The Livingston Parish News Weekly Show, a podcast produced by the Livingston Parish News, recently hosted State Representative Roger Wilder to discuss upcoming constitutional amendments.
The upcoming local election will put constitutional amendments on the ballot, including one Wilder introduced on millages and millage rollbacks. The amendment seeks to authorize a taxing authority to levy a millage at a rate lower than the maximum authorized rate under certain circumstances.
“This exact amendment was on the ballot in 2021,” Wilder stated, “but that time, everything failed on that ballot, so I picked it up.”
Wilder explained that “only a few things are in the United States Constitution; most of it is in statute and law,” but “when they wrote the [Louisiana] constitution in ‘73, everything is in the Constitution,” leading to these amendments becoming necessary since several are only “in the constitution instead of just the law.”
“We have to do it that way,” Wilder added. “It has to go to the public.”
“There’s another [amendment] that discusses property taxes for elderly over 65. So our parish right now does not have the authority to decide if it wants to eliminate, freeze, lock, whatever on property taxes for the elderly,” Wilder described as an example. “Let’s say Livingston decided to do that; well, we can't because the Louisiana Constitution says you can’t. So we as legislators passed that as one of the measures.”
In order for an amendment to make it to the ballot, it needs 2/3rds of the vote from the House and Senate as well as the Governor’s signature.
“2/3rds of the House is 70 votes. We can get 53, which is the majority… but to get that threshold you have to have consent that is watered down and has watered out all of the pieces [of the amendment] that someone didn’t like.”
Wilder’s amendment concerning mileages was brought to life by his experience “pay[ing] a lot of property taxes through [his] personal business and [his] home” and realizing that those taxes "fluctuate” at times.
“Our constitution currently mandates… that every four years [the tax assessors in each parish] have to reassess the property in the parish,” Wilder noted. “And within those four years, if you have a mileage and you don’t max it out – the highest you were charging becomes your new maximum.”
Wilder described it as a “spend it or lose it” caveat.
As such, areas that run mileages below their maximum for three of the four years face a hard decision: stay at the lower mileage rate and lose the potential for a larger maximum, or raise the mileage to the maximum to keep the maximum available in the future?
McHugh David, Executive Director of the Louisiana Press Association, stated that, for example, “look at the parish’s road program mileage, which started at 5 [mils] and is now at 2.32 [mils], which is 1.16 [mils] inside municipalities as well. Denham is very reliant on the parish and DOTD for their roads, but the parish has now cut their mileage almost in half. It got locked in because they had rolled it back, and now we have new engineering standards, roads are more expensive to do, and they don’t have the full mileage to do it.”
“Where we are with this is… we have it on the ballot,” Wilder stated, noting that competitors have already expressed opposition to the amendment, adding that the opposition’s “reasoning and explanation is totally false, there’s nothing factual about what they’re saying.”
“The bottom line is: we’re in an era now where Facebook… is the wrong place [to go for information] because nothing’s cited, it’s just emotional jibber-jabber.”
“We’re in the biggest opportunity of information right now, and we just can’t follow the most emotional, illogical fallacies that are out there,” Wilder concluded.
