LSU Manship School Statehouse Bureau

By: Madeline Meyer, LSU Manship School News Service

Published: May 13, 2019

BATON ROUGE–The House Transportation Committee approved bills Monday to authorize high-occupancy vehicle lanes and study higher fines for drivers who injure or kill motorcyclists and pedestrians.

The high-occupancy lanes, which would be a first for Louisiana, are designated for vehicles with more than one person. The bill, proposed by Senator Dale Erdey, R-Livingston, is intended to reduce traffic overflow by re-labeling lanes with adequate shoulders.

Erdey said one possible place for an HOV lane would be from I-12 in Walker to the I-10 and I-12 split in Baton Rouge. This bottleneck, the committee chairman, Rep. Terry Landry, D-New Iberia, said, causes commuters to get stuck in the corridor between Baton Rouge and Hammond.

Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston all have high-occupancy lanes.

The committee also approved a study that helps motorcyclists and other vulnerable road users.

In 2018, 79 motorcyclists, 163 pedestrians, and 29 cyclists were killed in Louisiana, according to crash data reports provided by LSU. In 2019, motorcycle and cyclist fatalities are projected to increase.

The study, proposed by Rep. Polly Thomas, R-Metairie, will look at ways to increase punishment in an effort to deter accidents.

The current fines, sometimes only $250, are not high enough, legislators contended. “If you are going to cause a fatality,” Rep. Gisclair, “you should not have the privilege to drive again immediately.”

Read more in KALB.

By: Madeline Meyer, LSU Manship School News Service

Published: May 9, 2019

BATON ROUGE–The House on Thursday passed a $30 billion operating budget for next year that includes $1,200 teacher pay raises, $600 for support staff and full funding for TOPS scholarships, but not the $39 million for public schools sought by the governor.

In stark contrast to previous budget debates, the full House almost unanimously approved the bill in a 100-1 vote.

The budget now moves to the Senate, which could push to add in the $39 million for the schools that Gov. John Bel. Edwards originally proposed. Edwards, a Democrat up for re-election, proposed pay raises of $1,000 for teachers and $500 for support workers.
Republican House leaders suggested that the state cannot afford both the teacher pay raise and the $39 million increase for public schools.

House Education Committee Chair Nancy Landry, R-Lafayette, commented after the vote that the big issue between the House and the Senate will be whether to fund both the pay raise and the increase for the schools.

“We feel like we can’t do both right now,“ she said. “It’s too much of an ask, 4.5 percent increase for one year for both the increase in the teacher pay and the increase in the across-the-board funding.”

Read more in KALB.

By: Hunter Lovell, LSU Manship School News Service

Published: May 8, 2019

BATON ROUGE–After the Senate rejected his bid for a constitutional amendment to exempt diapers and tampons from the state sales tax, the bill’s sponsor, Sen. J.P. Morrell, found another way to get the job done.

Late Wednesday, Morrell, a Democrat from New Orleans, changed another bill to do essentially the same thing by statute. That bill passed 29-5.

The main difference, Morrell explained, is that voter approval of a constitutional amendment would have made the tax exemption permanent, while the Legislature could change or rescind its own approval at any time. The House still needs to consider the matter and could reject Morrell’s latest plan.

Morrell also proposed other bills that sought to acknowledge women’s rights and prohibit sending victims of sexual abuse to jail if they decline to testify against their accusers.

Morrell proposed a constitutional amendment to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. But the Senate struck down that proposal by a clear 9-26 majority.

Read more in KALB.

By: Lauren Heffker, LSU Manship School News Service

Published: May 8, 2019

BATON ROUGE–The Louisiana Community and Technical College System is partnering with Amazon Web Services to implement the tech company’s Educate curriculum, Gov. John Bel Edwards announced Wednesday.

The community colleges also will collaborate with Amazon to offer an associate degree in cloud computing.

“This is all about the talent pipeline,” Edwards said. “We want that in Louisiana, too.”

The partnership is the first step in a broader push to try to increase the workforce for high-paying tech jobs in the state, the governor said. Building an information technology and cybersecurity infrastructure has been one of Edwards’ goals this legislative session.

The credits from the 12 community and technical colleges will transfer to institutions in the Louisiana State University system, the University of Louisiana system and the Southern University system.

“The very nature of work is changing forever,” University of Louisiana System President Jim Henderson said at the briefing.

Read more in WWNO.

By: James A. Smith & Hunter Lovell, LSU Manship School News Service

Published: May 7, 2019

BATON ROUGE–A House committee approved a bill on Tuesday that would limit Louisiana’s sentencing law for repeat offenders only to violent crimes.

The bill, sponsored by Rep. Randal Gaines, D-LaPlace, is part of an effort to expand the overhaul of Louisiana’s criminal justice system that began in 2017. It also would sharply reduce the number of people serving lengthy incarcerations.

The bill passed without objection in the House Committee of Administration of Criminal Justice.

Louisiana still has one of the world’s highest incarceration rates even though Gov. John Bel Edwards and Republican lawmakers agreed on a package of criminal justice reforms two years ago.

In June 2018, the state’s prison ratio was 712 per 100,000 residents, which was significantly higher than the national average of 415 per 100,000 residents in state and federal prisons, according to data from the Pew Charitable Trusts and U.S. Census Bureau.

Last November, voters eliminated Louisiana’s Jim Crow-era law that allowed people to be convicted of felonies even if only 10 of the 12 jurors voted to convict them.

