BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) - Democrats in the Louisiana House held up a construction financing bill Wednesday, trying to force Republicans to negotiate a deal on state spending and tax proposals that remain stalled with only two weeks remaining in the legislative session.
The lawmakers targeted a measure that pays for state-financed construction projects. Because the legislation requires a two-thirds vote, Democrats who make up a minority in the chamber had enough members to keep the bill bottled up in the House.
Without passage of the financing proposal, millions of dollars in ongoing construction work would be unable to continue, and future projects would be unable to start.
Democrats hope to use that leverage to hammer out a budget and tax deal that they’ve so far been unable to reach with their Republican colleagues.
New Orleans Rep. Walt Leger, the top-ranking Democrat in the House, said the decision to bottle up the financing bill was born out of frustration that Republicans have refused to have “a meaningful conversation about how to repair our state” and end continued cycles of financial problems.
“We feel like we’ve shown up here for the last two years and offered solutions to our budget situation, and every option has been rejected,” Leger said.
Alexandria Rep. Lance Harris, chairman of the House Republican Delegation, called it “Washington-style politics.”
“It really doesn’t motivate a lot of members,” Harris said, describing the maneuver as holding the bill “hostage.”
The majority-GOP House has passed a budget proposal for the financial year beginning July 1 that would leave $206 million on the table that Louisiana’s income-forecasting panel projects will come into the treasury.
The House didn’t spend the money in order to hedge against expectations the estimates are too rosy. GOP leaders say the state has had 15 midyear deficits over the past nine years because the forecasts have been too high.
Democrats want to spend all available money, saying that without it, health services, the child welfare agency and prisons would face unnecessary and harmful cuts.
Meanwhile, lawmakers have done little to patch a more than $1 billion budget hole that looms a year later, when temporary sales taxes passed by the Legislature expire on June 30, 2018.
Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards wants lawmakers to pass a variety of tax measures to close the gap. House Democrats agree with much of the governor’s approach. But most tax bills must start in the House, and no large revenue-raising tax bills have received backing there so far amid strong anti-tax sentiment from Republicans in the chamber.
The current legislative session that must end June 8 is the last regular session in which taxes can be considered before the 2018 drop-off in revenue. Edwards has said if lawmakers don’t piece together enough tax measures to fill the gap, he expects to call a special session over the next year.
House Republicans pared back spending in the budget proposal for the upcoming financial year in the hopes that cutting government now would lessen the mid-2018 gap. With that action, they believe the shortfall, estimated to be as much as $1.3 billion, could be cut in half.
The vote for the construction financing bill was 56-40, 14 votes short of what it needed to pass. The bill didn’t fail on a straight party-line vote. One Democrat supported passage: Rep. Neil Abramson of New Orleans, chairman of the House tax committee and the lawmaker who handles the construction budget. A few Republicans with concerns about state construction spending levels voted against the financing bill.
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House Bill 3: www.legis.la.gov
House vote: https://bit.ly/2qXEn6L
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