The Paul M. Hebert Law Center has been required to foot more than $130,000 in faculty salary and benefits for LSU System Office General Counsel Ray Lamonica, even though he hasn’t taught a class since 2005.
Lamonica’s situation partially illustrates how System President John Lombardi has expanded the bureaucracy of the LSU System Office — which employed 38 people in 2002 and swelled to nearly 60 employees by 2012 — in spite of decreases in state funding.
The growing number of positions, including 19 executives making six-figure salaries, has been accommodated through administrative assessment fees to the 12 campuses currently overseen by the LSU System and by “other self-generated income” and “direct-cost reimbursement.”
Lamonica says that following Hurricane Katrina he was “needed full-time in the LSU System Office to address the extraordinary legal issues, therefore I discontinued teaching at the Law Center.”
He continues to be listed as a tenured faculty member on the law school’s website, but all involved acknowledge he has not taught a class since leaving for his current position seven years ago.
Lamonica’s faculty salary has not only remained on the books, but it increased by $10,000 in 2008 — part of a general salary increase for law school personnel — under orders from the System Office, Law Center Chancellor Jack Weiss acknowledged.
Currently, 37 percent of Lamonica’s $275,000 annual LSU System salary comes from the law school’s payroll. The law school also pays approximately $30,000 of his $72,000 annual benefits package.
Lamonica indicated his Law Center salary is taken into account when the LSU System assesses the law school for administrative services.
Public financial records do not support that. The law school currently pays $22,000 to the System annually, according to public records. That’s some $4,000 less than the assessment based on 2004-05 revenues, the last academic year Lamonica taught at the Law Center.
LSU campuses currently are assessed .0011 percent of their revenues, except for the Law Center, which is saddled with a rate of .0077 percent when Lamonica’s salary and benefits package is included — many times that of other LSU System entities.
Hit with the challenges of shrinking state appropriations, Weiss said he requested a formal review of Lamonica’s faculty payment in 2009, the year after he was given the $10,000 raise. Weiss said his request was directed to Lombardi, but that it was rejected for reasons he could not recall.
Lamonica said in an e-mail that his “total compensation is paid by the LSU System, and I received no salary or compensation from the Law Center.” Technically, he is paid from the System Office budget, but law school officials confirmed $102,000 in wages and more than $30,000 in benefits are indeed transferred from the law school’s budget to the System Office to augment his pay.
Lamonica also said it is his “understanding” that the LSU System financial staff arranged for the law school to be compensated for his designated professorship supplement when he wasn’t teaching.
Weiss said he is unaware of any such agreement and, because he was not chancellor at the time, is unable to elaborate on the reason Lamonica has remained a tenured faculty member while not teaching. Lamonica said he annually updates two law treatises and has co-authored two books without receiving a research supplement from the law school.
While state funding to the LSU System office has decreased in the past several years, two other areas have dramatically increased.
The LSU System Office partially curtailed losses with a category it calls “other self-generated revenue.” This includes Lamonica’s agreement with the law school and the System’s claim to 10 percent of royalties resulting from intellectual properties, such as trademarks and patents generated on the System’s campuses.
Salaries paid by the LSU First Healthcare Network fall into a category created in 2008-09 called “direct cost reimbursement.”
As a source for System Office salaries, the combined self-generated and direct reimbursement areas have doubled in the previous four years to just less than $2.4 million.
Before being hired by the law school, Lamonica was appointed as United States attorney for the middle district of Louisiana in 1986 by President Ronald Reagan. He was replaced in 1994 by L.J. Hymel.