“Longer sentences are not a factor in deterring crime,” said Rep. Gaines. “Longer sentences overburden our prisons and budgets.”

Read more in KALB.

By: Hunter Lovell, LSU Manship School News Service

Published: May 6, 2019

BATON ROUGE – A bid to ban abortions after six weeks in Louisiana moved one step closer to being placed on the governor’s desk.

The Louisiana Senate signaled strong bipartisan support in a 31-5 vote in favor of the “fetal heartbeat” bill by Democratic Sen. John Milkovich of Shreveport.

The proposed legislation would ban abortions after the detection of a fetal heartbeat in the womb, usually at around six weeks. The bill now moves to the House.

Shortly before the Senate passed the bill, it overwhelmingly rejected a bill aimed at abolishing the death penalty.

This rejection followed an emotional hearing in a Senate judiciary committee last week that had supported an end to capital punishment.

The bill, sponsored by Sen. Dan Claitor, R-Baton Rouge, needed the approval of 26 senators to pass, but received support from only 13.

Proponents of the bill argued that the Louisiana Public Defender Board has spent $111 million on death penalty cases since 2008, and only one person has been executed since then.

Read more in Fox8 News.

By: Madeline Meyer and Sheridan Wall, LSU Manship School News Service

Published: May 7, 2019

BATON ROUGE — A state education board defied House leaders Tuesday and refused to back down from its proposal for $39 million in state aid to schools even though that could put a teacher pay raise in jeopardy.

The move sets up the biggest showdown of the legislative session. Gov. John Bel Edwards is backing the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education against House leaders who also support a teacher pay hike but do not want to give local school districts more money.

By law, the board sets the amount of state money to be provided to schools, and the Legislature can only vote that up or down. So if the board does not back down, any raise that the Legislature approves for teachers would be just a one-time stipend and not a permanent part of their paychecks.

Teachers, representatives from education advocacy groups and school superintendents all told the board Tuesday that they were willing to take that risk because the school districts have not had an increase in state aid in a decade.

Deborah Meaux, the president of the Louisiana Association of Educators, which lobbies for K-12 employees, said that BESE’s proposal “is the best plan that can make sure it is sustainable and we are not back here again next year asking for the same money.”

“We don’t want a one-and-done,” she said. “We want to make sure investment in education is ongoing,”

Read more in The Bossier Press-Tribune.

By: Lauren Heffker, LSU Manship School News Service

Published: May 6, 2019

A House committee voted on Monday to approve a bill that would give Louisiana’s legislative auditor access to taxpayer data to verify Medicaid eligibility.

The bill, part of a Republican effort to tighten management of the program, advanced 11-3 to the full House.

Rep. Tony Bacala, R-Prairieville, sponsored the bill. A similar proposal died in committee last year.

This year’s bill would give the state auditor access to income tax data to help detect fraud in Medicaid enrollment. Similar legislation exists in 35 states.

At the heart of the partisan debate are arguments about citizens’ information privacy and state government oversight of social welfare programs.

Edwards, a Democrat, has stressed the importance of keeping the federally funded Medicaid Expansion program, which provides health insurance for low income residents.

Republicans and the legislative auditor have attacked the health department’s management of the program. The department recently kicked 30,000 people off the rolls, saying that some of them earned over $100,000 a year.

“We found thousands of people that make between $50,000 to $80,000,” Bacala said. “We’re not taking from the poor. We’re taking people off the rolls who have been stealing from the poor.”

Read more in The Advertiser.

By: Madeline Meyer, LSU Manship School News Service

Published: May 6, 2019

BATON ROUGE–The House Appropriations Committee on Monday advanced a $30 billion state operating budget that would include $1,200 raises for public school teachers and $600 raises for support staff.

That marked an increase from the $1,000 raises for K-12 teachers and $500 for support workers that Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards has proposed. The higher raises would cost an additional $20 million.

But the committee, led by Rep. Cameron Henry, R-Metairie, rejected the governor’s proposal for a $39 million increase in funding for operating the schools.

That rejection came in a 17-3 vote shooting down amendments proposed by one of the governor’s floor leaders.

The committee also increased funding for higher education and fully funded the popular TOPS scholarships for college students.

The House is expected to vote on the budget on Thursday. Edwards also could make another push for more state aid to K-12 schools when the bill reaches the Senate.

Read more in KALB.

By: Madeline Meyer, LSU Manship School News Service

Published: May 2, 2019

BATON ROUGE — The Senate Education Committee voted 6-1 Thursday to approve the governor’s proposal to provide a $39 million boost in K-12 education funding.

The controversial bill is moving to the Senate floor with possible review by the Senate Finance Committee. It remains unclear if Republican House leaders will endorse the bill.

Gov. John Bel Edwards — whose re-election campaign has stressed support for education, including $1,000 teacher pay raises and $500 for support workers — praised the Senate committee’s vote.

Garry Jones, the president of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, spoke on behalf of the bill.

Barry Dusse, director of the governor’s Office of Planning and Budget, said amendments to the governor’s overall state budget proposal would allow for the $39 million fund. Dusse said the money would come from the Department of Health and $15 million in savings from other agencies.

Teachers unions support the plans. But some teachers are concerned that the raises are not high enough.

“I have watched as the state has demanded more from our students and teachers in terms of testing, while contributing little in the way of additional resources to meet the rise in expectation,“ Belinda Davis, an LSU professor and the president of the public school advocacy group One Community, One School District, said in support of the bill.

Read more in The Advertiser.