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LIVING
FROM
GUMBO
TO
GALLERY
Leah Chase gets museum space
NATIONAL, A-9
NATIONAL, A-8
‘STREETCAR’ ACTOR
KARL MALDEN DIES
NEVERLAND BURIAL
PLANS FOR MICHAEL
JACKSON UNRAVEL
t
I
BREAKING NEWS AT NOLA.COM
Dow
shutters
pair of
ethylene
units
THURSDAY, JULY 2, 2009
RIVER
PARISHES EDITION • 75¢
XXXXXXXXXX
Film studio investors
may be out $2 million
Boat
launch
put on
back
burner
Saints, coach, Archie Manning sought tax credits
Hahnville closings
cut handful of jobs
St. Charles kitty grows
for emergency center
By Matt Scallan
River Parishes bureau
CHARLES GRANT
MITCH BERGER
SEAN PAYTON
$425,000
$250,000
$144,000
defensive end
Dow Chemical will shut down
two units at its Hahnville complex, but the shutdown will result in fewer than 10 layoffs,
plant spokesman Tommy Faucheux said Wednesday.
The two ethylene units, a
cracking unit and an ethylene
oxide, ethylene glycol unit, were
already idle because of a glut in
the plastics market, and most
workers on those units have already been assigned to other
duties, Faucheux said.
Ethylene is a petroleumbased building block for plastics.
“There’s more ethylene in the
U.S. market right now than anyone can use,” Faucheux said,
adding that there are no plans
to restart the units even when
the economy improves. The Olefins 2 unit had already been
shut down because of mechanical issues, Faucheux said.
The company also announced
the shutdown of the ethylene
dichloride and vinyl chloride
monomer units at its
former punter
coach
$125,000
$120,000
$100,000
$32,000
$26,250
$19,200
$16,000
$13,600
By Robert Travis Scott
Capital bureau
Archie Manning, Drew
Brees and coach Sean Payton are
among more than two dozen people
with ties to the Saints who together put
nearly $2 million into an Elmwood film
studio that has failed to return their investments as promised.
Manning and an attorney for one of
the players said Wednesday that they
thought they were taking part in a routine tax credit program offered through
BATON ROUGE —
Louisiana’s motion picture studio incentives until they discovered that the studio project never received state authorization for the credits and that their
money was at risk.
“They weren’t approved — there
was no reason to think they would not
be,” Manning said.
Manning said he had received a telephone call from an FBI agent seeking
information about the studio’s investment plan.
Wayne Read, chief executive of
Louisiana Film Studios, said that he
was not aware of any federal investigation and that the Saints investors would
95 79
quarterback
See EMERGENCY, A-4
get their money back as new financiers
are brought into the project, which he
said could happen in two weeks.
Officials from the FBI and the U.S.
attorney’s office could not be reached.
The investment in the studio by current and former Saints members came
to light this week after deep snapper
Kevin Houser was released from the
team and replaced by an older player,
causing fans to wonder what was behind the move.
Houser invested $125,000 in the project, and many of his colleagues
Lone crash
survivor
clung to
jet debris
See INVESTMENT, A-5
Girl asks for mom
who is likely dead
Obama: State must use head on health
Lawmakers mostly
oppose ‘public’ plan
––––––––––
By Jonathan Tilove
Washington bureau
President Barack
Obama said Wednesday that he
intends to use “rational arguments” to douse “panic-peddling”
in Louisiana about his health care
plan, and then hope that if he can
persuade rank-and-file residents
that the changes he’s proposing
are in their best interests, the
state’s congressional delegation
will follow.
“All I can do is make rational
arguments and hope they catch;
it’s a great experiment,” Obama
WASHINGTON —
ALEX BRANDON / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
President Barack Obama speaks about health care
Wednesday at the Northern Virginia Community College
in Annandale, Va. Obama says resistance to his healthcare proposal by Louisiana’s delegation ‘is the result of
many years of panic-peddling.’
STORMS POSSIBLE
LOW
$80,000
$50,000
––––––––––
See JEFFERSON, A-3
ARCHIE MANNING
former quarterback
$80,000
wide receiver
Gov. Bobby Jindal vetoed a
$300,000 legislative appropriation for a boat launch in St.
