Aided by a better election calendar, at least some chunk of fiscal reform stands a good chance of making it into the Louisiana Constitution prior to hammering out the fiscal year 2027 budget next year.
After the defeat of the Third Extraordinary Session of 2025’s Act 1 that became this spring’s Amendment 2, due to a motley coalition of big government advocates on the political left and panicked conservatives, reformers went back to the drawing board to try again. This time, reformers offered an omnibus bill like previously but also filed four others taking parts of that bill that could be decided upon discretely.
The omnibus bill this time around, HB 472 by Republican state Rep. Julie Emerson, mutated by substitute into her HB 678 which then stalled in Senate committee. The reduced bill would have represented the portion of the amendment that basically would have folded the Revenue Stabilization Fund into the Budget Stabilization Fund and redirected mineral royalty funds. It floundered because some of the emptied fund could have gone to prop up tax cuts proposed in other bills if revenues dipped too much as a result of the cuts.
