Start wringing liberal populism out of LA budget

Liberal populists largely may have been evicted from power in Louisiana, but their ethos lives on, according to budgetary politics in the Senate to date for next year’s state spending plan.

More often than not, after the general appropriations bill HB 1 makes it way from the House of Representatives where constitutionally it must start the Senate will make a few significant changes. The most far-reaching change came concerning Republican Gov. Jeff Landry’s initiative to open up voucher-like programming to families beyond the current eligible pool of students coming from lower-income households who otherwise would attend lower-ranking schools to include those from any lower-income household, wrapping all into an education savings account format called LA GATOR.

Landry asked for $43.4 million to cover the existing pool and then $50 million to expand it to a least a small portion of newly-eligible families. But instead, the Senate Finance Committee stripped the additional funds. GOP Sen. Pres. Cameron Henry led the charge, questioning whether the cost of the program would grow too big, too quickly.

Any publicity good for long shot Senate hopeful?

If as a political candidate have little in the way of campaign resources commensurate to the office you seek, a shot of free publicity surely can’t hurt – unless it threatens to make you appear to be a crank.

That’s the situation in which Republican Senate challenger Sammy Wyatt finds himself. Next to no one in the state probably paid attention to his entry into the contest to knock off GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy, which he formally announced in mid-March. Wyatt, from Shreveport originally who worked in local law enforcement mainly in Bossier City and then in security in the private sector before decamping for graduate study at Louisiana State University (after a failed run for Bossier City Marshal), returned to serve currently as Chief Compliance Officer and Investigation Officer for Louisiana State University Health-Shreveport, a senior administrative position, although in 2022 he did apply unsuccessfully for the police chief’s position in Shreveport.

Wyatt positions himself as a consistently ideological conservative in line with the agenda of Republican Pres. Donald Trump. It’s unknown how much financial support his campaign has picked up, since he first filed with the Federal Election Commission on Apr. 1, the day after a quarterly report would have been required with the next due at the end of the month, but likely it is very little.

Insurance reforms diluted by rate-setting bill

The two steps forward, one step back approach Louisiana policy-makers have taken towards insurance reform seems unlikely to make much positive impact, because they keep coming up short in addressing the most prominent impediments to reducing premiums.

Insurance reform has been the topic of this year’s legislative session. While some effort has been made on immovable structure insurance, most and most attention has gone towards vehicle insurance. Indeed, with pomp and circumstance last week Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed several bills on the subject that he had supported, although a few more that he does not languish in the legislative pipeline.

The most controversial was HB 148 by GOP state Rep. Jeff Wiley, which actually started out differently. That bill gives the insurance commissioner, at present Republican Tim Temple, the power to set rates, potentially on any basis even arbitrary, filed by insurers regardless of how competitive is the market; until then, the commissioner could review a requested increase for noncompetitive noncommercial lines for an “excessive” increase, but not those that were deemed competitive, with competitiveness now not a factor for the criterion of “excessive.”

Another LA blackout, another renewable own goal

The advice Dr. Zaius gave to Taylor at the end of Planet of the Apes applies very well to the likes of hard left politicians on the Louisiana Public Service Commission and the New Orleans City Council, in reference to the blackout that hit the New Orleans area some days ago which brings both lessons and warnings.

Parts of four parishes, including Orleans, were hit by what power companies euphemistically call a “load shed” last weekend. Over half were in New Orleans, and nearly 100,000 total customers had lights out for several hours because, with one of Entergy’s nuclear reactors down, another shut down unexpectedly presumably over concerns that if left unaddressed could have blacked out even more ratepayers and for longer.

This echoed two similar events in northern Louisiana in April. Affecting about a third of customers compared to the one in south Louisiana, as part of its meeting the Public Service Commission held a gripe session earlier this month about those incidents, where both the utility involved, Southwestern Electric Power Company, and the regional transmission organization Southwest Power Pool tried either to blame the other or shrugged them off as acts of the Deity.