Outlay deviation proper to address inefficient system

Moving through the legislative process is SB 204, a bill that causes perplexed and contradictory reactions, but seldom any real understanding of its genuine meaning going forward.

The bill sponsored by state Sen. Robert Adley would allow the Louisiana Community and Technical College System to undertake a series of capital improvements worth $250 million across the state. It gathers a 12 percent match from private sector concerns, who figure the improvement will increase the pipeline of skilled workers to them, and then gets the state to pay in $20 million a year over 20 years to pay it all off.

Controversially, it goes outside of the normal capital outlay process, where the Legislature puts up a list of projects, which if it exceeds the net state tax supported debt limit then is culled by the State Bond Commission. The bill exempts this outlay from that limit. Treasurer John Kennedy raises the alarm about the precedent set in this ability in a technical sense to exceed that limit, as this could increase interest rates faced by the state and obviously creates increased obligations in the future.

House balking imperils good higher education reforms

Two higher education reform bills failed to pass yesterday in the Louisiana Legislature. While one appears to be a goner, passage of the other at least ameliorates the consequences of that to some degree.

State Rep. Thomas Carmody’s HB 87 would have removed the requirement that the Legislature must approve of all tuition and fee increases by two-thirds majorities. Louisiana is the only state that has such a requirement, where the only exception to it is if institutions achieve stated goals approved by the Board of Regents they may raise these up to 10 percent for the next year. It needed a two-thirds vote to proceed as it required amending the Constitution to remove the additional burden on tuition increases.

But it drew support of only a little more than half of those present and voting, and not even half of the seated membership. Mostly Republicans voted for it and most Democrats against, with two interesting variations. Several black Democrats from the New Orleans and Baton Rouge areas voted for it, possibly to assist the Southern University System schools in these communities. Several Republicans voted against it, almost all aligned with if not more vocal members of the Louisiana Budget Reform Campaign, perhaps as a tactic to enable better crisis creation; by closing off this avenue of higher education revenue, it might magnify the deleterious effects of a fiscal structure that makes higher education funding especially vulnerable, increasing the appeal of their reform agenda.

Bill promotes unwise reshuffling, procedural duplication

While it may spark a useful discussion on a larger question of government organization, the proposal for Louisiana to create a Department of Elderly Affairs given the current environment is unwise – although that may not be the main reason the bill in its current form was filed.

HB 352 by Rep. Joe Harrison would do this. Currently, programs dealing with the elderly are split between the Governor’s Office, a non-Cabinet collection of agencies, and the Department of Health and Hospitals. This bill essentially would take the Office of Elderly Affairs from the former and make a cabinet department of it – despite the fact there seems no real demonstrated need, in terms of improved efficiency or effectiveness, for this bureaucratic shuffling.

The matter of moving boxes and arrows around is more than trivial because of the Constitution, which states there should be only 20 such departments, so either it needs amending to allow for more or action would have to scrap one statutorily. While some states have such an entity at the cabinet level, most do not, and the mere symbolism of adding a department to government – acknowledging an expansion of it – makes the amending option unlikely to succeed.

Recent race cautions about raising judicial salaries

This week, the Louisiana Legislature will continue its look at raising judicial salaries again with state Sen. Danny Martiny's SB 188. While the debate mostly may turn on cost/benefit calculations such as whether the state can afford more in order to attract quality judges -- if higher pay actually does that -- something else to consider is the role that rising salaries has on the selection process for judicial jobs, as one of the most recent contested elections in northwest Louisiana showed.

Despite the fact that judicial contests – reinforced both by campaign finance law and by the Louisiana Code of Judicial Conduct – are supposed to have a nonpolitical air about them, the race for the open seat on the 26^th District Court that covers Bossier and Webster Parishes last year had all the trappings of an issue-promoting, mud-slinging tussle that one might expect in an election to legislative or executive office.

By and large, norms of judicial contests typically carry the expectation that the person to be elected presides over a non-policy-making part of government, where competence and integrity as a jurist should decide who gets the job. The candidates are supposed to comport themselves as above politics, in order to emphasize their fairness and impartiality they would portray if on the bench.

All of which has been turned on its head in this race. On the surface, past assistant district attorney and currently privately practicing Whit Graves may have seemed to start this with his proclamation that his election would end up lowering constituents’ taxes. Interjecting the issue of fiscal probity into a kind of contest where this seldom is seen, he argued that he would prompt a reorganization of the district’s courts in a way that would obviate the need for tax increases to offset additional spending for maintaining a new judgeship.

Hypocritical rant shows high stakes for funding renewal

The hypocrisy demonstrated in a statement made by a Louisiana legislator – likely shared by many of her partisan colleagues – illuminates the toxic mindset of the left’s impact on the lives of citizens, but especially on the black community, when it comes to the role that educational policy plays in keeping its members in power.

Last week, the Black Alliance for Educational Options staged a rally of parents, children, and supporters of the state’s scholarship voucher program that allows families whose children endure underperforming schools to be given the resources to choose an alternative provider that may not be a government school. Due to a recent judicial decision, the funding mechanism for the program now requires a separate appropriation, and these individuals wanted to remind legislators to ensure continued funding.

This apparently upset state Sen. Yvonne Dorsey-Colomb:

Manage surplus right to spare both vouchers, hawks

All of Gov. Bobby Jindal and chicken/budget “hawks” everywhere ought to be glad that the Revenue Estimating Conference agreed on a higher forecast for revenues eligible in spending for this current fiscal year and the next. They better be, because unforeseen expenses might gobble up a good chunk of this.

