Gov. Jeff Landry speaks Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2025.
Gov. Jeff Landry speaks Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2025.
Gov. Jeff Landry is crisscrossing Louisiana, running an advertising campaign and appearing on talk radio shows to get voters to approve the next big item on his agenda: a tax overhaul on the March 29 statewide ballot known as Amendment 2.
At the governor’s behest during a special session in November, the Legislature reduced income taxes, raised the sales tax, abolished a tax on big businesses known as the corporate franchise tax, imposed a tax on digital goods and lowered taxpayer subsidies for film producers and developers of historic buildings.
Those changes are now state law.
But Landry and lawmakers want to make a host of other changes to the tax section of the state constitution that requires a vote of the people.
“Amendment 2 will set Louisiana on a course to create more jobs, grow the economy and put more money in the pockets of hard-working Louisianans, teachers and our senior citizens,” Landry wrote in a column published in the Ouachita Citizen on Wednesday.
Amendment 2 has the support of several prominent advocacy groups, including the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, Americans for Prosperity and the Pelican Institute for Public Policy, among other groups.
Groups on both the left and the right are mounting a grassroots campaign against Amendment 2 for divergent reasons.
Those on the left say it would lead to spending cuts on such vital needs as education and health care, while those on the right say one provision could cause churches to lose property tax exemptions they need to survive.
“Politics and policy can make for strange bedfellows sometimes. I’m sure they’re coming from a sincere place, and so are we,” Jan Moller, director of Invest in Louisiana, a Baton Rouge-based group that supports state programs that help low-income people, said of his newfound allies.
Amendment 2 would double the standard deduction for seniors on their income taxes, lower the top individual income tax rate and impose a limit on the growth of government spending.
It would make pay stipends that the Legislature approved last year — $2,000 for teachers and $1,000 for support staff — a recurring part of their salaries. The money would come from ending three education trust funds. That would free up $300 million per year by eliminating $2 billion in debt.
Interest income from those trust funds has been providing $50 million per year for early childhood education, for improving struggling schools and for teacher recruitment. So eliminating the trust funds would put the money for those programs in doubt, Moller said.
Richard Nelson, the revenue secretary and the intellectual architect of the amendment, said the governor has committed to finding money to keep funding those programs.
The amendment also would give parishes the option of repealing the property tax on business inventory, make it harder to create more tax breaks in the future and take most property tax exemptions out of the constitution and put their continued existence in the hands of legislators.
The property tax change is the provision prompting some social conservatives — including the Rev. Tony Spell, who made a name opposing COVID restrictions — to work to defeat Amendment 2.
The amendment also would merge two state savings accounts, and, if passed, allow Landry to use some of that money to pay parishes to drop the inventory tax program.
The proposal does not touch two popular tax protections in the state constitution: the $75,000 homestead exemption and the sales tax exemption for the purchase of groceries, residential utilities and prescription drugs.
Landry moved quickly in his first year to put his stamp on government after eight years of Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat. A Republican super-majority in both the House and Senate — the first ever in modern times — has mostly approved his proposals.
Last year, Landry got the Legislature to pass a raft of anti-crime measures — including one that allowed the execution of Jessie Hoffman at Angola Tuesday night — to create Education Savings Accounts that allow children to attend private schools with taxpayer dollars and to give him greater power to control state boards and commissions.
The various changes to the tax system approved by legislators in November came in bipartisan votes that will shift the burden from income taxes to sales taxes, which hit the poor hardest.
Amendment 2 was put on the ballot by passage of House Bill 7, sponsored by Rep. Julie Emerson, R-Carencro. It consisted of 115 pages.
On Tuesday, during an interview on Talk Louisiana with Jim Engster on WRKF in Baton Rouge and WWNO in New Orleans, Landry said approval of Amendment 2 would make Louisiana more attractive to investors and move the state closer to his goal of phasing out the income tax.
“It paves the way for so many great things to happen,” Landry told listeners.
The political stakes for Landry are high, said Bernie Pinsonat, a veteran pollster and political analyst. He notes that then-Gov. Buddy Roemer never got back on track and lost his reelection race after voters in 1989 rejected his bid to rewrite the tax system.
Landry has more political support than Roemer had then, Pinsonat said, but added, “He has a lot riding on it politically.”
To help make sure it passes, Landry has spoken to chambers of commerce in Monroe, Covington, Houma and Plaquemine in recent days.
Make Louisiana Great Again, a Landry-supported PAC, is running TV, radio and digital ads extolling Amendment 2, said Brent Littlefield, the governor’s longtime media strategist.
While several prominent conservative organizations support the plan, some members of Landry’s political base are trying to defeat the measure because they say taking property tax exemptions for nonprofits and religious institutions out of the constitution — as Amendment 2 would do — would allow future legislatures to eliminate the tax breaks with a two-thirds vote and the governor’s support.
“How do we know who will be the next governor?” asked Hunter Lundy, a Pentecostal minister who finished fifth in the 2023 governor’s race and otherwise praises Landry’s performance as governor.
Lundy is paying for a digital media campaign against Amendment 2.
Woody Jenkins, a former state legislator from Baton Rouge who was a delegate to the 1973 assembly that wrote the constitution now in effect, called the property tax provision “a poison pill” in Amendment 2 and is writing articles against it that are being shared throughout Louisiana.
“This is people to people talking and pastors talking,” Jenkins said. “They don’t appreciate a lot of things loaded up onto one thing. When in doubt, people don’t vote for things they don’t understand.”
Moller said people who are not well educated on the amendment before they vote could be confused by the contents of a 115-page bill explained in only 91 words on the ballot.
“The overall message is that this amendment makes it harder to make the investments we need, drains critical trust funds and is based on misleading language and misleading promises,” Moller said.
A coalition of progressive groups are behind a webpage that tells voters to reject all four amendments on the March 29 ballot.
“They are using smoke and mirrors to pass them,” reads the webpage, which doesn’t identify who is behind the effort to defeat all four amendments.
Email Tyler Bridges at tbridges@theadvocate.com.
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