By this point in the calendar, almost a week after the end of the regular legislative session, Gov. John Bel Edwards typically knows exactly what the Legislature did and didn’t do.
But after the flurry of changes lawmakers made to the main state spending bills during this session’s chaotic final moments, the picture remains a little hazy, he says.
“We’re still working on the money bills that were delivered to me on Monday,” Edwards told the Rotary Club of Baton Rouge today.
While this year’s session, like all regular sessions in odd-numbered years, was nominally focused on state finances, Edwards said some of the most important bills received the least consideration.
“They were not given an opportunity to digest what they were voting on,” Edwards says.
Meeting with reporters after the Rotary luncheon, he noted that it’s not unusual for legislative members to lose projects in their district as retribution when they don’t go along with leadership, but he argues that targeting projects with regional and statewide importance goes too far.
“I don’t think it makes sense to penalize a legislator in a way that actually penalizes the state as a whole,” he said.
He discussed a new Mississippi River terminal south of the Crescent City Connection considered important to the shipping industry.
“There is $800 million in private financing committed to that project, and then we wake up on Friday morning, there’s not even a project in the bill,” he said.
While Edwards can line-item veto specific items, he does not have the authority to insert new spending into the state budget. He says he will ask the Legislature’s joint budget committee to move $4 million from a capital outlay savings account to the state Department of Transportation and Development to start the project, but it would still need an eventual state budget allocation.
