Governor John Bel Edwards released a column today saying cuts to higher ed and health care are not solutions to the budget crisis, but Republican House Appropriations Committee Chairman Cameron Henry says he’s more interested in where they can make cuts before raising taxes. He believes legislators will look at ways to reduce spending first…:
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He believes legislators will exhaust every measure possible to reduce the size of government before raising taxes.

Governor John Bel Edwards announces he’s dropping the lawsuit filed by the Jindal Administration to end Common Core. Edwards says the case, which is pending on appeal before the US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, uses money, time and resources that do not benefit students — especially since the process to develop and implement Louisiana’s own education standards is nearing completion. He says his administration will not continue to waste taxpayer money on lawyers and lawsuits.

The state department of revenue says their systems are not impacted by the system outage the Internal Revenue Service is experiencing. The IRS is dealing with a hardware failure which is affecting a number of their federal tax processing systems. LDR says Louisiana taxpayers can continue to prepare and file their state returns as they normally would.

Federal money received as part of a nationwide disaster resiliency competition will be used to move Native Americans living in Isle de Jean (zhan) Charles in Terrebonne Parish to safer ground. Eric Gill reports…
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