at Wednesday’s hearing.
“I hope that is something that you all are sued for. I hope you lose ‘cause you’re the Board of Ethics, and that is unacceptable,” he said.
Rep. Denise Marcelle, D-Baton Rouge, suggested the House committee use its subpoena power to force the ethics board chairwoman, La Koshia Roberts of Lake Charles, to appear at a future meeting. The board has levied thousands of dollars of fines against Marcelle for filing her campaign finance reports late.
Beaullieu told Marcelle the committee would look into that option.
Legislators allege the ethics board violated government transparency laws when its members discussed the hiring of an administrator to replace Allen behind closed doors. They said the matter should have been discussed openly at a public meeting.
In their lawsuit, Sens. Regina Barrow, D-Baton Rouge, and Stewart Cathey, R-Monroe, also allege the ethics board broke the law by not taking the required vote to go into a private session to discuss the administrator position. GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.
Allen pushed back on these accusations Wednesday, telling lawmakers she believes the board has complied with state open meetings law requirements.
She attributed the confusion to all the ethics board meeting minutes not having been posted publicly yet. A review of those missing records would show board members acted correctly, she said.
“Anything we did during [the private] executive session I feel like is appropriate,” she told lawmakers.
Outside of picking a new ethics administrator, Rep. Ed Larvadain, D-Alexandria, lobbed a personal accusation at Allen.
“You have a history of not including African Americans [on the ethics board’s staff],” Larvadain told Allen.
“I take offense that I have excluded African Americans. I have never directed an employee to exclude anyone based on race or gender,” Allen responded.
Approximately 20% of the ethics board staff is African American, Allen said, but over 30% of Louisiana’s population is Black.
Black employees are underrepresented in white-collar state government jobs, such as those seen at the ethics boards, and Black legislators often question agencies about the makeup of their workforce.
In the new year, when Landry gains more control over the ethics board, it will lose some of its current independence.
Landry and the legislators approved a new law that allows them to pick the members of the ethics board directly starting in 2025.
Previous governors and legislative leaders were required to select board appointees from lists of candidates that leaders of Louisiana’s private colleges and universities recommend. The old system was an attempt to insulate the board from the outside political pressure.
More than 30 years after his Emmy-winning turn on “Guiding Light,” Monroe native Monti Sharp still remembers the moment that changed his life − when a small-town actor heard his name called on national television.
“And the winner is − Monti Sharp from Guiding Light.” The words, spoken by “The Young and the Restless” actress Kimberlin Brown at the 1993 Daytime Emmys at New York City’s Marriott Marquis Hotel, are still embedded in Sharp’s memory.
“Something shot through me and my body jerked,” he said. It took his “Guiding Light” co-star Amelia Marshall − his onscreen sister − to give him a little push toward the stage.
“It was a very surreal moment,” Sharp said. “It was just all kind of a real enchanting time. Huge surprise to me.”
From Ouachita Parish to daytime TV
Sharp, the youngest of five children born to an attorney and educator, described himself as a “ferocious reader” who spent weekends at the Ouachita Parish Library devouring books. It was there, he said, that he discovered Richard Corson’s “Stage Makeup” − the book that first opened the door to the world of theater and set him on his artistic path.
“I was just fascinated by that book and I checked it out and I kept it for quite a while until they came out a subsequent edition − third, fourth and fifth edition,” Sharp said. “I used to send away for catalogs where I could order things like nose putty and all these different things. I just wanted to try them out. I think that opened my mind up to the reality of theater.”
He spent several years on the road performing in regional theater before landing the role of David Grant on “Guiding Light.” He said he a casting director saw him in a production at The Public Theater in New York City and left a note in his mailbox alerting him about an audition she thought he should pursue.
“I think my manager or my agent at the time reached out and they scheduled the audition ,” he said. “That was a whole new audition process to me. Totally different from auditioning for theater. So I went into it with a kind of − looking back − naive view of it. I thought ‘I’m used to audition for plays. Ok’ but that process lasted a long time and eventually got to the point where we did a screen test. I showed up to the studio to do a screen with Nia Long and that was kind of interesting because I didn’t have the role but I knew I was this close. I think there was maybe two other guys there. I think Flex Alexander [and] I forget the other gentleman’s name. So I did it. I just had fun and we just really got along very well and then I went home and I just kind of forgot it because I was doing plays and other stuff.”
Sharp said his agent called and asked him to come by the office, delivering the news in person that he had won the role. Hearing he’d gotten the part was “exhilarating,” Sharp said.
