NEW ORLEANS — After two special sessions, followed by a hard-fought regular session, Louisiana lawmakers are ready to come home.
The New Orleans Area delegation is returning with a list of important bills passed into law.
The legislature agreed to hold the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board more accountable, amid chronic flooding and billing problems.
Lawmakers did away with estimated billing, set up a new arbitration process for resolving contested bills, and made drainage the sole responsibility of the sewerage and water board.
Under the old system, the city controlled the catch basins and smaller pipes.
“Those are three really big changes; we hope to see substantial changes for residents,” Rep. Stephanie Hilferty, R-New Orleans. I don’t think it’s going to happen overnight. I don’t want to provide that false hope, but we were very committed to looking at all of these things.”
Local lawmakers were seeking an exception to the state’s new permitless carry bill in the French Quarter.
Instead, the legislature agreed to apply the current restrictions on people who have a permit to carry to people who carry without a permit.
That includes notifying police officers you’re carrying a gun.
It also prohibits a person from carrying a gun without a permit who is under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
“We’ll probably be looking at this issue again, next year, but we wanted to give the police all the tools they can to keep illegal guns and bad people from having guns,” Sen. Kirk Talbot said. “I think it’s a step in the right direction.”
“It wasn’t the bill that we started out with,” Rep. Alonzo Know, D-New Orleans, said. “Those bills wouldn’t make it out of committee, so this is a watered-down version, but it gives police something when they have reasonable suspicion.”
In Jefferson Parish, Sen. Pat Connick was able to pass a bill requiring the Office of Juvenile Justice to notify law enforcement and the media when an offender escapes, even from a halfway house.
“It’s common-sense legislation and people saw that up here and it was passed with no problems whatsoever.
The legislature also passed a number of bills addressing the state’s insurance crisis.
Lawmakers extended the fortified roof program, lifted the ten percent surcharge on Citizen’s Insurance for three years, streamlined the claims process and repealed a rule blocking insurers from dropping a policy after it was renewed for three years.
Most policy holders as of August 1 would be grandfathered in under the old rule.
“Those are things we’ve done,” Talbot who chairs the Senate Insurance Committee said. “We need to hope for a quiet hurricane season that we always hope for, but we need competition and we’ve done I think everything legislatively to attract companies to come here and at the same time protect policyholders.”
As time ran out on the session, lawmakers decided not to call a Constitutional Convention at least for now or pass a controversial bill that would have gutted the state’s public records law.
This session, lawmakers also restored funding for the summer EBT program.
Qualified families will receive $120 per child in a single payment to purchase groceries beginning this month.
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