The Senate and the Administration, fed up with the standoff forced by the House this week, have drawn their lines in the sand today.
A House resolution to require the Edwards administration to start cancelling all state contracts still needs House concurrence on Senate changes, yet Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne showed good faith by submitting a report on the 50 top-dollar contracts to House Appropriations today.
After thanking Dardenne for the information, Covington Rep. John Schroder apologized the the difficulty this has created.
“We all had guns to our head,” Schroder said.
“I understand,” Dardenne responded, but he also warned, “We’re not going to terminate every state contract and start over.”
The bill that has caused the House to delay votes on any more revenue-raising measures for the past three days was voted on in Senate Finance today, as well -- Cameron Henry’s HB 122.
“The bill that came over from the House did not come balanced, and we are obligated to produce a balanced budget,” Finance chair Eric LaFleur began, as he offered an amendment that would strip most of the House cuts from the measure.
“We reduced those cuts by 69.6 million. So the cuts that we added, above and beyond what the Governor proposed, is 7.1 million dollars,” LaFleur explained.
That still leaves a $171-million hole, but LaFleur said the state Treasurer has identified another $88-million in savings, through bond refinancing that’s already in the works.
The Senate committee approved the changes, and then voted favorably on the bill.
The House got the message. They started working on the revenue raising bills this afternoon. Lafleur reminds the legislative leadership:
“So we just need 83-million more and we’re good to go. If you could knock that out this weekend, we’d all be home on Monday.”