Lawmakers are doing something highly unusual in the Louisiana Capitol this legislative session. They’re publicly discussing the individual projects included in—or dumped from—the state’s construction budget, the Associated Press reports.
The House Ways and Means Committee has been holding lengthy hearings on projects that were slated to receive state construction financing. Committee members have asked about the purpose of the projects, timeline, sources of financing and value to the state.
And they haven’t just focused on state projects, like construction on college campuses, at parks and on economic development initiatives. They’ve also been digging into the smaller, local projects around the state that lawmakers tuck into the construction budget each year and that governors have used to trade for votes.
Louisiana’s cash crunch is clearly bad when it reaches into that most politically protected of places: lawmakers’ pet projects.
“We need to make sure we’re being prudent with our state dollars,” Ways and Means Chairman Neil Abramson, D-New Orleans, tells the Associated Press. “Whether it’s cash dollars going to the operating budget or bonds (for construction work), it’s still state money.”
The state construction budget passed by lawmakers each year, known as the capital outlay bill, has become a sort of wish list. It’s crammed with more proposals than Louisiana has money to spend.
That leaves the governor to decide which projects advance to the State Bond Commission to receive lines of credit and the money to get under way. The commission is packed with a governor’s allies, so whichever list gets forwarded to the panel usually gets approved.
As governors before him had done, former Gov. Bobby Jindal got the Bond Commission to approve millions more in projects than Louisiana could afford in the short-term, leaving them in a queue awaiting financing.
Gov. John Bel Edwards inherited that lengthy list. But he also inherited something different from many of his predecessors: the worst budget problems Louisiana has seen in nearly 30 years. That limits the amount of borrowing the state can do to finance projects.
Abramson says the state can only borrow $400 million over the next two years and $1.2 billion worth of projects have been given cash lines of credit—promises of money from the state. “We have committed to pay for things that we don’t have the money for,” he says.
The governor proposed stripping $1 billion in projects from the construction budget. But he’s also proposing new spending for the roadwork and building maintenance on top of the long list of projects that already have received cash lines of credit.
Abramson thinks the reductions should go further. His committee is considering ways to remove some projects that have received lines of credit, to better match the construction budget to available money. The committee’s proposal is expected within the next week or two.
