Louisiana Politics: LABI scorecard generates some bad grades

By Jeremy Alford
LaPolitics.com
The annual legislative scorecard compiled by the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry was released Tuesday and includes a grade of “F” for 94 members of the Louisiana Legislature.
The rankings represent a major review for some lawmakers, who rely on their scores to trigger campaign donations from LABI’s political action committees. The need for cash and support is even more noticeable this year, with elections slated for the fall.
It’s no secret that lawmakers leaned heavily on business to close a $1.6 billion budget shortfall, passing a slew of measures that amount to tax increases. Although LABI and others managed to negotiate sunsets on the measures, meaning they’ll expire in one to three years in some cases, the business lobby walked away from the session feeling many lawmakers had switched jerseys in the final session of their term.
“The scorecard will reflect that,” said LABI president Stephen Waguespack, who wrote in the scorecard’s introduction that “this was the highest tax increase in Louisiana in decades.”
The majority of lawmakers received a grade of “F” this session, with 64 failing in the House and 30 in the Senate, which will make pulling money out of LABI’s political action committees this fall all the more difficult. It could also open up new opportunities for incumbents to be challenged.
Only two lawmakers failed to break 20 percent, including Rep. Jack Montoucent, D-Crowley, with 16 percent, and Sen. David Heitmeier, D-New Orleans, with 18 percent. Only 12 lawmakers earned “A” grades.
According to Camille P. Conaway, LABI’s vice president for policy and research, the bills that raised taxes were weighted heavily in the scorecard, pulling down the 2015 and overall cumulative scores for a number of legislators. Between half and two-thirds of the 2015 score relies on the tax votes, she added.
But LABI isn’t the only group with a scorecard that causes heartburn for tax-supporting Republicans. The Louisiana chapter of the conservative Americans For Prosperity released its tally last week.
AFP has already sunk $60,000 into radio ads promoting LouisianaScorecard.com and may dump just as much into fall field operations like door-to-door outreach and online advertising.
“It was a disappointing session with legislators throwing tax after tax at the wall to see what would stick,” saidAFP’s state director Phillip Joffrion.
The radio spot lashes out at lawmakers for passing “gimmicks, short term fixes and over $700 million in tax hikes” to balance the budget, and for adopting “a scheme to usher in Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.”

Freshman steers
clear of endorsements
While other members of Congress from inside Louisiana and out dish up endorsements for governor and attorney general here, as well as other races, freshman U.S. Rep. Garret Graves of Baton Rouge has remained quiet following his solid win in the 6th Congressional District.
Those close to him say that may very well be the Republican’s approach heading into the fall. Time will tell.
“His priority right now is not to tell people who to vote for,” said Graves spokesperson Kevin Roig. “He was sent to Washington to work on the policies and issues that are important to folks back home, and that’s his focus right now.”

Anti-union push
will be revived
As Louisiana proponents of legislation to ban automatic deductions of union dues from public payrolls look ahead to 2016, they’re trying to glean lessons from similar debates in other states this year.
Like the Legislature here, which saw its anti-union bill stalled on the House floor after committee passage, legislators in Texas failed to move a comparable measure after it was advanced by the Senate. During the session’s final moments in Texas, a vote was not scheduled as concerns were voiced about the political burdens it would place on lawmakers, with both unions and business heavily lobbying the issue.
That kind of noisy debate was shaping up in Louisiana when Rep. Stuart Bishop, R-Lafayette, decided not to push for a vote on the House floor during the recent session as his colleagues asked for relief from the pressure. Bishop, however, has said since then that he is planning to re-file the bill in 2016 and it will be his first piece of legislation introduced.
In Oklahoma, lawmakers there did manage to pass a bill prohibiting automatic deductions, but only for unions with monopoly-bargaining privileges at public schools and higher education institutions. Supporters claimed it was watered down, since it did not capture all union activity, but they still cheered it as a first step. Lobbyists who are tracking the issue nationally are already predicting the 2016 model bills for other states, possibly even Louisiana, may defer to the scaled-back approach seen in Oklahoma.
In Kansas, a payroll deduction bill stalled this year after opponents amended it to include bans on donations to charitable organizations, like United Way. Lawmakers in the Louisiana House were planning the same treatment for Bishop’s bill before it was stalled, offering an early preview of defensive maneuvers that may resurface in 2016.

LED has new
assistant secretary
Mandi D. Mitchell, who cultivated a savvy reputation at Louisiana Economic Development handling legislative affairs, congressional relations and federal programs, has been promoted to assistant secretary.
The staff at LED were made aware of the personnel change late last month by new Secretary Steven Grissom, who was appointed to replace Stephen Moret, now the CEO and president of the LSU Foundation.
In a letter to his staff, Grissom called Mitchell a “state and community leader,” noting her previous lobbying work at AT&T Louisiana. Mitchell is expected to retain her previous responsibilities of handling legislative and congressional issues.
But her new role also includes managing business intelligence, community competitiveness, small business services and state economic competitiveness, according to LED’s website.
The promotion places Mitchell in the No. 2 position at LED as elections for the next governor and Legislature get underway this fall. New governor traditionally bring in a new slate of department and agency heads, but it’s not unheard of for them to retain secretaries and undersecretaries as well.

They said it
“I knew the minute that it was said that there was trouble.”
—Lizzy Olsen, Miss District of Columbia 2015, on Donald Trump’s comments about Mexican immigrants that prompted two television networks to pull out of the Baton Rouge-hosted pageant, in Vanity Fair

“It’s clever, and it’s self-serving.”
—Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist at Public Citizen, on U.S. Sen. David Vitter’s frequent Senate committee meetings held in Louisiana over the past year, in Bloomberg
For more Louisiana political news, visit www.LaPolitics.com or follow Jeremy Alford on Twitter @LaPoliticsNow.