HERE THEY GO AGAIN

Having failed in an attempt to raise the state’s expenditure cap by a whopping $2.4 billion in the December special session of the Legislature, the Blanco administration is hatching another plan to raise the expenditure ceiling in the regular session that begins April 30.

Here is some background.

Over 15 years ago, voters approved a constitutional amendment that says state revenues in any budget year cannot grow faster than the three-year average growth of personal income in Louisiana.

For years, the spending cap never came into play, but the rapid growth in the state budget has now made it quite relevant.

The formula that determines the spending cap established that some $330 million was available under the cap for the current budget. By the time the special session rolled around, only $194 million remained. Even though no bills were passed in the December session for cap-related expenditures, in the few weeks that have passed since the session, that amount is now down to about $175 million.

How can that happen, you might ask?

The answer is simple. When the Legislature is not in session, the Joint Legislative Budget Committee can meet and make budget adjustments through instruments known as BA-7s. (This committee always contains a majority of legislators close to the governor, and that is certainly the case now.)

There obviously has been quite a bit of “adjusting” going on, and those “adjustments” are obviously part of an administration plan to put more pressure on the Legislature to raise the expenditure limit.

Commissioner of Administration Jerry LeBlanc recently took umbrage with those who suggest that the public employee pay raises proposed by the governor could be done by using the funds available below the expenditure limit.

LeBlanc noted that there are “other demands” on state government that the administration obviously feels should take priority over the proposed pay raises when it comes to expending the funds available below the cap.

If the administration wasn’t of that opinion, it would reserve the amount of funds necessary to do the raises below the cap and sell those other “priorities” to the Legislature as items necessary enough to require raising the expenditure limit.

Of course, the administration and its floor leaders in the Legislature know that using the public employees to raise the expenditure cap gives them a lot more political leverage than using any and all of those other “priorities.”

Simply put, the Blanco administration’s game plan is to use the Joint Legislative Budget Committee to spend as much money as possible when the Legislature isn’t in session in order to claim in the regular session that the only way to fund the pay raises is by raising the expenditure ceiling.

Blanco’s team told the Legislature during the special session that approximately $95 million was needed in the current budget to begin the pay raises in April, and it was willing to use the money below the cap to fund them.

Now the administration appears to be singing a different tune.

The teachers, support workers, and public safety personnel of the state should know there is money available and unspent right now for the Legislature to fund those pay raises effective in April and to annualize them with money available below the cap in the next budget. If those public employees are the priority, that will happen.

If they are just a means to an end, the Joint Budget Committee will spend all of the money below the cap, and the administration will once again use the public employees as bait in a fiscal snare.