Legislators: Most of budget gap closed, but still disappointed

Area legislators left the state’s special legislative session Wednesday frustrated despite the Legislature closing all but roughly $30 million of the state’s budget gap for the next four months, several legislators said this morning.
State Sen. Bret Allain, Rep. Sam Jones and Rep. Beryl Amedee were the guest speakers during today’s St. Mary Chamber of Commerce legislative breakfast at the Petroleum Club of Morgan City.
The Legislature finished its three-week special budget session Wednesday. Gov. John Bel Edwards called the session solely to solve the state’s budget shortfall for the 2015-16 fiscal year ending June 30 and to begin fixing the projected 2016-17 budget deficit.
Allain, R-Franklin, said legislators finished the 2015-16 state budget gap to $32 million, but the state is still facing a $813 million deficit for the 2016-17 fiscal year. The Legislature started the special session with a $956 million shortfall for the remainder of the 2015-16 year, and a $2.3 billion shortfall for the 2016-17 fiscal year.
Jones, D-Franklin, said the house leadership was “an absolute failure” in the three-week session. Representatives “sat around for days” waiting for the house leadership to present bills that would fix the state’s budget problems, Jones said.
Members of house leader-ship are the only ones that can send bills to the senate to fix the budget problems, and, for days, “they did nothing,” Jones said.
“We didn’t really do a whole lot of anything other than to try to patch holes so we just didn’t have a total collapse,” he said.
Amedee, R-Gray, who took office in January, said the outcome of the session was “very disappointing” because legislators didn’t cut the entire 2015-16 budget shortfall.
The Legislature faced many unprecedented obstacles, including the severity of the budget issues and speed at which they had to address those problems, she said.
However, the Legislature did pass two main revenue-increasing measures, which included raising the state’s four-cent sales tax by one cent and getting rid of sales tax exemptions that “special interest groups” had, Jones said.
Allain said the one-cent sales tax increase is just a short-term fix and will stay in place through the end of the 2017-18 fiscal year.
Allain was “embarrassed” that the conference commit-tee reports on both of those major revenue raising bills didn’t get to the senate until 15 minutes before the session ended.
“We didn’t get to double-check them. We didn’t get to read them,” Allain said.
The Legislature has to make changes to ensure that all legislators have adequate time to read those reports, Allain said.
Legislators had to raise taxes so they wouldn’t “do serious damage” to higher education and state hospitals, Allain said. Close to $200 million in budget cuts were also made during the special session, he said.
Amedee hopes legislators will work on providing the necessary structural changes to the budget in the future.
“Good ole boy politics was still alive and well” during the session, she said.
In the last hour of the session, Amedee said she received threats of cuts to schools in her district if she didn’t do “the governor’s bidding.”
“We have to do what’s right. We have to represent the people that elected us,” Amedee said.
The Legislature also took $126 million from the state’s “rainy day fund,” which can only be done every other year, and used non-coastal BP oil spill settlement money to patch the budget, Allain said.
Raising revenues in the special session was easy in comparison to the monumental task of fixing the state budget’s structural problems, Allain said.
Legislators’ “no votes” get the state nowhere and means there won’t be money for items such as fixing the La. 182 bridge in Morgan City as an escape route or minimum foundation program funds for state public schools, which are facing a possible $44 million cut, Jones said.
Legislators won’t have much time to rest as they will go into the 2016 regular session Monday. The Legislature cannot raise revenues during the regular session so the Legislature will likely have another special budget session later this year.