Cancel Jim Bernhard's sub-contract thingy

This wide ranging scandal at LSU involving systemic sexual misconduct and institutional cover-up is  pretty shocking. 

The 150-page report from law firm Husch Blackwell, which includes 100 additional pages of exhibits, is a damning indictment of LSU’s many failures in protecting its students.

Among its three key findings: LSU did not follow federal laws, best practices or even its own policies in cases of reported sexual misconduct; LSU’s athletic department incidents were not properly reported; and LSU has never appropriately staffed its Title IX office, which investigates such allegations.

Interim LSU President Tom Galligan released the report Friday to the LSU board of supervisors, describing it as “hard to hear and even harder to read” and pledging to right the many wrongs it illuminated. Galligan placed two athletic department employees on brief unpaid suspensions Friday, and he said LSU would adopt all 17 recommendations in the Husch Blackwell report.

The blame here goes all the way to the top.  Among the worst actors are former head football coach Les Miles and university administrators who tried to keep his actions quiet. It appears as though the institutional policy was to suppress any and every suggestion of sexual harassment or violence associated with the program.  

The Husch Blackwell report took a deep look at several incidents, including how LSU handled reports of sexual assaults from former star running back Derrius Guice, domestic violence from former wide receiver Drake Davis, reports of sexual harassment by Miles and dozens of other complaints involving other students and athletes.

In some cases, LSU took great pains to keep the bad behavior secret. When LSU engaged the local law firm Taylor Porter to conduct a sexual harassment investigation into Miles in 2013, for example, the university kept no file on the investigation and intentionally stored it off-site, Husch Blackwell found.

One example not cited in today's article was the subject of another report back in November. Multi-gagillionaire and LSU booster Jim Berhard played a major role in these cover-ups.  

When LSU Police investigated allegations in 2018 that a football player was abusing the tennis player he was dating, multiple witnesses told officers they were afraid of coming forward because they feared repercussions from influential Baton Rouge businessman and Democratic political donor Jim Bernhard.

Bernhard is mentioned by name in seven separate instances in police reports about former LSU wide receiver Drake Davis’ abuse of LSU tennis player Jade Lewis, who has recently spoken out publicly for the first time. Bernhard, the wealthy chief executive officer of Bernhard Capital Partners and former CEO of the Fortune 500 contracting firm known as The Shaw Group, took in Davis when he was growing up and helped raise him.

Had the university taken any of these multiple scandals as seriously as it claims to be taking them now, it would have cut ties with Bernhard a long time ago.  Instead, just last month, it announced a deal (cut in secret) to grant his company a lucrative piece of a major facilities contract.    

The LSU Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to split an $810 million energy deal between two contractors, Enwave Energy Corp. and a joint venture that includes Baton Rouge businessman Jim Bernhard and the national firm Johnson Controls Inc.

The LSU board did not disclose the price of the deal during the meeting, but LSU officials confirmed it afterward. The agreement calls for the university to pay Enwave $27 million per year over the next three decades. How much money Enwave makes off the deal will fluctuate annually based on natural gas prices and the price of the energy Enwave produces for LSU, said LSU spokesman Ernie Ballard.

Enwave will pay Louisiana Energy Partners — the name of the joint venture between Bernhard LLC and Johnson Controls — directly, instead of LSU paying both entities, Ballard said.

Prior to the deal, the Bernhard group and Enwave had been competitors for the whole contract. Bernhard was so intent on getting it, in fact, he had to turn down a position he figured he had already purchased. 

Two months before LSU started negotiating with Bernhard and Enwave, Gov. John Bel Edwards offered Jim Bernhard an appointment to the LSU Board of Supervisors. But Bernhard, a major supporter of the governor and political donor to the Democratic Party, turned down the seat without explanation.

Sitting on the LSU board would have prohibited him from doing business directly with the university.

That bit about "doing business directly with the university" is interesting. It raises the question as to whether Bernhard's arrangement to be paid by Enwave leaves the door open for him to take that Board of Supervisors' seat after all.  

It's clear he expects the Governor owes him. People with even longer memories will recall that there had been rumblings in 2019 that Bernhard was considering challenging John Bel for reelection that year. But it turned out that those ambitions were sated by... another massive state contract.  

Louisiana will enter into a complex agreement that could lead to the widespread privatization of energy systems at state agencies and universities throughout the state, after lawmakers reviewed the deal for a final time Tuesday.

Gov. John Bel Edwards' administration struck the deal with LA Energy Partners, a joint venture between Johnson Controls Inc. and Bernhard Energy Solutions, one of several companies controlled by Baton Rouge businessman Jim Bernhard.

And now, of course, comes the LSU deal and.. maybe still the possibility of a seat on the board.  All of this for one of the worst enablers of a system of abuse that runs through the entirety of the school administration and athletic department. If no action is taken against Bernhard now, what does that say about LSU's commitment to putting any of this right?  What, in fact, does it say about the Governor's responsibility as well?

Choose your own impropriety

You can get mad at John Bel for appointing his nephew to the UL Board of Supervisors or not. It's up to you.  It's not technically an ethics violation of any sort. 

The UL System governs nine colleges and universities, including Southeastern Louisiana University, the University of New Orleans and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Stevens, the son of the governor's sister Alice, is a graduate of SLU.

The governor's selection would not run afoul of the state code of government ethics against nepotism -- preference for relatives in hiring.

The ban generally applies to members of a government official's immediate family, including children, the spouses of the children, brothers and sisters, the spouses of the officials' brothers and sisters, his or her parents and his or her spouse.

