Time is running out to familiarize yourself with the ballot for Saturday's election - on your ballot will be four constitutional amendments. It’s good to read up on these amendments beforehand because the description of amendments and bills can be confusing once you’re already in the booth. I asked Robert Travis Scott, President of the Public Affairs Research Council, to help break down these amendments and give us a clear understanding of them.
Explain Amendment One, sales tax streamlining… what is that about?
We have a very decentralized sales tax system in Louisiana, and our state constitution states that each parish will have a single collector for sales tax.The collector in the state takes the sales tax money and remits it back to the local and state governments in order for them to have their tax revenue. Amendment number one changes the constitution to say, you can have a streamlined sales tax commission, made up of local government representatives to create and help implement a new system… even if this amendment passes statewide, the legislature still has to come in and pass an implementation statute in order to get the thing running, and they need a two thirds majority vote in both the House and the Senate of our state legislature. This is a very high bar to meet in order to have something that everybody agrees on and people feel safe about
Let's move to Amendment Two, which deals with tax reform.
The Louisiana state constitution says that when you pay your federal taxes, you get to take that amount of money when you're filling out your state income tax form, and you get to deduct that from your income. Louisiana makes about average revenue, or maybe less for it's individual income tax. That's unusual because we have such a high tax rate compared to other states… This amendment would set a cap on the tax rate and allow the legislature to decide what to do with the federal tax deduction. There's implementation legislation that would reduce our upper tax rate to 4.25%, down from 6%, and it would also reduce the other two tax brackets that we have there. Basically, you're getting dramatically lower tax rates and you're giving up this big tax deduction… it's largely revenue-neutral, both for the taxpayer and the state. I think it makes our individual income tax system more fair, and obviously more simple and more stable.
Amendment Three deals with taxing authority for new levee districts. Talk about that, Robert.
It takes about five levee districts in this state that don't have a millage yet, and they would charge residents to do the work. This amendment would make the levee districts operate like all the other levee districts that came before it. The boards of these levee districts could bill up to five mills on a property tax… If you're not a voter in one of these levee districts, you're basically voting to decide whether you're going to give the choice to these five levee districts to decide on whether or not they want to allow a millage. It boils down to a local referendum for these five.
Of all the amendments, Three actually confuses me the most. I don't like this idea of not having the locals actually straight up vote one way or the other on this issue.
The people I've talked to who were in these districts really feel like this is really a local referendum. They are telling statewide voters to let them vote ‘yes’ on the amendment this Saturday so they can decide for themselves.
Detail Amendment Four, tapping dedicated money to fix a deficit.
Amendment Four would allow the governor to spend more money to handle emergency situations, and has to get approval from the joint budget committee in the legislature to do it. This is something they can do in a regular session. If the legislature is in a regular session, they can deal with this the normal legislative way. This would be something that's used when they're not in regular session.
