State voters would have the chance this fall to decide whether to carve out a portion of the state’s “rainy day fund” for road and bridge projects under a proposal approved today by the House Appropriations Committee.
Mineral revenues finance Louisiana’s so-called rainy day fund, formally called the Budget Stabilization Fund. SB 202 and SB 259 by Sen. Robert Adley, R-Benton, would change the state constitution to dedicate some of those oil and gas dollars to state transportation projects. Adley’s bills already have cleared the Senate and now move to the House floor for what could be a final hearing. Yet even with legislative approval, voters statewide would need to approve the constitutional amendment in the Oct. 24 election for the new fund to go into effect.
Under Adley’s proposal, the first $500 million that goes into the Budget Stabilization Fund would be used as it is now to help balance the budget. Any funds beyond that would go into a newly created Transportation Stabilization Subfund that would be used for state highway projects.
Adley said the new fund was a “way to lock up some longer-term funding” to chip away at the state’s nearly $12 billion backlog of road and bridge projects.
The idea for the fund came from a task force of House and Senate members that gathered input on possible ways to resolve the state transportation backlog. The task force issued a report before the legislative session began with more than a dozen recommendations.
—Noticeably absent from this morning’s legislative action was a high-profile meeting of the House Ways and Means Committee. It was canceled over the weekend, and with it an important hearing for one of Gov. Bobby Jindal’s key legislative proposals.
SB 284 by Finance Chair Jack Donahue, R-Mandeville, has been put on hold temporarily. It creates the SAVE (Student Assessment for a Valuable Education) tax credit. It also allows the Board of Regents to issue an assessment for each of Louisiana’s 220,000 university students, but they wouldn’t need to actually pay it. Instead, universities would get a tax credit in the same amount and the state would give them the cash.
House Ways and Means Chairman Joel Robideaux, R-Lafayette, said Sunday he was trying to “foster productive consideration,” not kill the bill.
“I plan to reschedule after giving Sen. Donahue and the administration time to address questions that have arisen,” he said.
Some House members say they have concerns about giving a tax credit to a tax-exempt institution and worry the administration is pushing the bill to satisfy Jindal’s revenue-neutral rule. Jindal has said he would veto the budget if every dollar raised in taxes isn’t matched equally with reductions in planned spending. According to sources in the legislative leadership and the administration, passing a budget in a revenue-neutral manner without the SAVE bill might be more difficult than imagined.
Jeremy Alford and Jeremy Harper will publish a daily update throughout the legislative session on Daily Report PM. Alford reports on Louisiana politics at LaPolitics.com. Follow him on Twitter or on Facebook. He can be reached at JJA@LaPolitics.com.
