The final full week of the legislative session, which budgetary issues will dominate, started today with the aggressive cost-cutting plan of Treasurer John Kennedy being stopped cold in Senate Finance Committee.
Kennedy presented bills by Rep. Dee Richard, I-Thibodaux, to reduce the number of state contracts by 10% and to eliminate 5,000 jobs per year in state government.
“I think you could save a lot of money if you got rid of some of these contracts,” he said, and then read through a list including counseling for breastfeeding, spiritual advisers for Muslim inmates, fur marketing in China, and “chimpanzee discovery days,” before chairman Sen. Jack Donahue, R-Mandeville, advised, “I think we have the picture.”
Commissioner of Administration Paul Rainwater argued that contracts are vetted during the budget process and that the administration has reduced their value by $1.4 billion, or 30%, since Gov. Bobby Jindal took office. He cautioned that the blanket 10% cut included in House Bill 327 would cripple Bayou Health, the new coordinated care network. Many contracts, he said, result from pass-through federal funding requirements.
Kennedy countered that the reductions can be made without affecting Bayou Health. But the committee, without objection, approved a motion by Sen. Greg Tarver, D-Shreveport, to involuntarily defer the bill.
The same went for Richard’s HB 328, to cut state positions through attrition, which had passed the House, 94-5. Kennedy acknowledged that the administration had cut 12,000 job positions since its first term, but that the cost of payroll had increased. He said the job reductions could be made by not filling one-third of positions that become vacant, and that it need not affect any “warm bodies.”
But Sen. Tarver, who owns a funeral home, noted, “You talk about warm bodies. I’m in the business of cold bodies,” and then made one of HB 328 by moving to defer. No one objected.
It was a rough start to the week for Kennedy in Senate Finance, which, the day before, excised $553,000 from his budget in what observers saw as payback for his criticizing the administration’s spending practices.
—Had it not been Appropriations Chairman Jim Fannin, D-Jonesboro, on a tear about the Department of Revenue going to debit cards for income tax refunds, his bill to reinclude the option of paper checks likely would not have gone far.
But with Fannin raising examples of constituents—and even fellow lawmakers—having difficulty transferring funds from the cards to their bank accounts, his bill cruised through the House and one Senate committee. Ultimately, the Department of Revenue, citing a fiscal note of $250,000 to implement the option, had Senate allies recommit to Senate Finance.
There, Chairman Sen. Jack Donahue offered an amendment to sunset the debit-card program in three years, to which Fannin assented while pledging to continue to monitor the program in his committee. Taxpayers can also receive their refunds by direct deposit.
—The controversial bill to drug-test welfare recipients must clear a high hurdle today before a likely skeptical Judiciary B Committee. After a testy debate, HB 380 by Rep. Sherman Mack, R-Albany, passed the House, 65-26. The Senate panel it goes before later today has a 4-3 majority of Democrats—including its Chairman Sen. J.P. Morrell, D-New Orleans—and is expected to oppose the measure.
