House panel keeps cap on legislators’ allowance

• By MARSHA SHULER
• Advocate Capitol News Bureau
• Published: Mar 12, 2008 - Page: 4A - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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State representatives will continue to get a maximum $1,500-a-month voucher expense allowance, a House committee decided Tuesday.

The House Executive Committee endorsed a resolution keeping the rate the same as it’s been since first adopted by officials in 1998.

The $1,500 allotment will stay in effect until June 30, 2012. But the House committee can come back and change the rate at any time during that period if it elects to do so.

The voucher expense allowance comes on top of a $500-a-month unvoucher expense account which lawmakers are allotted by state law.

Each House member must submit itemized statements of expenses with invoices and receipts supporting the expense in order to be reimbursed. Members don’t automatically get the $1,500 a month.

The voucher expense allowance can be used to pay for office supplies and equipment, postage, printing, telephone, travel, “and such other reasonable and necessary office expenses related to the holding and conduct of their office,” according to the resolution.

Representatives can roll over up to $3,000 in unused expense funds from one budget year to the next.

If everyone used their full allotment in a given year, it would cost $1.9 million, House Clerk Butch Speer said. “We have never spent over about 80 percent,” he said.

State Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-New Orleans, said he wants to be able to roll-over more unused money from one year to the next.

“If we are saving it for certain things, we should forfeit it as long as it is in accordance with the mission, role and purpose of this account,” Richmond said.

At times, lawmakers do get caught in a bind if they are sending out newsletters to constituents after a session’s end, Speer said. It’s close to the end of the state fiscal year and they are trying to beat the clock on use of funds that may have built up in their accounts, he said.

Speer suggested changing the deadline for use of the funds from June 30 to Aug. 31.

But Richmond sought the lifting of the $3,000 rollover.