The final half-hour of the 2015 legislative session seemed more like an auction than lawmaking, as the House approved dozens of bills in the last 30 minutes. When the gavel came down at 6 p.m. Thursday, nobody was quite sure what-all we had bought — not even Gov. Jindal.
“The process isn’t over,” Jindal told reporters during a post-session press conference. “Obviously, we do want to look carefully through every bill for any unintended consequences.”
Now that we’ve had a few days to examine our “purchases”, here’s what we ended up with:
First, a $24-billion budget.
“All priority items in our budget issues are now funded, including health care and higher ed,” Appropriations chairman Jim Fannin stated.
Altogether, the tax measures that passed increased revenue by about $720-million.
The cigarette tax is going to help pay for health care.
“We raised the tax on cigarettes from 36 cents (per pack) to 86 cents,” Rep. Hal Ritchie, author of the tobacco tax bill, said. “And the moneys that will be received from this tax go into the Medicaid Match Fund.”
The bulk of the funding for higher education is coming from cutbacks in tax credits, tax exemptions, and tax incentives that business had previously enjoyed.
“We have increased across-the-board reductions of tax credits from 20 to 28 percent,” Rep. Fannin said of the final agreements struck to fund the FY 2016 budget. “We capped movie tax expenditures at $180-million.”
It’s not a total loss for business, as many of the business tax changes are temporary, lasting one year or, at the most, three years.
And it wasn’t a complete win for higher education. They didn’t get one of the autonomies they had sought — the freedom to raise tuition without legislative oversight.
How do you rate what the legislative session bought and paid for? Your chance to say comes Oct. 24, when the next lot of state officials and lawmakers hits the auction block … I mean, ballot box.
Note: an earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that election day was on Oct. 23.