Once upon a time, a certain columnist in Starkpatch was actually funny.....
Just the good ole boys, never meanin' no harm,
The Mississippi Department of Transportation uses $530,000 it wasn't using to pave roads, repair bridges, patch potholes or for other credible purposes to buy a helicopter from the state Bureau of Narcotics.
MDOT needed the helicopter so badly that after it began to make payments on it on Sept. 15, 2004, the helicopter sat in a hangar eight months in Meridian without being operated until May 9, 2005.
Once MDOT decided to use its new toy, the primary use for the snazzy Eurocopter was what?
"Fuel tax evasion surveillance" is what MDOT executive director Larry "Butch" Brown told me last week. He said MDOT's helicopter is searching for fuel tax dodgers who are supposedly smuggling fuel in a 3,000-ton tanker along the banks of the Mississippi River and offloading the bootleg fuel into a truck that would then transport the untaxed fuel to a convenience store near you.
Reminds me of a bad Dukes of Hazzard episode. Boss Hogg sends Rosco P. Coltrane and Enos up in a helicopter trying to catch the Duke boys and Cooter running moonshine ethyl. YEE-HAW!
Ahoy, mateys, yo, ho, ho
My, my, that's real cloak-and-dagger stuff. And how many times in the past, pray tell, has a mysterious pirate fuel barge actually been nabbed bootlegging untaxed fuel into Mississippi?
MDOT enforcement director Willie Huff told The Clarion-Ledger this week that the agency "has not confirmed thatit (fuel smuggling) is being done."
In English, that means that while the MDOT helicopter has been up in the air for some "surveillance" flights, there have been no arrests of anyone involved in such clandestine activities. According to the State Tax Commission, only four people in the entire state are under indictment for fuel tax evasion and none has been involved in rogue fuel barge-to-truck transfers on the river banks.
But here's a tip for the MDOT pilot.
Seems
a fuel barge can haul about 850,000 gallons of fuel and an 18-wheeler
can offload about 3,000 gallons of fuel. So, when you guys are out
cruising the river, look for a barge that has about 283 18-wheelers
lined up offloading fuel and you might hit paydirt.
Look for really long lines
Or, better yet, just look for convenience stores with really low gas prices and the corresponding long lines of customers trying to buy gas and let the MDOT officers down on the ground ask the retailers for their paperwork on the fuel they're selling.
That's not as sexy as having the MDOT helicopter up in the air, but it would likely be at least as effective.
Or better yet, why not just turn that bad boy loose on some real crime-busting activities. Loan the helicopter to O.J. Simpson in his never-ending search for the "real killers."
For those keeping score, MDOT has rather pristine state audits. The work the agency does is important and there are hundreds of dedicated MDOT employees doing a good job daily.
Brown is an able administrator. State audits confirm his honesty with public funds.
But what does appear as obvious as a helicopter of dubious necessity is that at a time of great austerity in state government, the almost $1 billion bureaucratic beast that is MDOT is engaging in some empire-building activities that ought to be a wake-up call for legislators.
Here's hoping if that rogue untaxed fuel barge really is out there, the MDOT copter catches it and collects that fuel tax. But folks, I'm not holding my breath. Are you, Uncle Jesse? Cooter? Anyone?
Kingfish note: Reading this column almost reminds one of Sting.
10 comments:
Perhaps these shenanigans are why MDOT no longer has a Law Enforcement division.
"Brown is an able administrator."
What in the cornbread hell?
MDOT, no longer has a law enforcement division??? Is this true???
Years ago, didn't Butch Brown get arrested at a Coast casino for being passed out at a slot machine?
If MDOT no longer has a law enforcement function, there's a bunch of guys in new pickups and SUVs needin' to be arrested for impersonating officers.
@1:38
You are probably one if the uninformed geniuses who like to reference “tinfoil” on JJ.
MDOT Law Enforcement became an agency of DPS and the Mississippi Highway Patrol at same time that the State Capitol Police did.
You simply have poor observation skills. Perhaps you shouldn’t read JJ while driving.
A Bob truck holds 3,000 gallons. An 18 wheeler holds between 8,500 to 11,000 gallons depending on what liquid. I had heard rumors of this a few years ago so it all isn’t a bogus piece shit. There were people actually doing this and laughing all the way to the bank. But for the most part, they weren’t selling to stores. They had contacts and were selling/ pumping off directly from the Bob trucks. A Bib truck can pump on and pump off. An 18 wheeler can only pump off with gravity.
So, 7:32 - because you had "heared rumors" of this, it isn't a bogus piece of shit?
If the 'rumors' you heard fit with the 'facts' you state, then instead of having 203 eighteen wheelers lined up along the shore of the Mississippi, then there would have been over 600 Bob trucks lined up. Pretty big convoy that I believe most anybody could spot even without a helicoptor.
So, just as it was shown to have all been a piece of shit set of rumors so that the "able administrator Butch Brown" (now that combination of words is actually a piece of shit, but...) could help his buddy out and offload the helicoptor he had bought without authorization. Butch, because as an "able administrator", he had his own funds that weren't subject to the legislature's control and bought himself a helicoptor that MDOT never used. But started the rumors to give a justificaiton.
8:39, here is a thought. I personally knew of someone who bought “said” fuel but if you think about it, the smart thing to do would not have more than 1 or 2 trucks being the “mules” for this type of activity. There are many places along the river to get access. You just have to know where to go. A smart person wouldn’t line that many trucks up because you can’t find that many fuel tankers to do that in the first place.
I no longer keep up with it, but if it's true that the law enforcement division of MDOT has been absorbed by the Department of Public Safety, it has taken them long enough. It was 18 years ago in 2004 when the Highway Patrol first made its move for that to happen.
I come to find out later that the Federal Government was the one that initiated that move. It seems that the feds wanted the commercial trucking enforcement placed under conventional state law enforcement. With the commercial enforcement under the Department of Revenue, any violations were not applied as penalties on commercial licenses. Needless to say, the feds objected and threatened the with holding of funds.
The Department of revenue, raised hell about what would have been a large part of their budget, at that time, and was having none of it. I see the feds won out, it just took awhile.
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