re: Mall of Louisiana Annexation Does Not Include Major Dept. Stores

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St.George is run by volunteers. Rainey is a volunteer spokesman. If any of these people were to ever run for office, then voters could make their decisions at that time. For now, St.George incorporation remains a grassroots effort.

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Heck

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St.George is run by volunteers.

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If you think white and Rainey are dirty thats fine, but unless they're elected to office in st.george its irrelevant.

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Spokesperson and Media Contact:

Lionel Rainey III (225) 247-4246 (Email)

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More than a year ago and before the St. George pullout movement was formalized, White called on businesses in South Baton Rouge in an effort to drum up financial support for a charter school in that part of the parish.

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But LED’s $717,000 contract no. 718453 with a company called LR3 would appear to warrant closer examination.

The president of LR3 is one Lionel Rainey, III, who people in Baton Rouge will recognize as the public face of a concerted effort to break away from Baton Rouge and to create a separate city of St. George in East Baton Rouge Parish.

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But what about that contract with LED?

Well, first of all, it was awarded on a no-bid basis. In other words, LED never issued a request for proposals (RFP) nor did LR3 ever submit a proposal despite having no obvious qualifications for creating an Internet database system.

When asked about the no-bid contract, LED responded by pointing out that contracts for social services may be awarded “without the necessity of competitive bidding or competitive negotiation,” provided the director of the Office of Contractual Review determines that certain conditions apply, one of which is that the total contract amount is less than $250,000 per 12-month period.

At the same time, LED’s response acknowledged that service requirements “shall not be artificially divided so as to exempt contracts from the (RFP) process.”

And that’s where things get a bit dicey.

LATRAC, the state database for contracts, lists the amount of Contract no. 718453 as $717,202 over three years (Oct. 20, 2012 through Sept. 30, 2015) while the LED contract document breaks the contract into three amounts: $217,204 the first year and $249,999 in the second and third years.

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Not only did LED appear to be circumventing the RFP procedure by breaking the contract into three sections, but there appear to also be questions about another state regulation that says agency heads shall take into account, in the following order, “the professional or technical competence of offers, the technical merits of offers, and the compensation for which services are to be rendered, including fee.”

First, there appears to have been no “offer” from LR3, which only incorporated as a business on Sept. 19, 2012—barely a month before its $717,000 contract with LED took effect on Oct. 20, 2012.

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So, to recap, we have a company that is barely a month old landing a $717,000 contract with a state agency without benefit of competitive bidding, or without a formal proposal from a contracting firm that provided no evidence of its qualifications to perform work that appears to be already available through another state agency, LWC.

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And then there’s LR3’s billing address.

Invoices submitted to LED by LR3 give its billing address as 2133 Silverside Drive, Suite A, in Baton Rouge.

Rainey is also listed as president of Vote Guards Dot Org., of the same address.

But there also are three other businesses of 2133 Silverside Drive, Suite A, Baton Rouge, according to the Louisiana Secretary of State’s corporate web page: Phoenix Consulting Group, BP Oil Claim Solutions, LLC, and EFL Angels Foundation.

All three list Meredith Eicher as a corporate officer.

Meredith Eicher, along with her sister Ashley, was sentenced to five months in prison in 1990 after pleading guilty to two counts of aiding and abetting mail fraud in connection with the collapse of Champion Insurance Co.

She also was ordered to serve two years’ probation after her release and fined $10,000.

Champion, the third largest insurer in the state, collapsed in June of 1989, leaving $150 million in unpaid claims. Her father, John Eicher, was sentenced to 46 months in prison in connection with the collapse which also implicated then State Insurance Commissioner Doug Green, who received $2.7 million in bribes from the Eichers. He received a 25-year federal sentence.

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All in all, when one takes the St. George pullout effort that is supported by a political figure at the opposite end of East Baton Rouge Parish and led by an individual whose newly founded company, housed in the same office as four other companies—three of which have as a corporate officer someone who participated in the defrauding of $150 million in insurance claims 25 years ago—lands a $717,000 no-bid contract with the state, one has to ask….

What could possibly go wrong?

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What could go wrong?

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Again, these are the people leading the effort. They started it, and are in charge of it.

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Bodi White started the campaign

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