HOUMA, La. (AP) - Recent editorials from Louisiana newspapers:
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March 8
NOLA.com/The Times-Picayune on the state’s budget:
This is how knotted up Louisiana’s budget is: Roughly $24.5 billion of the total $29.7 billion budget proposed by Gov. John Bel Edwards is tied to specific programs and expenses, according to an analysis by The Associated Press.
Either it is federal money that can only be used as Congress or the executive branch allows. Or it is dedicated by state statute or the Louisiana Constitution to certain services.
Even the $9.5 billion general fund, which is the most flexible pot of money in the budget process, has strings attached. Lawmakers are required to spend about $4.3 billion on K-12 education, elections, debt payments and other mandated costs, the AP said. That leaves a little more than $5 billion for legislators to divide up.
The lack of flexibility is a main reason that health care and higher education have been hit with cuts time after time over the past decade as legislators and the governor’s office made cuts to balance the budget.
Gov. Edwards called lawmakers into special session in February to close a $304 million midyear budget deficit. With the regular session set to start in April, the state is short about $440 million to provide services at the level Gov. Edwards thinks are needed for the budget year that starts July 1.
So in his proposed budget, neither the TOPS scholarship program nor hospitals that serve the poor are fully funded.
There may be less painful places to cut than those, but those are off limits. They don’t have to stay that way, though.
The Legislature could remove the some of the statutory dedications on revenues and could ask voters to change constitutional dedications.
The Louisiana Association of Business & Industry argues that would be an important step toward budget reform. Unlocking dedicated funds created over the years would allow lawmakers to better prioritize existing dollars and give the public more oversight of spending, LABI officials said.
In 2015, LABI looked in-depth at how the state spends its money. The report broke down the portion of the budget that is locked up by statutory and constitutional protections. Some of the protected categories haven’t been reviewed in years and may not be a smart use of money based on the state’s current needs.
Then-Gov. Buddy Roemer and the Legislature abolished more than 100 statutory dedications to get more spending flexibility to deal with the oil bust in the 1980s, the LABI report said. Those changes didn’t last. “Since then, dedications have been created year after year, slowly locking away billions of dollars in state tax revenue for specific functions of state and local government,” the report said. The number of dedicated funds has exploded since the 1988 budget year - increasing from 78 to 393, LABI said.
Dedicated revenue has skyrocketed for some agencies, the LABI study found. The Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism had only $40,000 of dedicated revenue in the 2005 budget year. That had grown to $10 million by 2015. The statutory dedications for the attorney general’s office grew by 239 percent in that period - from $6.6 million in fiscal year 2005 to $22 million in 2015. The Department of Wildlife and Fisheries nearly doubled its dedicated revenue over that decade, from $62 million to $118 million.
The overall result is that some agencies are protected from cuts while others, like higher education and health care, get tapped repeatedly.
That isn’t a smart way to make the most out of the resources we have.
Agreeing on what dedications to remove might not be easy. The agencies or groups whose budget allocations are essentially protected won’t want to give that up. And some dedicated revenue is going where it should.
But having more flexibility to move money around to meet the state’s top priorities makes sense. Lawmakers should take a hard look at which dedications make sense and which don’t.
Online:
https://www.nola.com/
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March 7
The Advocate on New Orleans monuments:
On hearing Monday’s news that New Orleans city officials can move ahead with plans to take down several Confederate monuments, we first felt as if we were revisiting a piece of history as remote as the Confederacy itself.
Residents started arguing about the monuments in 2015. So much has happened in the life of Louisiana and the nation since then that what once looked like a major controversy now seems small by comparison.
In the months since New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu suggested that the monuments should go, the state has experienced a controversial police shooting in Baton Rouge, the subsequent deaths of three Baton Rouge law enforcement officers at the hands of a disturbed gunman, and two major floods. Along the way, Louisiana joined the rest of the nation in electing a new president after one of the most divisive campaigns in American history.
The once-vivid debate about what should happen to four New Orleans monuments, including prominently displayed statues of Confederate leaders Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and P.G.T. Beauregard, is probably about a hundred arguments ago in the record of rancor that’s become our body politic.
But the battle over the monuments, which took a big turn on Monday with a court ruling clearing the way for their removal, appeared to anticipate the deep cultural divide that continues to dominate our civic life here and across the nation.
Landrieu promoted the idea that the monuments should be removed from their prominent perches in the city, arguing that they evoked a racist past not in keeping with a progressive community. The end result of a subsequent review process that led to a City Council vote to remove the monuments looked like a foregone conclusion. In announcing his opposition to the monuments before public input began, the mayor seemed to signal that the outcome of the process was never really in doubt. Critics of the removal plan cast it as political correctness run amok - an attempt to erase the complicated history behind the Civil War.
The monuments debate, which attracted attention throughout Louisiana and the country, created sharp battle lines, the whole debate trending toward conflict rather than consensus. Naturally, the losers went to court, so often a forum of last resort these days when political dysfunction fails to foster common ground.
But a three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week that the plaintiffs had no grounds to prevent city officials from removing the monuments. A Landrieu spokesman said the city will seek bids for the removal soon. An anonymous donor is paying for the work.
Regardless of their views on the issue, New Orleans residents should honor the court’s ruling, and we hope the removal process is a peaceful one. If the Civil War taught us nothing else, it’s that even in the heat of political strife, we should look to our fellow citizens as partners, not adversaries.
Online:
https://www.theadvocate.com/
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March 2
The Courier of Houma on the U.S. News and World Report ranking Louisiana last on its Best States list:
Louisiana has found itself at the wrong end of another list.
This time, U.S. News and World Report ranked Louisiana last on its Best States list, which was released on Tuesday.
The list, compiled for the first time by the magazine, measured each state on a number of factors, including health care, education, crime and corrections, infrastructure, opportunity, economy and government. Each category also included subcategories.
Louisiana was at or near the bottom in crime and corrections (last), opportunity (49th), education (46th), economy (46th), government (46th), health care (45th) and infrastructure (39th).
Rankings like this do two things: They give us a compelling reason to examine where we are and where we would like to go.
Importantly, the ranking leaves out some important information about Louisiana.
First, there is no way to measure our culture, our love of family and our commitment to one another.
Those qualities, though real, don’t lend themselves to qualitative rankings such as the magazine’s.
Second, some of our information has changed.
“This is a great effort and could be a valuable tool in guiding public policy, but the initial report lacks critical information and uses outdated statistics that pre-date the current administration,” Gov. John Bel Edwards’ spokesman Richard Carbo said. “While the governor understands there are areas for improvement, the methodology used in this report to take a quick score of every state certainly doesn’t come close to capturing the very best parts of making a life here in Louisiana.”
For instance, Louisiana has covered 400,000 people with health insurance through its expansion of Medicaid, a fact that should have improved our standing in at least one of the rankings’ categories.
Still, the list does give us some food for thought.
For instance, it rightly points out some of our biggest challenges, such as crime and education.
We cannot afford to ignore the problems we do have. While our shortcomings and challenges do not define us or completely sum up where we stand in relation to other states, they deserve spots at the top of our list of priorities.
Unfortunately, the longer we put off addressing our long-term budget problems, the more difficult it will be to properly address our priorities.
If we take this ranking as an urgent call to action, it will be a blessing.
Online:
https://www.houmatoday.com/
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