Legislators: State sessions were 19 weeks of chaos

Area legislators were the guests at a St. Mary Chamber of Commerce luncheon Wednesday in Franklin.
Representative Beryl A. Amedee, (Dist. 51) was elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives in November, 2015 and an “unprecedented” series of legislative sessions awaited.
Amedee told guests that the legislature was in session for 19 weeks. “In the future, what I’m hoping is that we have some unprecedented answers and results, and changes, to the way we’ve been doing things so we don’t have this anymore,” she said.
She was assigned to the appropriations committee where “we get first crack at budget problems and solutions…the best description of our state budget that I’ve ever heard is a rubber band ball, and by the time I got here all the rubber bands had been exposed to heat and time, all melted together.”
Among bills that made it through the legislature were changing the requirements for the La. One Call program; a fee on cellphones of $1-2 month depending on the cell plan to augment 911 services on cellular service; limits on extended auto warranty companies, and more.
Working on the House floor is “like trying to take the ACT, in Walmart, on Black Friday, that’s how wild it is sometimes,” Amedee said.
Amedee said the state capital outlay bill contains $2 billion in projects, but only $317 million to spend. “If we don’t sell much in bonds in July, that money will be all gone,” she said. “And if we do sell, that money’ll be gone by December. I’m going to call for capital outlay reform. As much as our budget proposal has been true and has not contained one-time money, given us a more realistic picture of our budget, capital outlay still has a long way to go if you’re looking for a bill that deals in reality.”
Amedee said she often hears that people who are elected to public office always seem to “change.” She said her core beliefs are that government should live within its means; that increasing the tax burden on business is like “shooting yourself in the foot”; every tax dollar was earned by someone, and it is a sacred trust to decide how those tax dollars are spent.
She will meet with her constituents during the off-season, seeking input and answering questions, including the education community, local governments, tourist officials and others. “Lt. Governor (Billy) Nungesser has already contacted me to call a meeting…about how his office can help us with festivals and events in our area.”
Rep. Sam Jones (Dist. 50) said the legislature was in session so long “we didn’t know if it was day or night sometimes.”
Jones said the Senate “is like a country club…it’s so quiet and respectful” while the House is “Black Friday at Walmart every day. We do not know, when we go in, how any bill is going to come out.”
He said this year is “the hangover of the Bobby Jindal mess, the first year of spending $2-3 billion more than what you had in recurring dollars, the refusal of the former administration to make cuts but just spend until everything was gone. Every reserve fund there was in the state is gone. The $850 in the Medicaid senior trust fund is gone. The $550 million in the group benefits fund is gone. I can go on and on. It got so bad that the transportation fund was being robbed…siphoned out to pay for the operations of the state police.”
Worst of all, Jones said, the thirteenth payment for Medicaid reimbursement through the Department of Health and Hospitals and the managed care corporations was “kicked over to this year” at a cost of $300 million.
“That’s just what we know, there could be more,” Jones said.
He said there was “no appetite for tax reform” in the three sessions.
“We write a check to some of the biggest international companies who have net profits as high as $60 billion a year, we write them a check to be here,” he said. “That needs to be corrected, but it takes courage to take on the big boys.”
He said he believes in business incentives but “to continue to pay people without that check and balance” is counterintuitive.
Jones did not vote for the final appropriations bill. “There was no reason for us to not have 100 percent funded TOPS,” he said. “There were no real New Opportunities Waiver (NOW) waivers. I am happy to say we protected our hospitals, the Medicare expansion.”
He noted that there are projects still listed in the state capital outlay budget that have been finished for many years. “I don’t know how much of that $2 billion is real or not real, but I have confidence in this governor and Commissioner (Jay) Dardenne.”
Sen. Bret Allain (Dist. 51) said the House “is like the wild, wild west,” returning Jones’ comparison between to the two legislative branches.
He declared that the legislature “we didn’t fix anything, nothing” in three sessions.
Allain said the state’s budget woes were enormous. With reports of the budget being $2 billion above the previous year, he said that is true, but it was comprised of the last payment to medical vendors of $150 million; another $150 million more unpaid to medical vendors; Medicaid expansion at about $400 million just for signing up; and more spread out throughout the budget. He complimented Gov. John Bel Edwards for “being honest in his budget…maybe not a ‘standstill’ budget, but he was close.”
The senator said he is “done with cutting higher education. They’ve taken a 38 percent cut in the last eight years, you’re fixing to do serious damage to the institution that we plug billions of dollars into. That was our first victory. We got additional money for the medical schools…they’re in a place they can survive.”
There was a $50.5 million allocation to hospitals in the state that used to be public facilities in the charity system, Allain said. They had asked for some $85 million. “We think that’s at a rate they can survive until we get over this mess,” he said.
Also, TOPS is 70 percent funded, “probably our most popular program, sending our kids to school and keeping the best and the brightest here, is only funded 70 percent.”
One of two dollars previously cut was returned to sheriffs for costs of housing prisoners; $20 million for K-12 through the minimum foundation program; $6.7 million for non-public educational requirements; $4 million for the voucher system, rather than $6 million.
“It’s was the best spread of the money he had available to do the least amount of damage,” he said. “We’ve got to deal with inventory tax credit, the industrial tax exemption. Exxon’s contribution in a similar sized refinery in Texas is almost $60 million. We gave them back $5 million last year, and a lot of thing had to do with the inventory tax credit, that type of thing. If we don’t make the changes, get this budget on an even keel, we will continue to have these problems. If we don’t, you gotta replace every damn one of us.”