The organization that advocates for small businesses in Louisiana is generally pleased with how the legislative session went. Andrew Greenstein reports.
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Governor Jeff Landry unveils his plan to make sure that teachers continue to get a two-thousand dollar stipend that they’ve received since 2023. Jeff Palermo has the story.
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The organization that advocates for small businesses in Louisiana is generally pleased with how the legislative session went. Leah Long, the state director of the National Federation of Independent Business, says there were two bills in particular which passed that the organization is very pleased about. She says one of them creates the Bayou Growth Opportunity Workforce Program, or BayouWorks.
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Long says another bill that passed that the organization is pleased about is one that modernizes the state’s workers comp system and helps reduce costs for small businesses.
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Long says there were also bills the organization was advocating for which went nowhere, including a centralized sales tax collection bill.
Cut 5 (13) “…we’ll get there.”
Long says the organization was also playing defense with some bills that it did not agree with, including those which would have imposed new labor mandates and regulatory mandates on small businesses.
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It’s been seven months since LSU announced the hiring of new President Wade Rousse. In that time, he’s committed to making improvements across the Baton Rouge campus. He says things students ask him about the most include parking and housing, along with a project currently underway near the softball field.
Rousse says the administration has been searching for the optimal enrollment number as they face record application numbers. He says both the main and satellite campuses are expanding, but growth for the sake of growth can be dangerous.
Rousse says his top priority is raising funds to build a new library. He says that LSU needs to reach a threshold of private funding for the project before the state can provide capital outlay, and they’re very close to their goal.
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Governor Jeff Landry announced his solution today to prevent a potential pay cut for teachers. The governor has signed an executive order that directs BESE to find 168-million dollars that’s NOT used on instruction from the state’s public school budget and use that money to pay a two-thousand-dollar stipend for teachers and a one-thousand-dollar stipend for support workers.
This plan will likely not sit well with school superintendents who say they need more money because of rising fuel costs, insurance and other expenses.
But Landry says since 1988, Louisiana’s K-through-12 enrollment has dropped by more than 111-thousand students, yet the cost to education each child has increased 67-percent.
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Landry says when you take into account inflation, Louisiana public school teachers are actually making less than what educators made in the 1980s.
Teachers have received a two-thousand-dollar stipend since 2023, but it’s on the verge of going away because two different constitutional amendments failed to pass over the last two years and the stipend was not funded in the budget just approved by lawmakers.
But the governor believes the money to pay for the stipend can be found in the non-instructional section of the state’s public school funding formula.
Landry will need the support of the Legislature, before 168-million dollars can be removed from the Minimum Foundation Program. It will take a two-thirds vote by both the House and Senate.
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A former Louisiana congressman is recounting his recent visit to war-torn Ukraine. Charles Boustany told Jim Engster on Talk Louisiana that on his final day in the country, May 23rd, the area in Kyiv where he was staying came under attack, and to say that it was a harrowing experience is putting it very mildly.
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The attack left four people dead and dozens of others injured.
Boustany was in Ukraine to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky and to observe some of the country’s humanitarian efforts. He says the images from Ukraine that Americans see do the situation in that country no justice.
Boustany was joined in Ukraine by another former Republican congressman, Geoff Davis of Kentucky. Boustany says it seems as if the U.S. has forgotten about Ukraine since the new administration took office.