Charles Parish, putting off the
project for now. But Senate
President Joel Chaisson II, DDestrehan, said the money will
be spent in the parish because
he already had shifted it to a
proposed emergency operations
center.
“The boat launch is an important project, but I knew it didn’t
meet the governor’s criteria, so
I moved it to the new EOC,
which does fit the criteria,”
Chaisson said.
Jindal’s veto message said financing for the boat launch
should come from other sources.
The extra money brings total
state financing for the emergency operations center project
to $945,600, including $540,000
in Priority 2, which is financed
through state borrowing, and
$105,600 that originally had
been allocated to a project to
widen Almedia Road in St.
Rose.
Chaisson said the boat launch
appropriation was inadvertently
left in HB 881, the supplemental
linebacker
JOEY HARRINGTON
former kicker
River Parishes bureau
$93,750
LANCE MOORE
linebacker
By Matt Scallan
SCOTT SHANLE
JOHN CARNEY
––––––––––
Defense attorneys for former U.S. Rep.
William Jefferson played a recording Wednesday from a May
2005 lunch meeting in which
Brett Pfeffer, a former Jefferson aide, assured investor Lori
Mody that their dealings with
the Democratic congressman
were perfectly legal.
At the time of the conversation, Pfeffer worked for Mody,
who ran a Virginia educational
foundation. It was Pfeffer who
brought Jefferson and Mody together and led Mody to sink
$3.5 million into a deal to buy
the Nigerian distribution rights
quarterback
TROY EVANS
former safety
ALEXANDRIA, VA. —
.. .
$136,470
KEVIN KAESVIHARN
guard
Washington bureau
HIGH
DREW BREES
cornerback
JAMAR NESBIT
JEFFERSON ON TRIAL
By Bruce Alpert
RANDALL GAY
JEREMY SHOCKEY
tight end
He told Mody deals
with Jefferson legal
KEVIN HOUSER
former long snapper
HOW THE
CREDITS
WORK
Under the state tax
credit plan
to encourage
film industry
investment, more
than two dozen
Saints players and
others connected
to the team
invested in the
Louisiana Film
Studios in
Elmwood. For each
$1 invested, they
expected to get a
tax credit worth
$1.33 to lower their WHAT WENT WRONG: The studio has failed to qualify for state tax credits, so the
state income tax.
investors did not get the tax benefit they expected. And so far, they have not gotten their investment back.
See DOW, A-5
Defense
questions
ex-aide’s
lunch talk
DAVID PATTEN
former receiver
Weather,
B-8
CLASSIFIED
COMICS
DEATHS
D-7
C-7
B-4
EDITORIALS
LIVING
MONEY
B-6
C
C-8
NATIONAL
SCIENCE
SPORTS
A-8
A-12
D
By Tom Maliti
and Angela Charlton
Associated Press writers
said in an interview with small
group of reporters at the White
House. The roundtable with reporters on health care immediately followed a town hall meeting
on the subject across the Potomac
River at Annandale Community
College in Virginia.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius
issued reports last week assessing
the quality and affordability of
health care in each of the 50
states, with Louisiana ranking at
the bottom.
“Louisianians can’t afford the
status quo,” read a headline on the
report, which rated the state
“very weak” on overall quality of
care, worse even than neighboring
states Mississippi, Texas and
Arkansas, which were rated
MORONI, COMOROS — The lone
survivor of a Yemeni jetliner
crash, who clung to wreckage
for 13 hours before being rescued, lay in a hospital bed with a
broken collarbone Wednesday,
asking for little except for a
chance to see her mother.
But relatives said 14-year-old
Bahia Bakari was too traumatized to be told her mother was
feared dead, along with 151 others on board the Yemenia airways flight.
“I have told her that her
mother is in the next room,” the
girl’s uncle, Joseph Yousouf, said
outside a hospital in the former
French colony, where the jetliner was trying to land in fierce
winds before dawn Tuesday
See OBAMA, A-4
See CRASH, A-6
TELEVISION
WASHINGTON
WORLD
C-3
A-3
A-11
173RD
YEAR
NO. 163
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