Funds shift should trigger new MFP strategy

Necessity is the mother of invention, and perhaps Republican Gov. Jeff Landry hit on some needed reform of education expenditures.

After two attempts fell short to amend the Constitution in two consecutive spring votes that would have rejiggered state finances to shuttle money to school districts to provide educator and staff raises, Landry proposed a plan to reshuffle the state’s Minimum Foundation Program for this year to take money from operational and other non-instructional expenses and send it to salaries. This would require an intercession vote remotely by two-thirds of legislators in each chamber.

 

Problematically, some state school boards have raised alarms about the plan. In essence, they would be required to beggar spending on non-instructional expenses that could delay projects and support services or leave a district short in case of an emergency such as rebuilding after a disaster. Alternatively, they could dip into reserves for this one-time expense (policy-makers have convened a task force to reform educational spending that they hope provides a permanent increase in future years).

Govts should vet outdated, useless agencies

Maybe both Bossier City and Bossier Parish could use their portions of nearly a million dollars on something better than an outdated local government agency that acts like a bank with public dollars.

At its meeting earlier this month, the parish’s Police Jury reappointed three members to the Bossier Public Trust Financing Authority for four-year terms that would expire at the end of the month. The governing board has two other members whose terms end in a couple of years for the agency created in 1979 to issue mortgages for single-family housing, serviced through area financial institutions. Reappointments will have to be ratified by Bossier City prior to term ends.

In its early years it issued several such bond issues, but since then largely has fallen into disuse. Technically it is a component unit of Bossier City, but in reality it essentially operates as an adjunct of the Greater Bossier Economic Development Fund as its board members all are GBEDF directors and its agent Rocky Rockett is the GBEDF executive director. None receive compensation, although the Authority pays out administration fees and professional fees presumably for its simplified audit annually for the state’s legislative auditor.

LA already seeing benefits from SNAP changes

Louisiana, both gratifyingly and embarrassingly, leads almost every state in reduction of people in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which is a good thing

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act of last year made the most far-reaching changes to public assistance programs in three decades, among them to SNAP. Specifically, states would be penalized starting in fiscal year 2028 for an excessive inappropriate payment rate, reductions in eligibility requirement waivers for regions with higher unemployment rates, allowing fewer legally-residing foreign nationals to access it, and, in 2027, institution of a lenient community engagement requirement for working-age able-bodied adults without dependents.

Especially with the error-rate requirement using data that began using data from last year, states have become more vigilant in determining eligibility. As a result, rolls have declined steadily since the bill’s passage about a year ago. They’re about nine percent lower, or 4.3 million recipients, through February of this year (which should increase further as several states had waivers on standards into April).

Deal controversy to discourage Monroe investors

Double standards and good-old-boy politics aren’t going to serve Monroe well as it tries to take advantage of a generational economic development opportunity.

As the Hyperion data center project continues its buildout, which has given the area economy but particularly Monroe’s a big shot in the arm, bickering continues over a potentially-dubious use of taxpayer dollars. In the crosshairs is a $4.5 million deal by the Interstate 20 Economic Development District, giving the sum to an entity DZE LLC to build residential homes outside of the EDD. Its board, whose members mostly comprise City Council selections that at this time is controlled by black Democrats, bypassed normal procedures to award the money.

The city technically has jurisdiction over the District’s fiscal matters and has refused to release the portion of the money already billed. Initially it argued that it had uncertainty over whether statutorily it could do so, since the project had no real connection to the district. Mainly comprising Pecanland Mall, tax revenue gained through projects theoretically would fund district activities, so it is very difficult to see how infrastructure pertaining to houses outside of the district constitutes economic development within it. Other than the Board, does anyone seriously think new houses across the way will encourage more people to locate near to and want to take the low-wage jobs at the mall?

Bossier Jury setting itself up for lawsuit loss

Go ahead, Bossier Parish Police Jury, make my day, if you dare, although the parish would be far better off if you simply followed the law.

Last week’s Jury meeting ended with a letter of resignation from former Library Director Felesha Sweeney. Two days later, the parish’s Library Board of Control said it had appointed Marissa Richardson as the new interim director, it later clarified.

That’s important as she cannot take the permanent post until, according to statute, appointment by the Board, which requires a public meeting. But the past two meetings of the Board were inconsistent with state law because, among other things, the entire Jury of a dozen masqueraded as members of the Board when legally there can be a maximum of only seven voting members on it.

