(Editor’s Note: This story has been updated from an earlier version to clarify Michael Olivier’s remarks about C100’s support for Gov. John Bel Edwards)
Though lawmakers appeared to make some progress on Monday, advancing a bill that would generate $370 million in temporary sales taxes, it’s not at all clear they’ll get the job done by June 4, the date by which the session much adjourn.
So perhaps it’s not surprising that lawmakers have once again tabled any discussions about the bigger picture issue of fiscal reform. Committee of 100 CEO Michael Olivier says the state’s business roundtable hasn’t given up on fiscal reform but isn’t holding out much hope it will happen this year or even under the current administration.
“We haven’t been able to get any traction, have we?” Olivier says. “The recommendations came out in 2016. We were hoping to get it done in 2017, and when that didn’t happen, in 2018. Now, here we are and we’re staring at the next election cycle.”
The recommendations were a comprehensive series of reform measures that came out of a months-long study prompted by a 2015 bipartisan legislative measure, HCR 11. C100 and other good government groups, namely the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana and Council for a Better Louisiana, have championed the HCR 11 report and pushed for measures that, if implemented, would create a more stable, predictable tax code with fewer budget shortfalls.
But nearly three years later nothing has happened and lawmakers find themselves grappling with the same short-term solutions they’ve relied on for years.
C100 meets regularly with Gov. John Bel Edwards and has been generally supportive of him, even as the state’s larger, GOP-dominated business community has not been. Olivier says it may be time for his group to start looking at the make up of the legislature.
“Some people are certainly asking, if we have this impasse between a Democratic governor and a Republican legislature, what needs to be changed here?” he says.
Oliver says C100 is still committed to fiscal reform but at this point doesn’t see how to make it happen.
“We’re going to go down in flames with HCR 11,” he says. “I know people are tired of hearing about reform but we’ve got to get fiscal order in our state. So we stick by the HCR 11 recommendations that the legislature and the governor have endorsed. So why can’t we get there?”