Sharing the screen with Nia Long and more about Sharp’s turn in Guiding Light
Sharp’s first major storyline on “Guiding Light” centered on a forbidden romance between his character and Kat Speakes, portrayed by Long. The relationship put his character at odds with Kat’s father, Hampton Speakes, who was dating David’s sister, Gilly Grant. The storyline ultimately cemented his Emmy win.
“My character was introduced on the show as sort of this mysterious guy who no one really knew if he was a good guy or a bad guy,” he said. “Kat and I ran away together and we spent the summer on the run, trying to be in love and escape her father [and] the community who thought I was bad. That was a pretty exciting entrance. They really milked that entrance of my character and played into the mystery and all that and I think that’s what really captured people put me in the position to be nominated certainly.”
Sharp believes audiences connected with his earnest portrayal of David Grant because he approached the role with the discipline shaped by his theater background. Sharp said he was determined to do more than simply show up, tape his scenes and collect a paycheck. He wanted the work to matter, he said, and approached the role with a genuine effort to find artistic and theatrical meaning in it.
His portrayal helped cement his character’s fanbase and earned him the 1993 Soap Opera Digest Award for Outstanding Male Newcomer in addition to his Emmy. He was also named one of TV Guide’s ‘Soaps’ Sexiest Stars’ and went on to receive additional Emmy and Soap Opera Digest Award nominations.
Coming from the theater, Sharp said he and like-minded co-stars “were like magnets,” pushing one another to elevate the material beyond soap-opera conventions.
“It’s a very, very fast and very demanding workflow,” Sharp said. “Very different from any other type of work, certainly episodic television where you might be doing one script that whole week as opposed to one script per day.”
What Monti Sharp noticed about the treatment of Black daytime actors in the 90s
Sharp said the soap world of the early 1990s didn’t feature many Black actors as central characters, and issues surrounding race sometimes surfaced behind the scenes.
“There were some wild things that happened that needed to be dealt with,” he said. He approached those situations “not combative, but pretty cocksure,” a stance he believes challenged the show’s writers and producers to respond in kind.
Sharp said he began noticing that Black daytime actors weren’t getting the same visibility as white actors. Walking past newsstands, he said, he would see Black magazines featuring Black talent, but white publications almost never featured them on the cover unless they were part of a group, which he said was rare.
“There was a lot of segregation in the coverage and in the presentation of the product to the public,” Sharp said. “I recall we were doing these − because I was popular at the time − we were doing these public appearances. Go Maine for a couple of hours and sign some autographs with other people from the show and I went on one of these things at some point with a popular character from another show and we just started talking about what a gig this was and he said something like ‘Can you believe for like two hours we’re getting x amount of dollars’. I was like ‘You’re getting ‘X’ amount’. He was like ‘How much you’re getting?’ I said ‘I’m getting ‘Y’ amount’.”
Sharp said that when he questioned the pay gap, he was bluntly told that Black talent did not earn the same as white actors − even with his rising popularity and recent award wins. He recalled being told he should feel “fortunate” to be invited to fan events and was asked whether he wanted to continue, a response he described as a “gut punch.” Sharp said it was one of the first moments that ‘soured’ his relationship with the industry.
Despite his award wins, Sharp’s character’s storylines and screen began to shrink. When he said he raised questions, he was told a major story was coming − one that never materialized. He recalled speaking with one of the show’s writers who later confided that they had been fired after pushing for more material for Sharp and the actress who played his onscreen sister.
Beyond Guiding Light
Sharp’s post-“Guiding Light” career spanned daytime, film, and primetime television. He took on roles in “As the World Turns” and “General Hospital,” appeared in the film “Dead Presidents,” and made guest spots on shows ranging from “ER” and “Modern Family” to “NCIS: Los Angeles,” “How to Get Away with Murder,” and most recently “9-1-1.”
Sharp said these days, between television and film auditions, he has shifted more of his creative energy towards visual art − a passion that long sat in the background of his acting career but moved to the forefront during the pandemic.
He returned to Monroe in February 2024 to exhibit his work at the Northeast Louisiana African American Heritage Museum.
For updates on his artwork, he encourages visitors to join his mailing list at sharpartstudio.com.
Follow Ian Robinson on Twitter @_irobinson and on Facebook at https://bit.ly/3vln0w1.
Approximately 7 million people in the United States have vision impairment, including about 1 million people with blindness.
