Jones promises continued funds for parish projects

Rep. Sam Jones said the local legislative delegation will continue to bring infrastructure money into St. Mary Parish.
Jones (D-Dist. 50) spoke to St. Mary Chamber of Commerce members Wednesday at a legislative breakfast event held at the Forest Restaurant in Franklin.
Jones said the legislative appropriations committee chairman has not conversed with Gov. Bobby Jindal in a year and a half. “How in the world does (he) not be able to have an opportunity to speak to the governor? I think the governor’s given up.”
He said Gov. Kathleen Blanco left $1.4 billion in the general fund surplus.
“I went to Crowell Elementary and Franklin High School,” Jones said. “I learned math, and I learned a couple principles early on: You cannot spend more than you have, and on the rare occasion when you have to do a capital outlay purchase… you do it on a payment plan you know you can pay for. In the meantime, you can’t cut out the kitchen and the restroom of the house.”
Jones said the legislature will tackle the budget problem as best they can but “the only thing that’s going to solve this is an election.”
He blamed “when you give somebody a tax credit and you pay them beyond what their liability was to the state. If someone from Washington state comes to Louisiana and decides to sink $100 million into a school system somewhere, the state would reimburse him 95 percent of that money on demand. When that item came up four years ago I fought it, but wasn’t in the majority.”
Jones said that tax credit should be capped to prevent huge reimbursements.
“We still give Tom Benson $25 million a year for the Saints,” he said. “In the last few years Tom Benson has bought a yacht, bought a TV station and built an $11 million building at the Football Hall of Fame named for himself. Congratulation, you paid for that.”
He said he tries to eliminate that fund item every year and is never successful.
Jones said he was against Common Core from its initial emergence. “It has many problems, and one of them is the one size fits all problem,” he said. “We’re sixteenth in student graduation rates… they started measuring in 1965 and we were falling behind the Russians. Somebody did a study, and the United States came out sixteenth. We’re sixteenth now.”
He said such fears have repeated themselves over the years, but “I’m still betting on us. There’s something called American exceptionalism… I will take the 10 smartest people in the United States over the 10 smartest people from every country all over the world, and I will follow where they lead us with innovation and ideas and we’ll beat them every time.”
Oil-producing nations abroad are flooding the market with oil because their economies need the money from oil sales, Jones said. But the United States is natural gas independent, and no imports are necessary. “How did that happen? American exceptionalism. Someone solved the problem of getting too hard to get to natural gas.”
Jones said Louisiana is “one of only two states that has cut funding for higher education over the last seven years. We are the only state that has failed to increase spending on elementary and secondary education. We’ve had tuition increases for higher education that have increased costs 90 percent.”
He promised that the local delegation “will get our share of infrastructure. We’ve been able to bring back $160 million to this parish” in capital projects.
Jones said upcoming projects include bridge repairs, road resurfacing and other infrastructure.