By William Taylor Potter and Christian Boutwell
BATON ROUGE — Baton Rouge Attorney Brian Eddington and State Tax Commission chairman Lawrence Chehardy entered a heated discussion Wednesday during the Tax Commission’s meeting Wednesday whether local assessors or the commission has the more authentic authority to assess values for property tax purposes.
Neither was persuaded otherwise.
Continue reading “Tax Commission, Assessors wrangle over authority”
By Matt Houston
The Restore Louisiana Task Force voted Friday to approve a distribution budget for the $1.2 billion allocated by the federal government for flood relief, but not all affected residents will receive full assistance.
By William Taylor Potter
BATON ROUGE — Bren Haase, chief of planning and research, painted a bleak future for Louisiana’s coast during the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority board meeting Wednesday (Jan. 18) should no counter-actions be taken by the legislative and executive branches. He presented a draft of the 2017 coastal master plan that calls for $50 billion worth of projects aimed at flood risk reduction and minimizing land loss.
By Laryssa Bonacquisti
By Nicholas Chrastil
Louisiana’s chief election officer, Secretary of State Tom Schedler, says voters don’t have to worry about a “rigged election,” and charges his party’s presidential standard bearer, Donald Trump, with “overplaying the fraud card.”
Manship News Service Statehouse Bureau alumnus Justin DiCharia joined other journalists, policy analysts and political observers to review the 2016 legislative sessions on Louisiana Public Broadcasting’s Louisiana Public Square. The program originally aired Wednesday, July 13, 2016.
By Justin DiCharia
BATON ROUGE — In Louisiana, there are hundreds of bureaucratic fiefdoms referred to as boards, commissions or task forces, for nearly everything — marriage and families, strawberry marketing, polygraphs, crawfish promotion, grandparents raising grandchildren, polysomnography (the record of a person’s sleep patterns).
Collectively, they cost the state hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars annually. The precise amount is nearly impossible to calculate. And for a majority of these bodies — some large, some as small as five people, some powerful, some insignificant, some with executive authority, some merely advisory — efficient governmental checks and balances do not exist.
By Samuel Carter Karlin
BATON ROUGE — For the first time in the history of the Taylor Opportunity Program for Students (TOPS), the state’s flagship tuition-paying scholarship for in-state students who meet average academic benchmarks, lawmakers are cutting the program to help balance the budget.
Students will pay 30 percent of their tuition bills this upcoming school year — meaning a $1,000 to $1,700 increase in their bottom lines at most schools. While the Legislature moved into the night on budget negotiations, leadership said the TOPS funding will remain at 70 percent.
By Justin DiCharia
BATON ROUGE — Since 2014, the Louisiana has enacted eight laws to crack down on the state’s pandemic of human sex trafficking. State Sen. Beth Mizell of Franklinton, doesn’t see that record as sufficient.
On the second-to-last day of the Legislature’s second special session, Republican freshman Mizell offered a resolution to recommit the Joint Human Trafficking Study Commission, whose research spanned those eight laws after it terminated in 2014.
By Justin DiCharia
BATON ROUGE — Six cases of the Zika virus in Louisiana were confirmed Wednesday by the Louisiana Department of Health (LDH) during a one-person Senate committee hearing.
LDH Public Health Executive Director Doris G. Brown told Sen. Fred Mills, R-Parks, the only available legislative member at the Committee on Women and Children due to budget negotiations, that the six cases were travel associated and the infections did not originate within the state.
LSU Manship School Statehouse Bureau 