WHAT OTHERS SAY: Even with loads of money, a battle to get legislators to spend it wisely

Published 2:11 pm Tuesday, April 26, 2022

By Staff Reports

If you’re a taxpayer, you owe an attaboy to Stuart Bishop, the Lafayette lawmaker heading the House Ways and Means Committee.

It’s praise for what he didn’t do in the massive state construction bill steered through his committee.

“There are no splash pads. There are no baseball parks. There are no golf courses,” Bishop said. “This is about roads, ports, airports, bridges. And that was always my number one obligation.”

We agree that these are good priorities, but the omissions are probably not making Bishop popular among his colleagues, including his fellow Republicans.

Bishop’s goal was to remove the multitude of purely local projects funded by state dollars, a pork-barrel political system that is old as the Legislature.

However the fact remains that the Legislature has tons of money to spend, because of the pandemic recovery and new federal aid. It’s going to be next to impossible to keep all the payola projects out of the construction budget as it works its way through the process.

Splash pads, here we come?

We encourage legislative leaders to back the original lines of House Bill 2 and suspect that there will be support from Bishop’s Senate counterpart, Revenue and Fiscal Affairs’ chairman Bret Allain, R-Franklin.

Nevertheless, pressure for political projects will proliferate through both chambers. And what is a local project? Many of the Bishop priorities are roads or bridges or whatever that should be — and in most states are — the responsibility of local government. The Public Affairs Research Council thinks many other earmarks are buried in other budget bills.

Where Bishop’s initiative really matters is that he has advocated a “clean” HB2 as a way of limiting the governor’s powers over the Legislature.

For decades, legislators loaded HB2 with projects, realistic or not; the governor would dictate later in the process what would be funded and what would not be.

That’s real power in the State Capitol.

Bishop seeks to reduce the governor’s backstage sway. It requires restraint on the part of lawmakers currently disgruntled if their golf courses or ballparks didn’t get money.

We’ll see, but having the Bishop priorities in place is a good start.

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