Adopting the rhetoric of spousal abusers, Republican state Senate Pres. Page Cortez blamed Bossier Parish victims because they dared stand up for taxpayers when he collaborated with GOP state House Speaker Clay Schexnayder in stripping a net nearly $140 million from parish projects.
Republican state Reps. Raymond Crews, Dodie Horton, and Danny McCormick a day before the massacre had voted against busting the state’s spending cap to the tune of $250 million over the next two weeks and $1.4 billion over the succeeding year. While much of it ended up going to one-time items, a shell game maneuvered nearly $200 million towards education pay raises.
Crews, Horton, and McCormick along with local GOP state Rep. Alan Seabaugh and some other representatives across the state who voted against busting the cap but who couldn’t stop it, had a better way to secure those hikes. By paying down state pension unfunded accrued liabilities, they planned on facilitating local education agencies to dole out raises from money saved as a result of the paying down. That could be accomplished without breaching the cap.
But Schexnayder and Cortez, in league with Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards, wanted to create new state taxpayer commitments and lard up the pork even as the state faces a $1.5 billion revenue falloff within the next three years. And this meant breaching the cap, with woe to any legislator that got in the way.
They made the constituents of Crews, Horton, and McCormick, and to a more diffuse extent Seabaugh who is running for a new Senate district that encompasses Bossier and Caddo Parishes, pay for their temerity. And they did when the final version of the capital outlay bill HB 2 came out of a conference committee – only a few minutes away from the session’s end – headed by Cortez and Schexnayder with their allies on it.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Crews had complained bitterly on the floor of being given no time to vet appropriations bills. And McCormick did his best with parliamentary maneuvers to slow the process while Schexnayder and his leadership did the opposite to ram through the bills without debate.
Going into the HB 2 resolution, Bossier Parish, excluding money going to the Red River Waterway Commission but including YMCA and Jimmie Davis Bridge money that included Caddo Parish, had garnered $180,496,334, with over $154 million assigned to the bridge project – as well it should as the state recently let a contract for its building for nearly $362 million starting in 2024 to last through 2028. But after Cortez and Schexnayder stuck their thumbs onto the pie that dropped to just $41,276,334 – and this is before Edwards gets a crack with line item vetoes.
The bulk of the loss came from dropping $136 million out of the bridge in Priority 5 dollars, which actually impacts most the new Senate District 31 that Seabaugh is contesting and SD 36 of incumbent Republican Robert Mills who voted to bust the cap. While this deduction probably won’t sabotage the bridge’s building, it almost certainly will delay it.
But other projects directly benefitting the districts of Crews, Horton, and McCormick were reduced, if not eliminated in the final HB 2 version. Crews took direct hits with striking a million dollars for Bossier Parish Community College, $2.4 million for Benton, and $3 million for a Benton Road/Interstate 220 interchange. Horton had $2.27 million eradicated for a Haughton project and the dropping of $18.45 million in highway improvements around Haughton down to $11.7 million. McCormick had his punishments inflicted in Caddo Parish, where of allocation to five villages and towns in the parish only two survived worth less than $300,000 while $2.7 million to the other three got axed.
However, get-along-go-along interests reaped dividends from this butchery. An item for Republican Bossier Parish Sheriff Julian Whittington increased tenfold to $10 million and a giveaway to the YMCA of Northwest Louisiana doubled to $2 million.
Cortez indirectly explained these adjustments in the context of criticism of the general appropriations bill HB 1 because of unintended consequences in that and HB 2, each produced for House consideration just minutes before session end after the Senate had dealt with conference committee products. He blamed the likes of Crews, Horton, McCormick, and Seabaugh who he alleged had slowed down budget negotiations for days. “[The conservatives] never had any real interest in doing anything but derailing the whole process,” Cortez said. “That’s certainly not what’s best for Louisiana.”
Cortez needs to look into the mirror before he commits to name-calling. Blowing a once-in-a-generation surplus now rather than setting up conditions to spend more responsibly on these items in the near future – and with well over $100 million splurged on local governments and nongovernmental organizations – by using the surplus to stabilize the state’s fiscal structure first only served special interests while selling out the people of Louisiana, who will have to suffer service reductions and/or tax increases because of the irresponsibility of term-limited Cortez, and of Schexnayder and Edwards both also term-limited, with $1.5 billion in revenues collected annually scheduled to roll off the books within the next three years.
Meanwhile, constituents whose legislators fought for the state’s best interests get punished. Voters need to reward the bravery of Crews, Horton, McCormick, and Seabaugh this fall and need to ensure that after early 2024 the exploiters Edwards, Cortez, and Schexnayder never serve another day in any elective office.
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