Three of the major candidates running to be Louisiana’s next governor said at a forum in Westwego today that while lawmakers patched together next year’s budget, they didn’t make the structural fixes needed to stop repeated shortfalls in the future.
As The Associated Press reports, Republicans Scott Angelle and Jay Dardenne, along with Democrat John Bel Edwards, said making changes to the state’s tax structure and ending cycles of financial problems would be among their top priorities if elected.
Lawmakers used more than $700 million from tax and fee hikes and scaled-back tax breaks— along with hundreds of millions in piecemeal financing—to stop deep cuts to public colleges and health services in the $24.5 billion budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1.
Many of the measures are temporary. Several tax bills have three-year expiration dates.
“We did some good things, but we didn’t fix our structural problems,” said Edwards, a state representative and leader of the House Democrats.
Dardenne, Louisiana’s lieutenant governor, said the first order of business for the state’s next governor “has got to be to unravel the mess.”
“I commend the Legislature for what they had to do with no leadership coming from the governor’s office, with no plan whatsoever,” he said. “They did what they had to do to cobble together something to keep from destroying higher education.”
Angelle, a member of the Public Service Commission, said what lawmakers reached was a “short-term fix.”
The race’s front-runner, Republican U.S. Sen. David Vitter, had been scheduled to participate in the gubernatorial candidate forum in the New Orleans suburbs. But Vitter stayed in Washington, D.C., for a defense spending vote and submitted a short video instead, outlining some of his campaign platform.
All three contenders at today’s event supported a wholesale review to determine if the state’s generous tax break programs are a wise use of the state’s dollars. Each said he would seek to revamp Louisiana’s construction budgeting process to steer more money to highway repairs and port upgrades.
