Understanding the value of a seat in the Louisiana Legislature

The State Capitol in Baton Rouge, Louisiana

In many states that have "part-time" legislatures, where sessions are limited to a small term each year, members are often regarded as "non-professional" politicians.  The "value" of holding such a seat is regarded as low when compared to other political offices.  It's natural, then, for even nationally-recognized "experts" on politics to under-value the scope of a legislative seat in Louisiana.

I've told this story before, but it merits re-telling here.  Back in 1987, a guy I went to University of New Orleans with decided to try his hand at running for the Louisiana House of Representatives.  With a budget of lest than five thousand dollars, he did what you'd expect a guy in his late twenties with political ambitions would do, mount a grassroots campaign.  This entailed a lot of knocking on doors, walking local shopping malls, speaking at neighborhood associations, Kiwanis clubs, and the like.  For a job that paid about $21,000 a year, you wouldn't expect that much more would be necessary to compete.

This young man didn't have any illusions that he was going to unseat an incumbent, even one just completing his first term.  What he didn't expect, however, was to have that incumbent outspend him by a factor of 6:1.  The incumbent dropped well over $30,000 on his campaign, and the young man challenging him was crushed at the polls.

Over copious quantities of beer that November, we tried to sort out what happened.  When you're in what you expect to be a Pinewood Derby race and you get run over by a NASCAR team, things just don't make sense.  It made even less sense in the context of the race.  The incumbent for that seat, Kernan "Skip" Hand, had just finished his first term.  Prior to that, he ran for Mayor of Kenner, losing to now former Parish President (and likely future guest at Club Fed) Aaron Broussard.  That mayoral campaign was one of the most expensive in local political history, with the top three candidates spending a total of over $1million.  Hand won the legislative seat after another hard-fought and expensive campaign a year later.  There's no way Hand would have retired the debt from those two campaigns by 1987, and here he was, spending another $30K to crush an unknown newcomer.

All for a job that paid $21K.  It just didn't make any sense.  We all went on with our lives from there, and none of the folks I knew from Student Government at UNO attempted a run at office after that.  Still, we'd occasionally scratch our heads over that 1987 campaign, trying to sort it out. 

The answer became a bit clearer in 1993, when then-mayor of New Orleans, Sidney Barthelemy shined sunlight on an old legislative perk that was shared by the mayor.  He gave his son a four-year scholarship to Tulane University, under a program dating back over a century.  In 1883, the University of Louisiana, a public institution, was converted to the private Tulane University.  To compensate the state for the loss of the public school, Tulane agreed to give tuition waivers to the city's mayor and all the state legislators.  The mayor of NOLA gets to award a 4-year waiver annually, and the legislators get a 1-year waiver annually.  Naturally the revelation that the mayor was giving his family a huge financial bonus (the scholarships were valued at $17K/year in 1993), the ensuing firestorm was huge.  In the public outcry that ensued, it was revealed that then-Representative Hand had given a number of his annual scholarships to family members. 

Now the $30K spent on getting re-elected in 1987 made a lot more sense.  Forget the salary, there was a righteous chunk of money involved in the Tulane thing alone.  Things have changed and a lot more sunlight shines on this program now, but you get the idea.

This is just one "perk" that is enjoyed by state legislators in Louisiana, even though the legislature only meets for three months out of the year.  Given how long the Tulane tuition waivers remained out of the public eye, who knows what else exists that puts extra cash into the pockets of legislators.

Louisiana is often regarded as a backwater in the United States politically, particularly given our history with Huey P. Long.  State government here is quite centralized, however, largely because of mineral royalties.  The state reaps the benefit of offshore oil leases administered by the federal government, so various aspects of government that would be exclusively local in other states (like funding public school teacher salaries) include a role for state government.  This greatly increases the role and influence of even the part-time legislators.

To sum it up, an aspiring politician who is unfamiliar with the perks and influence of state legislators might not see the truck that is a co-ordinated effort to win one of these seats coming at them until it's too late.