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Photo caption: The Louisiana Supreme Court Building on Royal Street in New Orleans. Photo courtesy Wes Muller/Louisiana Illuminator.
The Louisiana Legislature accidentally reduced judges’ pay and removed $5 million for technology upgrades from a Louisiana Supreme Court fund last week as lawmakers scrambled to pass a state spending plan in the final, chaotic moments of their two-month session.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerome Zeringue, R-Houma, said the cutbacks were done by mistake and due to a “clerical error” made in budget bills he sponsored. The Senate included a set of amendments to two documents that were unknowingly deleted.
“We had every intention of transferring those dollars,” Zeringue said in an interview Friday. “There was an inadvertent change.”
The adjustments will cause state and municipal judges to lose a relatively modest amount of money — just $164,825 overall — in supplemental pay to cover travel expenses.
Another $5 million that was supposed to go to a court technology fund controlled by the entire state Supreme Court is also headed to an account now mostly under the control of Chief Justice John Weimer, with whom other justices have disagreements on spending, Sen. Jimmy Harris, D-New Orleans, said
The judges’ funding “mistakes” has added to tensions between the House and the Senate over the final budget that was passed in a rushed fashion last week. Senators didn’t get to see the budget documents — which House leaders were holding — until less than an hour before they were asked to approve them Thursday.
Had they gotten the budget bills earlier in the day for review, senators might have been able to adjust the judicial funding. Judges started calling members about the problem immediately — a few minutes after the documents became publicly available online — but it was too late to revise the budget bill before the vote, Harris said.
“Many of the senators are very upset,” Harris said. “How do we fix it? I honestly don’t have an answer.”
The accident may have also further soured the relationship between justices and Zeringue, who has been pushing for years for more transparency and financial accountability in the judiciary.
This year alone, Zeringue brought two pieces of legislation meant to rein in judges’ expenses. Both were vigorously opposed by all of the Supreme Court justices except for Wiemer and ended up dying in House committees.
Zeringue’s House Bill 589 would have required the courts to support the Judicial Supplemental Compensation Fund — the same fund that was reduced in budget — exclusively with court filing fees instead of relying on other state funding. Judges would also have had to use the fund to help pay for retirement and health care costs, in addition to travel expenses.
The money in the fund would also have been dispersed by the judicial administrator, who reports directly to the Supreme Court’s chief justice, rather than an existing panel of judges from the supreme, appellate, district and city courts. The House Judiciary Committee rejected the proposal.
Zeringue’s House Bill 307 would have lowered the reimbursement rate judges can claim for their travel expenses to bring it in line with the standard rates used by the legislature, Gov. John Bel Edwards’ administration and other statewide elected officials.
Zeringue said judges receive $118 per day just to cover meals when they travel in or out-of-state, and their hotel reimbursement rate has no cap. By contrast, lawmakers and other state officials follow the standard, lower reimbursement rates for meals and hotels set by the federal government.
For example, the governor’s staff received a daily allowance of $75 to cover meals while traveling with Edwards to London last year.
At a hearing earlier in April, Zeringue said he couldn’t find any other state that allowed judges such a high reimbursement rate for travel expenses. The judiciary budget had also grown by more than $30 million in the past 10 years, and judges had received raises over multiple years at times when other state employees were asked to go without, he said.
“In Louisiana, we’re at the bottom of many things…. But we are 17th highest in terms of judicial pay,” Zeringue said at a hearing in April. “We need to create more efficiencies in terms of the judiciary.”
New restrictions on the judiciary are always difficult to pass, however, in part because so many legislators are attorneys who have to appear before those same judges. For example, the House and Governmental Affairs Committee, who voted down Zeringue’s travel expense proposal, includes seven attorneys.
“Can you understand the concern it presents to us as lawyers?” Rep. Mike Johnson, R-Pineville, asked Zeringue before opposing the travel pay adjustment.
In spite of Zeringue’s fraught relationship with the judiciary, Harris said he didn’t believe Zeringue tried to sneak any reductions to the judicial budget past his colleagues on purpose. Zeringue has always been an honest broker in the Legislature, Harris said, and he “took [Zeringue] at his word” that changes included in the final budget bill were honest mistakes.
Senate President Page Cortez, R-Lafayette, has also said the Legislature’s budget process was confusing and rushed at the end, not because of Zeringue — who controlled many of the budget bills — but because of a small group of House conservatives who had slowed down budget negotiations for days.
“[The conservatives] never had any real interest in doing anything but derailing the whole process,” Cortez said. “That’s certainly not what’s best for Louisiana.”
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