Author: manshipxgr

By Justin DiCharia

BATON ROUGE — Two-year-old Juno Roy breathes with the help of an oxygen tank strapped on the side of her stroller. Her parents, Jessica and Brian Roy of Baton Rouge, feed her through a tube, often finding themselves in a hospital hoping a small infection does not turn fatal.

Juno was left at a Louisiana Safe Haven, a state-run facility where a desperate mother can leave her infant if she can’t care for it, no questions asked. She had been born three and half months premature. The Roy family fostered her for a year before officially adopting Juno. They were well aware of the odds against her survival.

Doctors told the family Juno would not make it through the first year, but she defied them all and is nearing her third birthday.

If the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services is underfunded this coming year, Secretary Marketa Garner Walters told the Senate Finance Committee Monday, it will become exponentially harder to find foster care parents for children with severe disabilities and conditions like Juno Roy.

Read the story in The Daily World

By Jack Richards

BATON ROUGE — The House failed to pass a bill Monday providing regulatory teeth to the internet sales tax law passed during the earlier special session over pleas from small business owners in the Legislature.

House Bill 1121 by Rep. Walt Leger, D-New Orleans, received the approval of 66 members of the 105-member House, but because it raised taxes it required a two-thirds majority, or 70 votes.

Read the story in The Advertiser

By Samuel Carter Karlin

BATON ROUGE — Some House Republicans, wary of Gov. John Bel Edwards’ budget figures and reluctant to raise more taxes, are questioning whether the state truly has a $600 million shortfall, with one legislator estimating the shortfall could be up to half that figure.

House Appropriations Committee chairman Cameron Henry, R-Metairie, believes Edwards’ spending targets — nearly $9 billion in spending — are too high.

Read the story in The Eunice News

By Justin DiCharia

BATON ROUGE — College fee bills are likely to increase to cover an $80 million cut to the LSU and UL system schools around the state, according to system heads.

Higher education system presidents testified before an education-friendly Senate Finance Committee Friday, highlighting the statewide contributions of each university and chastising the eight-year trend of divesting in state universities and colleges.

Read the story in The News-Star

By Jack Richards

BATON ROUGE — The group of non-legislators given the responsibility of making Louisiana financially stable in the future Friday crafted recommendations for Gov. John Bel Edwards to include in his expected call for another special session that specifically will address the state’s looming budget deficit.

The Task Force on Structural Changes in the Budget and Tax Policy will not have a final report until September, but it drafted preliminary recommendations so the governor can focus the agenda of the special session that he indicates he may call on June 6.

Read the story in The Shreveport Times

By Justin DiCharia

BATON ROUGE — Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate per capita in the nation with one in 26 residents under correctional control, and Jimmy LeBlanc, head of the state’s prison system, believes the looming $39 million shortage in much needed funding to local and state prisons won’t help change that statistic.

Read the story in The Town Talk

 

By Jack Richards

BATON ROUGE — Louisiana students may have one more thing to recite in their morning homerooms if House Bill 1035, which gets a full hearing before the House of Representatives next week, passes into law.

The chamber’s Education Committee voted 6-2 to approve a bill that requires fourth through sixth grade students to memorize and recite a 56-word passage from the Declaration of Independence.

Rep. Valarie Hodges, R-Denham Springs, said she brought the bill because her daughter could not tell her what the Declaration, adopted on July 4, 1775, announcing to King George III the 13 colonies were breaking away from England, said even after studying it in school.

Read the story in The Eunice News

By Jack Richards

BATON ROUGE — It was expected to be a simple vote on a bill to raise standards and crack down on human trafficking in strip clubs.

Rep. Walt Leger, D-New Orleans, who was handling Senate Bill 468 in the House, was wrapping up his arguments about the importance of preventing young women from being taken, exploited or sexually compromised.

Then the jokes started flying.

Read the story in The Advertiser

By Jack Richards

BATON ROUGE — Higher education leaders are preparing to woo out-of-state students with lower tuition to help “subsidize” in-state students and their universities and better compete with peer schools.

House Bill 989, which passed the Senate Education Committee Wednesday without objection, would allow higher education boards to lower tuition and fees for out-of-state students in an “economics of scale” effort to boost enrollment. It moves to the full Senate for debate.

Current law requires tuition and fees for non-residents to be at least equal to the average of other southern schools.

Read the story in The Advertiser

By Jack Richards

BATON ROUGE — The Senate voted unanimously Tuesday to remove the firearm requirement for a charge of aggravated assault of a police officer.  In a separate action, it also made attacks against police, firefighters and EMT personnel hate crimes.

House bill 582, by Rep. Katrina Jackson, D-Monroe, would allow a district attorney to charge someone with the more serious aggravated assault count if the officer was attacked with, for example, a knife or machete. The bill now goes to the governor.

Read the story in The Advertiser