The REC adopted a forecast that predicted $129 million more in revenue for finish up this year, and $155 million more available for the next. It appears part of the former amount ought to be spoken for, according to testimony given by Education Superintendent John White, stemming from the recent court decision that invalidated the funding mechanism for the state’s scholarship voucher program.

As part of that, the state’s Supreme Court also redefined that legislative instrument responsible for funding the state’s Minimum Foundation Program, calling it really like a law despite its legal designation as a resolution. The MFP is a formula created by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, which employs White, to direct state funding to school district operating expenses and must be accepted or rejected by the Legislature by concurrent resolution prior to the end of a regular session. If rejected, the previous year’s formula remains in place.

Poll confirms Landrieu reelection hope deteriorating

Dueling polls give a conflicting picture on how Louisianans react to expanded gun control. But the real story emerging is how Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu’s chances at reelection are dwindling to nothing.

A couple of weeks ago Public Policy Polling, which hires out to Democrats, published results alleging that support for certain senators, including Landrieu, dropped if they voted against a bill known as “Manchin-Toomey” after its sponsors that would increase the amount and intrusiveness of background checks for ownership, expanding a system that, if anything, increases the likelihood of crimes being committed with guns. Landrieu voted for the bill.

Then yesterday a poll put out by Defend Louisiana, begun as a pro-gun rights by Republican state Rep. Jeff Thompson, showed in contrast that people were less likely to vote for Landrieu as a result of that vote. Haughtily, the Landrieu campaign sniffed that this result was part of a “push poll,” meaning one that had questions designed to lead respondents to a certain answer.

Anti-privatization bills touted with delusion, dishonesty

Today at hearings of the House and Governmental Affairs Committee, state Rep. Kenny Havard might repeat what he said about his HB 240 on a previous occasion that the bill was not against privatization. Should he do so, it merely proves that he is ignorant or disingenuous.

Havard’s bill, along with the nearly-identical HB 519 by state Rep. Cameron Henry, would place numerous roadblocks to privatizing state government services. Currently, state law has the executive branch negotiate any such agreement and report it to the Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget, where this does have not a specific legislative prohibition such as if a state-owned hospital has its emergency room closed or is cut more that 35 percent in funding or in the case of privatizing benefits administration. The JLCB only may review and require additional information, but it cannot intervene in any way unless for a particular type of transaction the law specifically states it must approve. Meanwhile, the Administrative Procedure Act and internal executive branch rules provide many oversight opportunities to vet a contracting decision.

Not only do these bills require that contracts of a certain size (from minimums of $500,000 to $5 million depending on the bill and kind of contract, with some being entirely exempt) go in front of particular legislative committees for approval, but they create a burdensome and discriminatory process to get there. At the theoretical level they are noxious because they allow for legislative micromanaging of executing the law; there’s no sense in having a full-time executive branch to perform its lawful functions if an inexpert part-time Legislature, or parts of it, can veto administrative actions at this level.

Extra sporting event impact can't justify higher taxes

It no longer may be called the Independence Bowl, but Shreveport’s AdvoCare V100 Bowl keeps on defying expectations with its continued existence despite a host of disadvantages. And fortunately an attempt to allow local government-allied agencies dip into the citizenry’s pockets to keep it going was blocked.

State Rep. Henry Burns filed legislation for the upcoming session that would have boosted hotel occupancy taxes as much as 2.5 percent, in addition to the current 4.5 percent tax. HB 179 would have had the extra proceeds split between the Shreveport-Bossier Sports Commission, the bowl, and to fund Bossier City facilities. Apparently in the proposed law, Shreveport, Bossier City, Caddo Parish, and Bossier Parish all would have had to agree to allow the additional levy in order to bring it up to the maximum new level.

The cash infusion would allow the bowl to increase its payout from its current $1.1 million in the hopes of attracting higher-quality competition. It currently is scheduled to pit the seventh-place team from the Atlantic Coast Conference, an East Coast-based, declining major conference in football that may not be able to fill that slot annually (because a team must have no worse than a record of no more losses than wins except under special circumstances) against the tenth-place team from the Southeastern Conference, which is much stronger in football but because of the low position slotted also may not be able to provide an eligible team on a regular basis.

To get rid of one-time money, hawks embrace it

Q: What do “fiscal hawks” do when they want to spend scarlet “one-time money” on general fund operating expenses?

A: They call it “amnesty.”

And there’s the rabbit pulled from the hat by the “hawks,” a group almost entirely composed of Republican members of the Louisiana House of Representatives, as they contrived to extricate themselves from a mess of their own making. The group once had been known for its jihad against one-time money, or money gathered from recurring sources not tied into the general fund and from nonrecurring sources such as property sales, declaring long and loudly that such money could not stain spending coming from the general fund no matter what legal machinations made it eligible for use in the general fund.

Until in order to save the concept, they had to destroy it. Given the opportunity to excise about $490 million in such funds, where roughly two-thirds was of the recurring kind and the remainder nonrecurring, with House Democrats egging them on they hatched a plan to cut spending somewhat, pare back on tax credits, much of this being little more than pure subsidization of some grossly inefficient economic activity, and to finance the bulk by raising taxes, mostly on business.