As of 2012, 4.2 million Americans aged 40 or older have uncorrectable vision impairment. This number is predicted to more than double by 2050, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
The U.S. has a rapidly aging population, which means more people living with diabetes and other chronic conditions, which can lead to vision loss.
In Louisiana, an average 7.4% of adults are living with a vision disability.
These parishes had the lowest percent of adults living with a vision disability in 2023, in ascending order:
These parishes had the highest percent of adults living with a vision disability in 2023, in descending order:
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East Carroll Parish with 13.3%,
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Tensas Parish with 11.5%,
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Madison Parish with 11.3%,
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Claiborne Parish with 10.9%,
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Bienville Parish with 9.9%,
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Evangeline and Morehouse parishes with 9.7%,
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Concordia Parish with 9.1%,
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Avoyelles Parish with 9%.
Louisiana
How a Louisiana budget whiz and small business owner sees Congress’ fight over health care
WASHINGTON – When state Rep. Jack McFarland, R-Winnfield, isn’t mulling complex finances as chair of the Louisiana House Appropriations Committee, he runs a logging contractor firm in Winn Parish.
As a small businessman with about 20 employees, McFarland frets about the lack of action on health care. Time is of the essence, and McFarland wants the warring parties in Washington to figure out a solution.
Republicans want to overhaul the Affordable Care Act to lower health care costs and increase consumer choice. Democrats are not opposed to fixes but argue that will take too much time, so first, the enhanced ACA marketplace subsidies need to be continued before expiring.
About 24.3 million working Americans and small businesses — 292,994 in Louisiana — will see their monthly costs double, on average, starting Jan. 1 if the subsidies are not extended. Disagreement on extending the tax credits was at the center of the government shutdown.
An ardent conservative in a parish that gave 88% of its votes to U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Benton, McFarland agrees that substantial changes are necessary.
For instance, his employees can’t access the ACA marketplace.
Despite the promise in 2010 that the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, to lower health insurance premiums, it did not. The policy McFarland provided employees went from about $37,000 annually in 2011 to about $132,000 in 2024.
McFarland said his company had to stop covering premiums for his employees and now just pays a little to help. When some of his workers wanted to lower their costs by shifting to the ACA marketplace, they could not because his company offered health insurance, he said.
“As an employer, I would have to stop offering health insurance to all my employees for them to be eligible for subsidies,” McFarland said, adding that now many of his employees have no insurance.
Like most things that deal with health care and insurance, the Affordable Care Act is complex, with a lot of moving parts.
Obamacare protected people with preexisting conditions and made insurance available for those who couldn’t afford it. But the promise that premiums would decline because more people had insurance didn’t materialize.
Premium costs have risen from an average $177 per month in 2010 for individual policies, like the ones the ACA marketplace sells, to $467 per month in 2024, according to KFF, a Washington-based health analysis organization. Monthly costs for group insurance, like those offered by employers and cover roughly 170 million people, went up from an average $273 per month to $512 per month during the same period.
Senate Republicans are looking at various alternatives that align with President Donald Trump’s demand last week that the ACA subsidies go “directly to the people” rather than insurance companies.
In the House, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-Jefferson, told reporters Tuesday that House committee leaders also are looking at various ideas.
“We’re not here to bail out insurance companies,” he said. “We’re here to give families lower premiums and better options.”
But in both chambers, Democrats and Republicans are not talking officially to each other.
The Senate will need 60 votes to pass any GOP measure, which means seven Democrats have to sign on to any package that all the Republicans support — or eight Republicans have to agree with all the Democrats backing one of their ideas.
Right now, neither scenario looks likely when it comes to the key issue of whether to extend the enhanced ACA marketplace tax credits, which will get a vote in mid-December.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, said Thursday on the Senate floor that Republican ideas are “half-baked.”
“They are deeply flawed and woefully insufficient for our nation’s health care problems,” Schumer said. “When people’s monthly payments spike next year, they’ll know it was Republicans that made it happen.”
On Thursday, Johnson refined his oft-repeated accusation that Democrats only care about “illegal aliens” to point out what California, Illinois and Oregon spent more on health care for “noncitizens” than for police and roads.
Immigrants who slipped into the country without authorization are not legally allowed to take advantage of Obamacare. Legal immigrants who have jobs and children regardless of their status are allowed to buy insurance through ACA marketplaces. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that about 1.4 million immigrants have.
“Everybody’s just went to their corner and they’re just not coming out,” McFarland said. “It’s a broken system that needs to be fixed, not patched, for the people and for small businesses. They need to sit down and figure this out.”
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