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. Â 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.
By Justin DiCharia
BATON ROUGE – A recent national employment survey has New Orleans and Baton Rouge as the two worst cities for net employment in the U.S. this summer.
But the Department of Economic Development (LED) holds that those figures fail to show Louisiana’s positive year-to-year economic growth.
By Justin DiCharia
BATON ROUGE – The Christian Right looms in the Louisiana Senate Education Committee, and if the committee’s biblical bloc doesn’t change over the next three years, hot-button issues involving sex education, increased regulation of charter or home schooling, and evolution will likely receive a proper Christian burial.
By Jack Richards
BATON ROUGE — The Senate Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Committee Thursday unanimously approved a bill to require some nonprofits, for the first time, to track and report certain tax exempt sales to the Department of Revenue.
By Jack Richards
BATON ROUGE — The Senate Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Committee unanimously sent to the full Senate a bill Wednesday to change the way multi-state corporations calculate state income tax that would favor some companies over others.
House Bill 20 by Rep. Gene Reynolds, D-Minden, stirred controversy after Rep. Jim Morris, R-Oil City, was unable to explain the effect of an amendment he said would to help oil and gas companies.
By Samuel Carter Karlin
BATON ROUGE — Senators approved roughly $400 million in tax increases here Thursday, nearly half of which head to the Governor for final approval as lawmakers approach a June 23 deadline well short of the money needed to fill a $600 million budget hole.
LSU Manship School Statehouse Bureau 