Taxpayer-funded weight loss bill deserves veto

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, if he considers costs and outcomes, has good reason to veto SB 433.

The bill by Democrat state Sen. Gerald Boudreaux, after a few iterations, would have the state cover for Medicaid weight loss drugs for obesity, as prescribed. Louisiana Medicaid already covers it for clients where weight gain is a consequence of a chronic condition, which this expansion would not require. This has a five-year estimated cost of $72 million.

Here, the thinking is that obesity causes other maladies that eventually could fall under Medicaid treatment, hence needing state taxpayer support (although Louisiana typically has between 60-70 percent of costs covered by the federal government, so the bill has the Department of Health promulgate standards that would be consistent with federal regulations). By preventing obesity, the guess is that the use of semaglutide, the chemical in the drugs practically speaking that would have to be prescribed, would cost less than the eventual cost of treatment for other preventable conditions.

BC Council increases delivery of fiscal reform

Almost a year into their terms, the current Bossier City Council members that promised fiscal prudence and reform look set to deliver a heaping dosage of it in their meeting this week.

A couple of holdovers and four new members who took office last Jul. 1 came in with stated agendas of making more prudent spending decisions and better fiscal management than the predecessor majority. That has happened in bits and pieces, such as reducing free riding by large apartment complexes on water and sewerage fees and in refinancing bond deals. However, this week’s agenda features the broadest range of reform yet at the same time signals where more work can be done.

One item echoes previous efforts with the extension of a refinancing strategy for older bonds. An ordinance will extend the ability of the city to use a $15 million bond issuance in 2021 originally intended to pare down an issue connected to past public works projects (principally the Walter O. Bigby Carriageway, whose account has been spent in totality) to another active bond series. Essentially, the city will take advantage of differential interest due – the additional series had small payments early but these will increase substantially the closer it gets to its 2036 due date – between old and new issue to save roughly $850,000 annually.

Leftist media see Morris as threat, wield hatchet

Republican state Sen. Jay Morris has been getting a little too effective in countering the left’s agenda in Louisiana, drawing a transparent hatchet job from its far left media.

Morris has had a busy session authoring several high-profile bills that end up making it easier to remove wayward elected officials, reducing the size of overstaffed courts, and the just-signed law reapportioning the state’s congressional districts by replacing an unconstitutional map containing two majority-minority districts with a plan having just one. These have drawn the left’s ire, and so it wishes to discourage legislators from undertaking future reform efforts by trying to drag Morris through the mud.

The leftist Floodlight, Verite, and Louisiana Illuminator websites combined forces recently to publish a piece about the dealings of Morris and a long-standing business partner related to land near the Hyperion data center project. It breathlessly proclaims that Morris “used his political position to advance the project … [while] buying and selling the land around it over the past 15 months,” making him appear as a kind of grifter more commonly associated with political leftists concerning government.

Legislative review of alarmist plan welcome

Louisiana’s Climate Initiatives Task Force and its product the Louisiana Climate Action Plan officially died early last year. But a review of its legacy is most appropriate.

In 2020, Democrat former Gov. John Bel Edwards, safely reelected, let his inner radical leftist surface in part by establishing the task force, which received orders to come up with a plan that mirrored the climate alarmism agenda. It duly did so by 2022, fatally flawed by the scientifically unsustainable assumptions behind it, that wanted to commit the state to a traumatic ratcheting down of carbon emissions.

Fortunately, for the most part the significant portions would require legislative or Public Service Commission acquiescence, and the climate realism majorities in both make that unlikely to happen. However, actions taken by the executive branch, for example, could adhere to minor aspects of the agenda at the expense of taxpayers.

Sausage judicial bill still worth signing

Exemplifying to the extreme the old aphorism that legislating is like making sausage, reforming the bloated Orleans Parish district court system ended up half-complete with a plethora of compromises made by reformers.

SB 217 by the busy Republican state Sen. Jay Morris intended to right-size courts in Orleans. Even as it has only a little over 8 percent of the state’s population, a study determined the district had too many judges compared to others in the state, and this directly affected taxpayers statewide as they footed the bill for this bloat.

But with the history of Orleans that built in favoritism in its treatment – most of this a product of many decades past when it represented a much higher proportion of the state’s residents (over 20 percent in 1900, for example, and with New Orleans having more than twice as many people as all other municipalities combined) and commercial activity – this would require substantial dismantling, and right off the bat a concession needed making. Originally, the bill intended only to reduce a couple of seats of civil district courts, rather than all.