Too many constitutional amendments on state ballots?

State Rep. Jack McFarland said that given time, state education officials could find budget cuts that would provide money for teacher pay raises. (Photo by Cross Harris / LSU Manship School News Service)

BATON ROUGE — Voter rejection of constitutional amendments, including one that would have freed up money for teacher pay raises, complicated this spring’s legislative session and raised questions about whether the public is being asked to vote on too many amendments that are hard to understand, lawmakers said Thursday.

State Rep. Beau Beaullieu, R-New Iberia, said the failure of all five amendments in May was the biggest disappointment this session, and state Rep. Jack McFarland, R-Jonesboro, shared this sentiment.

“There is extreme disappointment that the amendments failed,” McFarland said. ”I do think the amendments got caught up in some of the outside political issues with the congressional redistricting and the controversy there. And it's unfortunate because now we're back to square one.”

State Sen. Gerald Boudreaux, D-Lafayette, said it’s time to reassess the strategy on constitutional amendments.

“While I respect the fact that there are some things that need to be changed, I think we need to hit the reset button and just stop with constitutional amendments for a few years and let people get a better understanding of what's going on,” Boudreaux said.

“I think that has been the problem, and that's why, you know, we have not been successful in passing these,” he added. “Lay people just don't understand the details, and you cannot put it on the ballot for people to understand.”

The amendments would have allowed lawmakers to adjust civil-service protections; created a school system in St. George, a town that broke off from Baton Rouge; given parishes flexibility in levying business inventory taxes; and raised the mandatory retirement age for judges.

The amendment seeking to give teachers a permanent pay raise by liquidating three state education trust funds caused the most chaos of the five, leaving Gov. Jeff Landry and legislative leaders scrambling to find a long-term solution.

Landry’s substitute plan is to take $168 million from non-instructional expenditures in the Minimum Foundation Program, which lays out the blueprint for $4.6 billion in K-12 funding for school districts across the state.

His idea is to provide teachers with $2,000 stipends this year while seeking a more comprehensive overhaul that could provide permanent pay raises next year. Changing the current allocation to pay the stipends would require a two-thirds vote of lawmakers via mail-in ballots to pass.

“Do I think over a long period of time, we could probably find $165 million within the $4.6 billion? Yeah,” McFarland said.

According to McFarland, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, non-instructional expenses can include food services, buses or fuel, among others.

Beaullieu, McFarland and Boudreaux reviewed the session on a webinar sponsored by the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana.

After a last-minute update from the Revenue Estimating Conference lowered revenue projections and sent legislators into a frenzy to maintain a standstill budget, McFarland said there were sacrifices that had to be made, including the decision to not increase the money allocated for Landry’s LA GATOR program to give state money to parents to send children to private schools.

“I think it put the Senate in a very awkward position because those are dollars we had already utilized and had already funded into various agencies,” McFarland said. “There were tough decisions made, and not all were popular, but it’s just part of the political process.”

Boudreaux said the priority was ensuring that students already enrolled through the school voucher program were taken care of. But, he said, an expansion of LA GATOR is not off the table if the Senate can set up fiscal guardrails.

“Next year, we could get to that point where we can look at how we incorporate that, because every one of us has those schools who are looking to expand the GATOR program within their respective districts,” Boudreaux said.

Other budget cuts included the elimination of a $31 million increase in K-12 school operational costs, but Boudreaux asserts that the budget still had some wins in higher education.

“We were able to put $56 million for outcome-based funding, along with millions of dollars that were put into the budget, direct funds to campuses and operations and facilities,” Boudreaux said.

Outcome-based funding is a budgeting model for higher education that allocates funds to public colleges and universities based on performance rather than enrollment rates.

Beaullieu said holding a convention to revise the constitution is unlikely, though he sees it as necessary.

“If we can't get them [voters] to vote yes on some of the amendments, at the end of a constitutional convention the voters have to accept or reject the new constitution,” he said.

“So, if we had one on the table today, I'm not confident that the voters would accept the new constitution,” Beaullieu said. “I think it's needed. I desperately think it's needed.”

Congressional redistricting took over the session in the last few weeks, as the Legislature voted to remove one of two majority-black congressional districts in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that the current map depended too heavily on racial considerations.

Beaullieu said he is confident the new map will survive any challenges.

“We found a happy medium in the map that we passed, and ultimately, we feel that it’s going to meet constitutional muster based on the Callais case and everything that we’re reading, even as late as two days ago, with the Supreme Court coming back on the Alabama redistricting case, saying they could proceed with their six-Republican, one-Democrat map,” Beaullieu said.

That “kind of gives us a good feeling that, any kind of challenges, we should overcome those.”

Boudreaux said he was pleased with the big turnout of constituents at the hearings on the maps.

“They put pause on their life to come,” Boudreaux said. “We were there until 4:30 in the morning and went late into the evening on that, where people had an opportunity to come and express their First Amendment rights to inform us as to what they feel. And it wasn’t just Democrats, it wasn’t just Republicans or Independents, it was everybody who came out. I think that’s what the process is supposed to be about.”

Boudreaux spoke against the shift this year to closed-party primaries in some races, saying it creates confusion and is likely to be revisited in the future.

Beaullieu, Boudreaux and McFarland all supported expanding Louisiana’s economy beyond dependence on the oil and gas industry, particularly with the passage of limited liability protections making Louisiana more enticing to the aerospace industry.

“I do think for us to compete, to have an opportunity ... to land one of the aerospace industries in Louisiana, we put ourselves in that position,” McFarland said.