Last chance: Early voting for the Nov. 8 elections ends today in Louisiana. Voters have until 6 p.m. to cast their ballots in advance of next week’s election. The ballot includes races to fill local, and congressional seats, Louisiana constitutional amendments and several local property taxes. Louisiana Secretary of State Tom Schedler says early voting turnout has been extremely high, breaking record numbers from 2008 and 2012. Three million people are registered to vote in Louisiana, and through Saturday, 366,620 voters had participated in the early voting period that began a week ago. See a list of early voting sites in Louisiana. You can also check out a list of endorsements by Business Report Publisher Rolfe McCollister on candidates, taxes and constitutional amendments.
Another try: Gov. John Bel Edwards is asking the Obama administration to reconsider its refusal to lessen Louisiana’s share of disaster response costs after March flood that inundated north and central Louisiana. The governor’s office released the appeal letter on Monday, The Associated Press reports. Louisiana’s share of the federal disaster response to the August flooding that ravaged south Louisiana is 10%. But the Federal Emergency Management Agency denied a request to lessen the state’s costs for the earlier March flooding from 25% to 10%. Edwards’ homeland security secretary James Waskom wrote to the White House that the two floods should be considered together because they have caused “significant economic hardship” to state and local government. Waskom wrote that lessening the match rate for the March flooding could save the state an estimated $28 million.
On top: Beating rival ExxonMobil, Shell posted higher than expected earnings by making further deep cuts in spending to cope with the oil price downturn now in its third year, Reuters reports. At $2.8 billion in the third quarter, Shell’s net income was above Exxon’s third quarter net income of $2.65 billion. Shell’s Chief Executive Officer Ben van Beurden says the oil sector has yet to emerge from troubled waters, but huge cost savings meant oil majors were getting closer to balancing their operations at today’s oil prices of around $50 a barrel. The prospects for an oil price recovery are still unclear, van Beurden says, despite attempts by OPEC and other producers to agree a deal to limit output and reduce the global glut which has pushed oil prices down by 50% since June 2014. Read the full story.
