Gov. John Bel Edwards says he’ll build next year’s budget proposal off Louisiana revenue projections blocked by House Republican leaders, proposing another round of K-12 teacher pay raises and boosted spending on colleges and early childhood learning programs with dollars he hopes eventually will be incorporated into the state’s official forecast.
The Democratic governor, readying for a second term starting in January, spoke about his plans for the 2020-21 budget proposal he’ll submit to lawmakers in February during a wide-ranging news conference Wednesday that recapped 2019 and looked ahead to the upcoming term.
His budget planning ran into a roadblock when Republican House Appropriations Chairman Cameron Henry blocked an updated income forecast that would have given Edwards and lawmakers more general tax dollars to spend in next year’s budget. Henry said it was too soon to increase the projections, citing financial uncertainties. His actions were backed by GOP House Speaker Taylor Barras. The two Republican leaders took a similar stance last year.
In response, Edwards says he’ll revisit the same budget approach he used after the forecast changes were blocked, proposing a budget wish list of sorts, using the dollars he and nonpartisan economists believe will show up in the treasury and offering ways he’d propose to spend the increased revenue.
“We will work with a planning document that is based upon that figure,” Edwards says.
Louisiana already is projected to bring in $319 million more in general tax dollars next year compared to this year. The blocked forecast Edwards intends to use would increase that by another $103 million.
The governor didn’t give a figure for how much he wants to increase spending on the various education programs, and wouldn’t say what size teacher pay raise he would propose. But he describes early childhood education, K-12 public schools and colleges as “all three critical areas to our future.”
“Education cures a lot of ills, and while we made good progress this year, it was the first teacher pay raise in 10 years. It was the first net increase in state general fund for higher education in 10 years, and we still have one of the lowest expenditures per student in higher education in the nation,” he says.
Edwards says he hopes the new Republican legislative leadership that will take office Jan. 13 will get the state’s income forecasting panel “back to functioning the way that it should,” rather than continuing to block forecasts.
Henry says that refusing to change the forecast doesn’t stop the governor from proposing his budget priorities: “They still have enough information to do the same type of budget process we did last time.” Read the full story from the Associated Press.
