Finally, the right thing was done. But was it done
for the right reason?
Yesterday, the Louisiana Supreme Court affirmed
that it would not take another look at its decision nearly two weeks ago not to
review lower
court rulings dealing with whether St. Tammany Parish zoning laws could
overrule a land use decision made at the state level. This involved drilling an
exploratory well that in the future could lead to the use of the hydraulic
fracturing technique that has become controversial through sensationalized
opposition to it. As soon as the company had word of the declination, it
spudded in.
Of considerable amusement over this two-years-plus
odyssey has been the reaction
of a vocal minority of St. Tammany residents, some of whom drew upon every imaginable
discredited allegation against the practice of fracking to argue why it never
should happen. In this time, science has settled with even more certainty that,
as long as drillers
follow safety protocols, the process
does not cause any realistic danger (including the overblown assertion that
they cause meaningful earthquakes, although the less common practice of
injecting wastewater into deep wells, which can be regulated against, is theorized
as a potential cause of these).
Seems Gov. John Bel Edwards and
his Administration’s campaign
of employing the Goebbels Principle to create a distorted view of the
Democrat’s first six months in office could not wait for the launching of its
formal tour.
Both Edwards the organ grinder and his monkey
sidekick Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne laid on the
balloon juice thick and fast in the past couple of days: Edwards through a series
of poison pen letters-to-the-editor
and Dardenne in comments when sought out by the media in response to cogent
remarks about the recently-concluded legislative sessions made by Treasurer John
Kennedy, also a candidate for the U.S. Senate. Kennedy
noted in an address that state spending in the budget had escalated by
about a third in just six years, fueled by $2.4 billion in higher taxes – all approved
by Edwards as a legislator and governor.
Dardenne in response said while the budget Edwards
recommended that largely made its way into to law was the largest since those
of the previous decade that were inflated by disaster recovery spending, the
current effort he alleged represented a more honest look at revenues and
expenditures. Yet examining that claim more closely shows a good bit of
dishonesty unto itself.
The announcement that Louisiana’s state government
intends rather than to rehabilitate to build a new Jimmie Davis Highway Bridge
over the Red River stirs more questions than answers where politics may interfere
with sensible use of taxpayer dollars.
Apparently, barn
swallows triggered this change in direction. The federally-protected
species insists on building nests on the sides under bridge decking and delayed
the project two years while everybody involved figured out how to chase them
away. Last month, both the state and contractor gave up, leaving motorists to
wonder just how much longer the bridge would remain safe to use.
Then last week, Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards
dramatically announced that instead he would seek to reallocate the existing $23.4
million in funding for the fixup to a new span. For years denizens particularly
in Bossier City dreamed of four lanes crossing, and plans have floated to build
another span. Mayor Lo Walker, referring to numbers of at least a decade ago,
estimated the cost of that at $60-80 million. Apparently, the $14 million or so
in federal funding could transfer over to kick start the process, and state
Sen. Barrow Peacock, who always has
preferred a new span over redoing the old one, cleverly inserted language to
speed up the process in case the state went for new over refurbish.
Seems that Gov. John Bel Edwards
plans to launch an apology/blame
tour now that he took some knocks in his first legislative sessions as
governor. As we might expect, not much of what follows from it should we
believe -- even if we pay for it.
Edwards, along with his new best friend forever
Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne, look to
invade legislators’ hometowns over the next two weeks to spin what happened in
the regular session sandwiched by two special sessions. What
happened was when comparing the state’s baseline spending – ranked
18th per capita among the states – to expected revenues
Louisiana would come up way short in the upcoming fiscal year, and over the
course of these sessions taxes went up $1.5 billion (after hikes of $800
million last year), general fund spending increased $800 million or 10 percent,
and total spending escalated $2 billion or 8 percent.
Yet somehow that wasn’t enough for Democrat Edwards,
who feuded with Republicans, particularly in the House, over raising taxes that
left him more than $300 million less than he wanted. So prepare ourselves for
the litany of excuses and red herrings to come from him an attempt to warp the
reality of the matter.
Even as he goes down to defeat, Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards
could not help but extend his hand up and parallel to him, with palm facing him,
lowering his pinky, and telling a number of Louisiana families to read between
the lines.
