The calls started coming in to state Rep. Stephen Dwight nearly every day after his election to the Louisiana House last year.
As Governing reports, interest groups all across the political spectrum were eager to meet with the newly elected member. For Dwight, it was a bit bewildering. A 38-year-old Lake Charles lawyer, he had never held elected office before. Suddenly, as a member of the Republican majority on the House Ways and Means Committee, he was in the middle of the state’s most severe budget crisis in decades. “It was like drinking water from a fire hose,” he says. “Everything was coming at us.”
One of Dwight’s first-term Republican colleagues, Rep. Jack McFarland, had somewhat more preparation, Governing reports. He had done the budgeting for both his small north Louisiana parish and his timber business. But those budgets pale in comparison to what he’s dealing with as a new member of the House Appropriations Committee. “By the end of my first year in office,” he says, “I will have learned as much as most legislators do in three years.”
That’s the way it is in the Louisiana Legislature in 2016, a year in which fiscal disaster and term limits have combined to give crucial roles to an unusual number of new members. Meanwhile, there’s one other group whose influence is rising: the large corps of lobbyists who practice around the Capitol in Baton Rouge.
While the newly minted legislators have only started to learn the inner workings of the state legislature, many of the lobbyists have been around for decades, Governing notes. Their numbers have grown over the years as well. In a legislature loaded with newcomers, lobbyists are an important source of information not only about the interests they represent, but about the legislature itself. Getting acquainted with Dwight, McFarland and the large class of freshmen lawmakers has been a high priority for the lobbyists roaming the Capitol corridors this spring.
Lobbyists are key players in every state capitol, and they may be more important now than in the recent past, as national advocacy and business groups turn their attention away from a gridlocked Congress to focus on affecting change at the state level. Louisiana, in the midst of a fiscal crisis, is a good place to watch the evolving roles of lawmaker and lobbyist play themselves out.
Governing has the full story.
