N.O. should transfer power to LPSC

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, New Orleans City Councilor Helena Moreno needs to realize.

Yet Moreno seems intent on doing just that. She has asked the Council to beef up its staff that deals with utility issues. It’s unnecessary and wasteful.

Currently, New Orleans only among American cities regulates its electricity provider. In every other state, entities at the state level oversee electric provision, which in Louisiana would mean the Public Service Commission.

Barras agrees; Earth resumes revolving

Louisiana’s Revenue Estimating Conference today provided its first revised forecast since last June. And now the world can start turning again.

You would have thought from the apoplexy issued by the Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards Administration every one of the four times Republican House of Representatives Speaker Taylor Barras refused to accede to a change that the end of civilization was nigh. The higher forecasts proposed since November and finally accepted require unanimity among the four panelists, but Barras initially wouldn’t go along out of an abundance of caution over the state’s lackluster economic performance, perhaps the country’s worst.

All throughout, Edwards but particularly Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne, his shill on the REC, kept whining about how not recognizing additional revenues would bring disaster, subverting criminal justice reforms and hampering efforts to improve reformation of juvenile offenders by preventing startup of a new facility. The Legislature – contrary to the Constitutional prohibition on contingency spending – had passed and Edwards signed a supplemental appropriation allocating money to these causes, which the Administration screamed up and down could not be fulfilled without REC recognition of higher revenues.

Wage hike part of Edwards potemkim strategy

If he champions so much an increase in the minimum wage, why would Louisiana Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards advocate the least likely way to accomplish it?

In his 2019 state of the state address, Edwards stumped for SB 155 by Democrat state Sen. Troy Carter, which would put into the Constitution a minimum wage increase with perhaps more to follow. Louisiana is one of a few states with no state minimum wage, and one of 20 that in practice enforces the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour for most workers.

He didn’t mention HB 422 by Democrat state Rep. Royce Duplessis that would unlock local governments to mandate their own increases. Nor did he give rhetoric backing to legislation, not on offer so far this regular session but commonly on the docket in past years, that would put an increase or several into statute.

Edwards disguised campaign speech flunks

The campaign reelection speech Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards gave substituting for the annual state of the state address distracted, misled, and outright lied.

With the traditional address granted to the governor at the opening day of Legislature’s regular session, Edwards issued forth a rendition decidedly distorted from the reality of Louisiana’s condition. The fact checking required and explicated would overburden the reader, but a few highlights prove illustrative of the con job Edwards seeks to perpetrate on the state’s electorate.

The governor crowed about record high state gross domestic product and numbers of Louisianans at work. But that’s because a rising tide lifts all boats: these numbers came about not because of anything Edwards did, but because of what Republican Pres. Donald Trump has done in cutting taxes and regulatory burdens – while Edwards has increased taxes and done nothing to ease constraints on business. In reality, he has failed to champion tort reform and encouraged legal actions against businesses following the law.

Cantrell Cuba comments show ignorance

Is Democrat New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell stupid or merely gullible?

No other possibilities exist from comments she made about a recent junket to Cuba. The city hasn’t released exact figures, but it probably will cost taxpayers several thousand dollars (a total has been announced, but some of that includes private funds) to send her there, along with other area politicians, bureaucrats, and business and educational leaders.

Cantrell gave the same pie-in-the-sky answer that Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards rendered for a similar junket he took in 2016, bleating about economic ties with the communist island nation. Economic relations with Cuba beyond the trivial will happen no time soon and didn’t need any but the lowest functionaries to negotiate abstract deals that probably never will come to fruition.

Survey hints at Edwards reelection prospects

The recently-released Louisiana Survey provides more bad news than good for Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards’ reelection chances.

This snapshot of public opinion compiled by Louisiana State University’s Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs on an annual basis looks at issues of the day. This edition focused on some systemic policies of long standing, plus perceptions state government and the economy. It doesn’t ask about assessments of politicians, candidates, or parties,
and releases on other matters will follow in the future.


At the presidential level, a number of models to predict who wins these contests base their results mainly on economic performance and candidate or incumbent popularity (and, according to the data at this point, these point to Pres. Donald Trump winning reelection). That doesn’t translate as well to governors, in that the impact of state economic perceptions is much smaller, and that presidential popularity and the electorate’s general ideology loom larger.

Two-faced Edwards rejects significant savings

As usual, it turns out that Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards was talking out of both sides of his mouth.

Not to the surprise of close watchers of Edwards’ political career, last week the Democrat renounced adding work requirements for able-bodied adults to enroll in Medicaid expansion after having paid lip service to the idea in the past. Instead, he offered up a miniscule program to train unemployed Medicaid recipients.

This echoes his reversal of a last-minute policy change by his predecessor that made able-bodied adults without dependents fulfill a work, training, or community engagement standard in order to receive Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program aid. Back then, he produced a fig leaf for doing nothing in the form of a cosmetic executive order that essentially changed nothing about gaining SNAP eligibility while alleging otherwise.

LSUS/Tech merger idea worse than before

Despite a weak case seven years ago that has only deteriorated since, another stab is being taken at merging my employer Louisiana State University Shreveport with Louisiana Tech University.

Democrat state Rep. Cedric Glover filed HB 470, which would fold LSUS into Tech as soon as accreditation hurdles and other legal niceties happen, likely years from now. By this August, to facilitate this transformation, LSUS would move out of the Louisiana State University System and into the University of Louisiana System.

Glover gave a completely different reason for the change than did supporters of the 2012 move. Then, they argued the LSU System neglected the campus that they claimed was slowly wasting away. At the time, the System said it would introduce measures to cut costs and boost enrollments, such as expanding course and degree offerings through its flagship institutions in Baton Rouge.

Cantrell wins, perhaps despite her influence

New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell won, even though she may not have had anything to do with it.

Last weekend, dozens of local measures peppered ballots across the state for voter assessment. Perhaps the most prominent was a proposal to increase property taxes on New Orleanians designed to pass through to fund operations of the New Orleans Council on Aging.

Although the City Council unanimously put the measure on the ballot and no other area elected officials opposed it, Cantrell did so. She rightly pointed out that the city ought not to lock in a new tax the proceeds of which likely would have distributed by a nongovernment organization, but that the city should have more direct control over these disbursements which wouldn’t necessarily need a new tax to fund that commitment.

LA GOP, conservatives suffer election setbacks

Things didn’t go as planned for Louisiana Republicans in the weekend’s runoff elections, raising doubts about their ability to significantly expand their legislative majorities this fall.

This year so far, three special election runoffs have occurred in House of Representatives districts. Republicans had hoped, in net, to gain a House seat as a result of special elections kicked off last month. Contests predictable in their partisan outcomes settled then, with two of the three resolved this past weekend having implications for the chamber’s partisan balance.

One seemed a forgone conclusion, in District 18 where Democrat Jeremy Lacombe had far outpaced Republican Tammi Fabre and the remainder split mostly among Democrats. With 22 percent having gone to a black candidate and Lacombe having pulled 45 percent in the general election, that Fabre in the runoff ended up eating a little into the votes of candidates who finished off the pace provided only slight comfort to the GOP, with Lacombe winning decisively in a district that Republicans won handily in the past two statewide elections of candidates for federal office.