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Senate Finance Amends State Budget

Louisiana Senate Broadcast

With just one week left in the regular session, the Senate Finance committee had to work on the budget over the Memorial holiday.  

The committee made amendments to the House-approved state budget, including a reduction to TOPS funding, which Senate Finance Chairman Eric LaFleur (D-Ville Platte) said would be funded at forty-eight percent of its cost.

The House had funded seventy-five percent of the popular scholarship program by sweeping $100 million in fees and self-generated revenue from other state agencies. The Senate committee reversed that in order to make room for waiver programs, which, says LaFleur, "in these amendments, are fully funded.” 

Hospital funding was also changed. Initially, the Governor outlined a budget that would have funded five of the nine public-private partner hospitals.  The House reallocated money to all nine partners. Now, the Senate is giving the Department of Health and Hospitals $1.6 billion for that purpose.  "Rather than allocate them individually to each hospital," says Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne, "there is an amount provided to the hospitals with the discretion of DHH to determine how those funds should be allocated.” 

Governor Edwards has issued a call for a second special session, with the intention of raising revenue to fill the $600 million shortfall that begins July 1.  That special session will begin at 6:30 pm Monday, June 6, just thirty minutes after this regular session concludes. Senators, like Wesley Bishop (D-New Orleans), are trying to factor that in. 

“I think at some point in time," says Bishop, "you kind of have to have a pecking order. I mean, some folks have obviously placed TOPS on top of that pecking order. My pecking order might be different than somebody else’s. So I want to know, assuming we raise the additional revenue, where we specifically plug it into.”

An agreement has been reached with the Governor, dedicating one-third of the money raised in the next special session to TOPS in order to fully fund the program.  Where the other two-thirds are spent is up to the Legislature.  

“There has not been any specific commitment or any specific discussion about where the rest of that money is going to go," responded Dardenne.  "There may be 144 different priorities floating around here, but at the end of the day, there has to be a consensus reached on where money is spent,” he says.

While nothing was said publicly about HB105, which would have given the Attorney General a separate budget, the Senate Finance Committee instead amended the A.G.'s budget back into HB 1. 

The full Senate votes on the bill Wednesday.