He reacted as such when learning that the
Louisiana House of Representatives’ budget plan included a provision that if
the Taylor Opportunity Program for Scholars did not receive full funding that
recipients would frontload tuition payments. The Republican leaders who
backed the notion felt that a change in fiscal fortunes would produce more
money than anticipated later in the fiscal year and if not then families would
have more time to secure alternative funding. At present, TOPS appears to have only 70 percent funding.
However, neither of these rationales made a
favorable impression on Edwards, who wanted to lard up at least another couple
of hundred million dollars’ worth of tax increases on top of the $2.3 billion
legislated over the past 13 months to close the gap. Keep in mind Edwards
himself in his executive budget proposed cuts to TOPS, as a strategy to coerce
the GOP majorities in the Legislature to hike taxes.
A virtually parenthetical comment derived essentially from a
footnote created a bit of turmoil at the Board of Elementary and Secondary
Education, illustrating a larger debasement of the scope and purpose of public
policy research that has wafted through policy discourse for the past half-century.
During
a routine report adoption, Louisiana School
Board Association Executive Director Scott Richard challenged a passage
that noted the state’s Student Scholarships for Excellence Program, known
colloquially as a voucher program that allows lower-income families with
students at or who otherwise would attend low-performing schools to have the
state pay for tuition at a qualifying public or private school up to a certain
level, saved the state money. He pointed out a sentence in a February Legislative
Fiscal Office report alleged that the state would save $8.3 million without
the program.
BESE gubernatorial appointee Doris Voitier then
asked for the report’s alteration to include the LFO snippet. It is no accident
that Richard, whose clients generally loath the program because it both
highlights their failures and removes resources from their control, and
Voitier, a careerist of government monopoly schools whose appointer Gov. John
Bel Edwards opposes vouchers and in this year’s budget tried
to scale back funding of these, called for this. So the report forwarded to
the Legislature will have both, treated as equal.
A couple of announcements last week confirmed what
my Advocate colleague Stephanie Grace
argued as the coming
of the “permanent campaign” to Louisiana gubernatorial politics, one of
these proffering a surprise that perhaps demonstrates how far its tentacles
have reached and what it means going forward.
Grace notes that Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards’
statement – just a bit over six months into a four-year term – that he would
run for reelection signals a mindset that state politicians increasingly
incorporate campaign optics into the governing strategies they employ and
therefore the issue preferences advanced and the methods they used to do that.
She speculated that the Republican-led Legislature, particularly the House, and
GOP Atty. Gen. Jeff
Landry, a potential rival to Edwards’ reelection, in the methods they
oppose and/or try to upstage Edwards in the pursuit of his agenda, join Edwards
in this mode of governance.
However, less well-noticed at about the same time
Edwards confirmed the obvious that Republican Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser in
a speech insisted
he swore off running for governor, thus against Edwards, in 2019. In the
first half of the year, Nungesser had coordinated with a leading Republican
Party official in an odd,
if not far-fetched, scheme to bring business to the state apparently
without Edwards’ knowledge, despite that his job description has nothing to do
with such efforts. Such a move could be seen as attempting to raise his profile
for ascension to the state’s top spot.
The toxic mixture of envy and cluelessness of
Louisiana’s Democrats went
on full display yesterday, captured by a single remark with the handiwork
of their governing philosophy as the background noise.
In the wake of the failure of HB 38 by
state Rep. Malinda
White, which for the next two years only would have allowed deductibility
of 57.5 percent of excess federal income tax deductions on state individual income
taxes unless the combination of mortgage interest and charitable contributions
exceeded that mark, state Rep. Gene Reynolds,
head of the chamber’s Democrats, stupidly opined “They voted to protect the
interests of the super-rich.” From such a statement, and if representative of
the state’s Democrats, demonstrates they have no clue about the bill’s potential
consequences or the bankruptcy of the ideology behind it.
Officials of the foremost backer of the bill,
Democrat Gov. John
Bel Edwards, alleged that most of the 23 percent of returns that took the
deduction concerned filers of $100,000 and over. The latest data (fiscal year 2014)
indicate that about 25 percent took it, at an average of a little over $2,800.
