Houma businessman answers state senator’s remarks about previous letters

James Cantrelle
September 28, 2010
Lafourche District 13 school board
September 30, 2010
James Cantrelle
September 28, 2010
Lafourche District 13 school board
September 30, 2010

Dear Editor,


I feel it necessary to respond to allegations made against me by state Sen. Butch Gautreaux in your Sept. 20th edition. In trying to defend why he first spoke in favor of supporting the drilling moratorium, he used stress as an excuse, and then went on to accuse me of opposing him by writing letters to the editor because of his support of a minimum wage increase.


I noticed that while he tried to use stress as an excuse for supporting the moratorium, he did not comment on what made him say he did not care how the people of his district felt, since he was not going to run for public office again. If you would like to hear his exact words, you can go on the Internet to http://senate.legis.state.la.us/video/2010/June.htm#3. Then go to Louisiana State Senate June 3 chamber and scroll to 11:57 and to 21:56.

He told a blatant lie. I have never written a letter to the editor about the minimum wage. After all, that was a federal matter and a federal law, and it makes one wonder if he is suffering from delusions of grandeur thinking that he had some input on that law.


I did write letters to the editor on four occasions over the past few years that he obviously took issue with. While I supported him financially, voted for him and did business with him, I never felt I was obligated to agree with every vote he took or thing he said. After all this is still America; the facts on the letters are:


• Nov. 28, 2005: I wrote stating that it was time that Louisiana elected officials started taking their share of the blame for the shape the state was in, and to stop trying to deflect all the blame to the federal government. This was a week after Sen. Gautreaux went into a tirade on the Senate floor blaming the president for all of Louisiana’s ills, to the point that the Republican senators walked out during his tirade.

• June 18, 2008: I wrote encouraging my fellow citizens to contact the governor and demand that he veto the obscene 100 percent pay raise that the legislature had given to themselves. This at a time when college tuitions were going up and budgets being cut, our roads and bridges needed work and there was no money for firemen or policemen. I did not even mention Sen. Gautreaux in the letter.

• June 29, 2009: I wrote concerning the fact that I was appointed to the University of Louisiana Board by the governor in June of 2008 and served until I did not receive Senate confirmation in June of 2009. In trying to find out why I was not confirmed I found out that a single senator can block a confirmation from his own district and that Gautreaux had cast the lone vote against me. When the media asked him for a reason, he refused to give one. So I started investigating and found that had the pay raise not been vetoed by the governor, he would have gotten if not the largest, one of the largest pay raises in the entire Legislature with a corresponding increase in his state retirement. It took me several weeks before I was able to confront him at a public meeting in Morgan City and force him to admit that the reason he blocked my appointment was because of the letter.

• June 14, 2010: I wrote informing the people of his district what he said on the Senate floor about supporting the moratorium and how it did not matter to him how the people of his district felt because he was not running again. And that is what I have put on the billboards … in his words … exactly as he said them.

I feel that we ought to force an elected official to run on their record. Too many of them claim lame excuses like stress as an excuse for the wrong decisions they make that affect our lives.

Gregory J. Hamer Sr.,

Morgan City