Greater Baton Rouge Business Report: Legislative lab

At the precise time last week the state Senate debated a bill to ban soft drinks and snack food from school vending machines, the House considered allowing convenience stores to sell alcoholic drinks mixed on the premises.

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Were these conflicting currents or just the free flow of sometimes contradictory ideas examined in the laboratory of democracy known as the Louisiana Legislature?

Ultimately, the Senate compromised by allowing an equal number of Coke and Pepsi machines alongside those dispensing fruit drinks and bottled water and did the same with Honey Buns and granola bars. No such happy medium was arrived at in the House, which rejected legalizing daiquiris-on-the-go.

But the legislative experimentation was just getting started in what became a wild-card week as representatives waited for the administration to bring up its stalled cigarette tax up for a vote.

What seemed one of the crazier, unpassable bills, to allow slot machines at Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans, became imminently reasonable and practical when it was amended to dedicate the revenue to fulfilling the state's contract with the New Orleans Saints. The voluntary tax on tourists seemed to bridge the irreconcilable positions held by New Orleans area lawmakers and those from the rest of the state over who should bear the burden for subsidizing the football franchise.

But hot as the slots-for-Saints bill was when it blew out of the House a cooler reception awaits it in the Senate, which is usually more conservative on gambling matters and generally skeptical of experiments cooked up in the House.

The airport slots bill overshadowed another House-passed item, to allow gambling on large paddlewheelers on the Mississippi River. It's a rather startling concept: gambling on riverboats that actually cruise. What will they think of next?

Here's one. After 170 years of state and parish elections being held about a year earlier than presidential elections, the House decided to align state voting with the federal calendar, which would save $6.4 million every four years. But critics see through the cost-saving move and denounce it as a reprieve on term limits, because current legislators and other state officials would have their terms extended one year, until the 2008 election.

Senators might also object, without actually saying so, to losing the option of running for Congress while having a safe legislative seat to fall back on.

Education vouchers are not a new idea. But House Bill 613 by Rep. Tim Burns, R-Mandeville, little noticed when first filed, bubbled up as the surprise bill of the week and one of the most controversial of the session.

Last year, a similar bill, which would use state tax dollars to pay private and church school tuition for up to 1,200 students now in failing public schools in New Orleans, did not get a second in House Education Committee. This year, it was sent to the House floor by a 13-1 vote.

Besides the archdiocese committing to applying state accountability standards to vouchered students, which it refused to do last year, the major change was the continued deterioration and chaotic management of New Orleans schools, which lawmakers from around the state have lost patience in waiting for the locals to address. The bill passed, 62-37.

Observing from the side of the chamber were a former schoolteacher and a former principal, now the governor and the state superintendent of education. The governor said the bill sent a "strong message" but also hoped the Senate did not send it to her desk. The same for Superintendent Cecil Picard, though he might use the threat of the bill's passage to induce more cooperation from the Orleans Parish School Board.

Public education lobbyists might be right in predicting that the voucher bill will never become law. But every so often an idea that starts as a legislative experiment turns into one whose time suddenly comes.

JOHN MAGINNIS is a Baton Rouge-based syndicated political columnist. Reach him at his Web site, www.lapolitics.com.