By Gracie Thomas
LSU Manship School News Service
BATON ROUGE - Voter rejection of constitutional amendments, including one that would have freed up money for teacher pay raises, complicated this spring's legislative session and raised questions about whether the public is being asked to vote on too many amendments that are hard to understand, lawmakers said Thursday.
Rep. Beau Beaullieu, R-New Iberia, said the failure of all five amendments in May was the biggest disappointment this session, and Rep. Jack McFarland, R-Jonesboro, shared this sentiment.
"There is extreme disappointment that the amendments failed," McFarland said. "I do think the amendments got caught up in some of the outside political issues with the congressional redistricting and the controversy there. And it's unfortunate because now we're back to square one."
Sen. Gerald Boudreaux, D-Lafayette, said it's time to reassess the strategy on constitutional amendments.
"While I respect the fact that there are some things that need to be changed, I think we need to hit the reset button and just stop with constitutional amendments for a few years and let people get a better understanding of what's going on," Boudreaux said.
"I think that has been the problem, and that's why, you know, we have not been successful in passing these," he added. "Lay people just don't understand the details, and you cannot put it on the ballot for people to understand."
The amendments would have allowed lawmakers to adjust civil-service protections; created a school system in St. George, a town that broke off from Baton Rouge; given parishes flexibility in levying business inventory taxes; and raised the mandatory retirement age for judges.
The amendment seeking to give teachers a permanent pay raise by liquidating three state education trust funds caused the most chaos of the five, leaving Governor Jeff Landry and legislative leaders scrambling to find a long-term solution.
Landry's substitute plan is to take $168 million from non-instructional expenditures in the Minimum Foundation Program, which lays out the blueprint for $4.6 billion in K-12 funding for school districts across the state.
His idea is to provide teachers with $2000 stipends this year while seeking a more comprehensive overhaul that could provide permanent pay raises next year. Changing the current allocation to pay the stipends would require a two-thirds vote of lawmakers via mail-in ballots to pass.
"Do I think over a long period of time, we could probably find $165 million within the $4.6 billion? Yeah," McFarland said.
According to McFarland, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, non-instructional expenses can include food services, buses or fuel, among others.
Beaullieu, McFarland and Boudreaux reviewed the session on a webinar sponsored by the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana.
After a last-minute update from the Revenue Estimating Conference lowered revenue projections and sent legislators into a frenzy to maintain a standstill budget, McFarland said there were sacrifices that had to be made, including the decision to not increase the money allocated for Landry's LA GATOR program to give state money to parents to send children to private schools.
"I think it put the Senate in a very awkward position because those are dollars we had already utilized and had already funded into various agencies," McFarland said. "There were tough decisions made, and not all were popular, but it's just part of the political process."
Boudreaux said the priority was ensuring that students already enrolled through the school voucher program were taken care of. But, he said, an expansion of LA GATOR is not off the table if the Senate can set up fiscal guardrails.
