A pair of linked bills potentially would pare Louisiana’s election calendar a bit and encourage more voters to vet local government bills that involvement taxation, but with a reduction of transparency that needs correction.
Two decades ago, Louisiana suffered more election dates than excess judges today in Orleans Parish. Over the years, breaching silly complaints about the necessity of having so many eligible election dates, gradually statutory changes reduced the number of eligible days so that the 46 separate election dates from 2000-04 dropped to just 26 from 2020-24.
That number may fall further with Republican state Rep. Bryan Fontenot’s bills HB 393, a constitutional amendment, that would open the door to having his HB 400 reduce the number of elections on which local taxing and referendum items may appear. Essentially, for these it would make eligible annually only a single election, in the fall in even-numbered years and gubernatorial election years, and in the remaining year in the spring except for Orleans Parish in the fall, which also would exclude general election runoffs. In other words, the eligible dates are those that promise the highest potential turnout because of other local, state, or national elections sharing the ballot.
Further, HB 400 would define more specifically the exception that local governments can use to have such an election on a nonstandard date. The Constitution empowers a local government to schedule such an election in an “emergency” situation but doesn’t define that. Nor does statute, with the only existing check on this power being the same article preventing such elections from being held within six months of each other and in statute where such elections must be vetted by the State Bond Commission, a majority of which theoretically could turn down a request for a special date. The bill changes this by requiring additional approval by the governor and secretary of state and making SBC approval contingent on a two-thirds vote, which then would allow for use of a general election runoff date. The six-month buffer remains unchanged.
Not only would these bills almost certainly reduce the number of election dates per year (special elections for office vacancies still would pop up), saving some money, but they also would reduce gamesmanship of local governments in trying to keep tax measures on the books. Often, local governments will shop around among the currently 14 eligible dates to find one with the lowest turnout with which to schedule. Lower-turnout elections favor tax passage as these measures almost exclusively deal with revenue sources for a local government, and for items such as charter changes the government desires an outcome it will want to have swayed. In these lower-turnout affairs, local government employees and their families disproportionately comprise the electorate as they have a vested interest in the matters, biasing the result in that direction. However, when forced to share the ballot with higher-stimulus contests, their influence diminishes and a truer picture of the electorate’s sentiments emerges that in some instances increases the chances of having occur the opposite of what government wants.
But there is one potential snake in the garden to otherwise excellent efforts. Between committee and the House floor, an amendment latched on removing the open meetings provisions in law when a local government deal with a tax proposition. Interestingly, in the roughly four minutes Fontenot used to present the bill to the House concluding with a unanimous vote of all present to send it along, he didn’t mention this amending.
Basically, at present in such a circumstance the governing authority must provide public notice 20 to 60 days prior to its consideration of the item, both published and during a public meeting. In its current form, the bill makes this transparency aid vanish.
The notice provision allows advance warning to citizens to prepare for and turn up at the meeting where the tax matter will be considered. There doesn’t seem to be any principled reason why attenuation of possible election dates should dispense with public notice; in fact, because with so few election dates available which will require more attentive planning that permits greater lead times, it should be easier than ever to fulfill this simple mandate.
The Senate should strike that mysterious amendment to make a pair of good bills great on the way to them hitting the Secretary of State’s or governor’s desks.
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