Jindal's Budget Plan Stays The Course
by Jan Moller - Times-Picayune (excerpt)

BATON ROUGE -- Gov. Bobby Jindal presented the Legislature with a $30.1 billion executive budget Friday that keeps most state agencies operating at current levels, adds money to some health care and economic development programs, and eliminates more than 1,000 vacant jobs from the state payroll.

Commissioner of Administration Angele Davis, Jindal's chief budget architect, said the spending plan was crafted as a hedge against the likelihood that state revenue will level off in the coming years as Louisiana's overheated hurricane-recovery economy begins to cool.

"The responsible thing for us to do today is to prepare for those future years where we see our revenues declining," Davis said, calling it "the beginning of a new direction" for state government.

The governor's executive budget serves as the blueprint that lawmakers will work from as they craft a spending plan for the 2008-09 budget year that starts July 1. The budget plan assumes that legislators will agree to Jindal's request for $110 million in business tax breaks, which will be one of the topics of a special session that the governor has promised to call for March 9.