Surplus property sales seen as important part of balanced La. budget

From the perspective of a $24 billion state budget, $47 million or so may not sound like a lot. Sen. Jack Donahue, R-Mandeville, who chairs the Joint Legislative Budget Committee, says there was a time when he didn’t think so either. But given the spending cuts and revenue assumptions the Jindal administration has had to make to balance the budget for the next fiscal year, $47 million from the sale of state properties that is penciled in on the revenue side of the ledger is more important than it might otherwise seem. “When we are faced with making $800 million in cuts to health care, every $47 million helps,” Donahue says, adding that it “hit him” recently when he realized how much surplus property the state owns—including the site of the former Department of Insurance building on the Capitol Grounds, for example, or the Southeast Louisiana Hospital in Donahue’s St. Tammany Parish district. “I think it’s part of good government to sell off properties the state doesn’t need,” he says. As to whether the state is counting its chickens before they are hatched, Donahue concedes the properties may not fetch all $47 million their sales are budgeted to bring in. But he doesn’t think the administration is being unrealistic in its expectations. “Every property on that list has an appraisal attached to it and, in most cases, already has an offer to purchase,” he says. “So most of them are pretty far along.” —Stephanie Riegel