Anyway, it could have been worse.  A year ago John Bel tried to appoint Jim Bernhard to the LSU Board. Bernhard declined. Which seemed to make some sense at the time simply because we could assume it was a case of overkill.  After all Edwards had already awarded Bernhard's new company a lucrative contract to privatize energy systems at state buildings. Seems like more than enough repayment the Governor could offer Bernhard for the gentlemanly favor of deciding not run against him in 2019. 

Bernhard Energy Solutions partnered with the HVAC company Johnson Controls at the request of the Edwards administration after both firms submitted proposals to the state. Bernhard Energy Solutions is one of several companies controlled by Bernhard Capital Partners, a private equity firm run by former Shaw Group chief executive and Democratic Party official Jim Bernhard, who was floated as a potential candidate for governor before ruling it out last year.

But it turns out Bernhard didn't turn the LSU board position down out of contentedness. He was actually angling to grab another deal for his company. 

Since then, the competition over the massive contract — which several board members described as having a value of $855 million over decades — has grown increasingly fierce. Five Board of Supervisors members told The Times-Picayune and The Advocate that LSU staffers have tried to steer them toward the Canadian company, Enwave, which offered a less expensive deal but may also lack a necessary license to do the work.

Bernhard, however, wields immense political power and ties to LSU and its football program, and board members said that’s made him a controversial choice for the contract. He seems to want the deal badly: In fact, he turned down an invitation from Gov. John Bel Edwards to serve on the Board of Supervisors that would have prevented him from getting the energy contract. Meanwhile, Bernhard Energy Solutions has partnered with Johnson Controls Inc. for similar projects, creating a new entity called LA Energy Partners. And they also formed a subsidiary called Tiger Energy Partners specifically to vie for the LSU contract.

So which is it worse for John Bel to appoint his law partner/nephew to a higher ed board position? Or is it worse that he and LSU continue doing business with this guy?  

Even without serving on the board, Bernhard has cast a long shadow over LSU. As LSU police investigated allegations two years ago that LSU football wide receiver Drake Davis had abused his girlfriend, several witnesses in the case told police that they feared coming forward because they feared retribution from Davis’ powerful adoptive father — Bernhard. Bernhard has said he did not threaten any retaliation in the case.

Bernhard also touted in a 2015 news release that a cogeneration plant his companies built on LSU’s campus “continues to help reduce LSU’s energy expenses by millions of dollars annually.” But LSU attorneys said the opposite in 2006, when the university and Bernhard Mechanical sued one another over the plant.

LSU claimed the cogeneration system meant to save money actually increased the university’s utility bill by more than $2 million a year. LSU attorneys said then that Bernhard had promised energy savings totaling between $7 million and $44 million over 20 years.

“Since the cogeneration system began operation in late December 2004, the cost of operating the system has exceeded by more than $2 million what the same energy would have cost LSU had the new system not been built,” LSU’s attorneys alleged.

Who knows? The Ethics Board doesn't offer much guidance either way.

The bosses won the pandemic

The football wars are a perfect microcosm of what's going on out there. 

Just over a month after the Big Ten became the first major conference to postpone the 2020 football season, the league reversed its decision Wednesday and announced plans to begin playing the weekend of Oct. 24.

The Big Ten will have medical protocols that include daily coronavirus testing and enhanced cardiac screening, the announcement said. The conference’s university presidents and chancellors voted unanimously to resume the season.

Most of the stories about this emphasize Trump and the role of the Presidential election.  Big Ten schools are in midwestern "battleground" states.  Trump can rile up the usual hooting hogs over something like this. Biden, meanwhile, because his strategy is all about peeling off Republican votes in those states, can't really complain too much. Nobody wants to be the grinch that stole football. Since Trump has the liberty of not actually caring about whether or not football is safe, he distorts the entire debate. In reality, we shouldn't have football this fall.  But because Trump departs from reality and says we can, then anyone who disagrees is trying to take something away from us.

That's all true enough. But it's also just the surface level electoral handicapping. Like every other policy debate during COVID, this is really about the balance of power in the labor market. We don't just have to have football because people like football. We have to have it in order to make the point that bosses can force people to work under dangerous circumstances.  It's the same reason we're insisting that schools return to "in-classroom learning" despite the concerns of teachers all over the country. It's the same reason Republicans keep trying to sneak liability immunity for employers into every relief bill.  The pandemic is giving the bosses a chance to alter the terms of employment to their advantage and every forced "reopening" is another point of leverage for them. 

College athletics is a megabillion dollar industry where the athletes, the labor that makes the whole business possible, still aren't even paid for what they do. Can they perform their extremely valuable but uncompensated labor in a safe environment?  Do we even care if they can?  It does not appear as though we do.

Orgeron said Tuesday that LSU's team has "about three or four guys" who currently are sick with coronavirus, and the team does not have "a lot of guys in quarantine."

"I think most, not all of our players, but most of our players have caught it," Orgeron said. "So hopefully they won't catch it again, and hopefully they're not out for games."

Hopefully they won't catch it again.  It's good to be hopeful, I guess. 

One other thing this Big Ten reversal should tell us is we're definitely going to end up forcing some kind of tourist event for Mardi Gras to happen this year because "the economy" (i.e. owners of hotels and restaurants) will demand it. The looming municipal elections will probably factor in that decision much as the Presidential election is part of the football war. But the real issue, again, will be how big a win can the bosses get and which political figures will work the hardest to get it for them.