(Official editorial of the Advocate/Times-Picayune, May 18, 2025)
In one way at least, the Louisiana Legislature seems poised to apply the right lessons from earlier losses. After voters overwhelmingly defeated the 115-page constitutional Amendment 2 in March, lawmakers are breaking the key tax and fiscal proposals into bite-sized parts.
This is as it always should have been. Voters deserve a menu of options to choose from when they might have an appetite for only some, but not all, of the offerings on the table. Especially when proposing to change the basic charter of the state’s government, citizens should be able to weigh in on individual components of the plan, so as to ensure that the final product truly represents the public will.
As individual pieces of legislation, two of those proposals merit strong consideration as they aim to make our state more fiscally sound. Lawmakers wisely have been moving those proposals toward passage in the current session. Although perhaps a few tweaks to the current forms of the bills still would be advisable, these suggested statutes are moving in the right direction — and, at the very least, should be presented to the voting public individually without being tied to so many other, unrelated ideas.
One that has some worrisome aspects but also offers great rewards is House Bill 473 by Rep. Julie Emerson, R-Carencro. It would take three separate educational trust funds out of the constitution and use the money to retire a large portion of the debt owed by the Teachers Retirement System of Louisiana, plus make permanent a $2,000 teacher pay raise — with tens of millions of dollars per year left over for other, presumably, educational purposes, rather than to make interest payments to banks.
The trade-offs are complicated, but Louisianans deserve the option to vote on them.
A second initiative — technically three bills, House Bill 366 by Rep. Daryl Deshotel, R-Hessmer, and House Bills 678 and 578 by Emerson, which would work hand in hand — offers far more upside than downside…. [The full editorial is at this link.]
