Prep Roundup Week 2
September 16, 2015
Terrebonne sheriff and deputies sued over shooting of teen
September 22, 2015
The state senator who has represented a district that includes Terrebonne and St. Mary parishes has breezed into a second term of office unopposed, with no opponents registered to run against him in this year’s upcoming election.
State Sen. Bret Allain, R-Jeanerette, will represent District 21 for four more years. In addition to St. Mary and portions of Terrebonne, the district also includes portions of Lafourche and Iberville parishes. He can run to hold the seat for one more term after this new one is completed before being barred from doing so by term limits.
Allain, a business owner and sugar cane farmer who bested former Tri-Parish Times publisher Darrin Guidry in the 2011 election to initially win the seat, mostly credits keeping his word to constituents as the reason for his success.
“I think I showed everybody that I did what I said I was going to do, represent all parts of my district,” Allain said. “People have faith in the amount of what we have been able to accomplish with capital outlay, getting some very important parts of the district funded.”
Only partly in jest, Allain said it is possible that the great challenges lying ahead for the Legislature might have contributed to the lack of opposition.
“Things might have frightened off everybody based on what the budget is going to be for next year,” Allain said, noting that he and other lawmakers are walking into a gaping deficit, with fewer options than ever available to plug spending gaps.
Finding a way to keep the state from getting into such fiscal constraints through change in the law, Allain said, will be one of his top priorities in his new four-year term.
“It is not good,” he said of the state’s position. “Until we address some of the structural problem that we have in the budget it is not going to get any better.”
Allain said he and other lawmakers will need to look carefully at tax breaks for businesses that have helped put the state into a downward fiscal spin.
The inventory tax credit, which requires the state to credit businesses back the amount of money they pay to parish governments for their inventories, is one of the practices Allain sees as particularly onerous.
“We have the same deficits year after year,” he said. “We can no longer afford to partially subsidize local governments through the inventory tax credits. Since 1991 the state has been giving refunds to those people paying the inventory tax, 100 percent of it. We cannot back the local governments anymore. They have grown the inventory tax so much it is affecting our ability to fund higher education and health care. It started out as a good idea, but it will grow to $500 million next year.”
Allain, who holds agriculture and engineering degrees from LSU, garnered 51.4 percent of the vote in a close election against Guidry in 2011.
In addition to a focus on coastal protection, Allain has been a strong advocate of infrastructure upgrades, particularly completion of the proposed I-49 corridor that follows the route of U.S. Highway 90 in Louisiana. That project, along with upgrades to La. Highway 1, Allain maintains, are vital to the economic health of his district and Louisiana as a whole.
