Political Horizons for June 8, 2008

• By MARK BALLARD
• Advocate Capitol News Bureau
• Published: Jun 8, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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The Louisiana House of Representatives on Thursday took its first step towards ending generations of dominance by the state’s governor.

Louisiana, over the years, has allowed its governor to control the Legislature, pick its leaders, decide its agenda. This is not the system the nation’s Founding Fathers had in mind.

Until Thursday, few of the 104 members in the House had dared to publicly question Gov. Bobby Jindal’s wants. Still, they voted 100-0 on legislation — House Bill 582 — the governor’s minions are working hard to sidetrack. HB582, among other things, would allow the Legislature to insert itself in the process of deciding how best to spend taxpayer dollars on construction projects.

Though the Legislature long had the right and duty to choose which projects get funded, the process called “capital outlay” has evolved into one in which the governor makes the actual choice. It gives the governor enormous power to reward and punish legislators by deciding which projects — a basketball court, a firehouse, a high-end development on a reservoir — the state will back for loans.

“The one thing that has done more harm to Louisiana is that we make every administration and every governor king. You do that by allowing them to have absolute control over how money is spent and which projects that get funded,” said state Sen. Robert Adley, R-Benton, a long-time proponent of overhauling the capital outlay system.

HB582 doesn’t fully reform a problematic system, said Jim Brandt, head of the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana. “It’s done behind closed doors. The public has no knowledge of how the projects are the selected, what the rationale is behind them” said Brandt, whose study group has a long list of suggested changes.

But HB582 would transfer who decides which projects to fund from the governor to a legislative committee. Capital outlay is all about who controls the lines of credit.

Interestingly, HB582 is sponsored by Jindal’s hand-picked speaker of the House,  Jim Tucker, R-Terrytown, and is being pushed by the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, state Rep. Hunter Greene, R-Baton Rouge, who has written his own measure. Both owe their positions to Jindal.

The governor, who did not respond to two days of requests for an interview on this subject, is working hard to defeat the measure and instead is pushing Senate Bill 808.

Jindal cannot really be faulted for forgetting his campaign promises of reform. Like many, many governors before him, Jindal has found difficulty in abandoning such a useful tool after handling it.

SB808 does require feasibility studies on every project. That’s an important addition, says Brandt. HB582 foregoes the analysis for projects  less than $3 million. About 24 percent of the projects — 187 of the 768 in this year’s capital outlay bill — fall below that threshold.

But SB808 keeps the power with the governor and his chief financial aide, the commissioner of administration. That’s where it belongs, says Jindal’s commissioner, Angèle Davis, who argues that her division has the tools, personnel and expertise to manage the allocation of the finite amount of taxpayer dollars.

“At any given time we’re very familiar with the ability of the state, and all the intricacies surrounding the sale of bonds and the cash flow situation,” Davis said.