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Facing the FireHagel sits through tough hearing for Defense position.
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Yellow vs. goldIowa Yellow Jackets play S. Beauregard Golden Knights.
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americanpress.com
Friday, February 1, 2013
HHH No. 43,123 Lake Charles, Louisiana 50 Cents
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An important element of the soon-to-open SEED Center is the business incubator, which will be home to up to 35 people who want to start up a small business of their own.
The business incubator will offer office spaces for potential and current business owners to lease.
To be housed in the new SEED Center, the business incubator will be just one part of multiple entities coming together to promote the impor-tance of an entrepreneurial spirit in Southwest Louisiana.
Business incubators are a worldwide concept, but the one at the SEED Center will be the first of its kind in South-west Louisiana, said Adrian Wallace, SEED Center pro-gram director.
The mixed-use incubator will be available for any type of business from technology to food. It will be open for pre-startups, startups, and home-based businesses that want to
By lance [email protected]
Incubator to house 35
potential businesses
The first three pieces of leg-islation filed for Louisiana’s upcoming session all involve firearms and gun control, and one measure would require people to keep their guns locked away when they are not being carried or used.
House Bill 4, by Rep. Bar-bara Norton, D-Shreveport, would make it illegal for people to “keep or store” fire-arms that are not in a “locked container” or “equipped with a lock to render the firearm inoperable.” First offenders would be fined up to $300, and any additional violations would include a fine of up to $500 and six months in jail.
Rep. Brett Geymann, R-Lake Charles, opposes the measure. He said he does not believe tougher gun control laws will prevent tragic events like the December shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., that left 26 students and school staff dead.
“Politicians try to pass bills that feel good, but it doesn’t take care of the problem,” Geymann said. “I don’t think that’s the answer; I don’t want to whittle away at our Second Amendment rights.”
Geymann said Norton’s measure appears to follow the
By John [email protected]
Louisiana responds
to gun control
The Calcasieu Parish School Board is gearing up to provide additional teacher retirement funds as the state continues to seek more financial support. From last year to this year what retire-ment funds are provided by the School Board will result in an 11 percent increase. Karl Bruchhaus, the school
system’s chief financial of-ficer, said this will take the rate from 24.5 percent to 27.1 percent.
“We will have to carve out, in the absence of a tremen-dous revenue increase to offset that, in the amount of about $5 million,” he said. “We will have to carve that out of our existing expenditure budget.”
Bruchhaus said they will probably start the process of
crafting the budget for next year — which will include the increased expenditure — around late March. Currently, the School Board spends about $33 million on teacher retirement. Bruchhaus said this is in addition to the $3.5 million spent on retirement funds for school employees. He expects by next year the total will increase to roughly $42 million.
“What’s happening is the
retirement systems have for years said they’re underfund-ed,” Bruchhaus said.
He said that Louisiana’s retirement systems have de-termined there is not enough money to cover teachers for the rest of their lives. There-fore, the school districts now have to put in more money to try to bring the overall sum to a higher amount to cover this.
School Board President Randy Burleigh said he feels
confident that at present the budget is fine and that they currently have over a 12 per-cent surplus. However, he said there has been more pressure on the local school district to fund the state and the federal government in all employees’ retirement packages. “We as a local school board are having to absorb more of that; they’re not giving us the funds, and
By nichole [email protected]
CPSB to make room in budget for rising teachers’ retirement costs
By The Associated Press
BATON ROUGE — The state’s pool of money to pay for ongoing construction projects is running dry, and Louisiana is teetering so close to its debt ceiling that there’s little room to borrow more to replenish the fund, officials
said Thursday.Without a new infusion of
cash, Louisiana is projected to run out of money to pay for college building repairs, eco-nomic development projects and state-funded road work in about four months, said Whit Kling, director of the State Bond Commission that over-
sees construction borrowing and state debt calculations.
State senators heard the troubling news of the latest money problem in a briefing about Louisiana’s finances by Sherry Phillips-Hymel, the chamber’s chief budget ana-lyst. She told senators that the capital outlay fund is “very,
very low.”“The fund is broke. The
fund does not have sufficient cash resources, and without a change in the legislative statute, there’s no way to issue additional bonds,” Kling, who watched the Senate briefing, said after the meeting.
The state can borrow
money to pay for construction projects through bond sales to investors, with the debt paid off with interest over several years. But Louisiana has a constitutional limit on debt, and the state is $22 million from hitting its $605 million debt ceiling, Phillips-Hymel told senators.
Kling said that leaves the state little capacity to issue new bonds to replenish the construction fund. He said the state could borrow enough money to cover about four ad-ditional months of construc-tion work before hitting the
state nearly out of construction funds
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More insideSee the sights of the 74th Live-stock Show and Rodeo, B8
hold on tight!
Rick Hickman / Special to the American PressBuck Lunak of Cut Bank, MT competes in the bareback riding event at the 74th An-nual District Livestock Show and Rodeo on Thursday night at Burton Coliseum.
State debt limit could cause money to run out in four months
Bills for new session both regulate guns and counter future
federal law
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A6 AMERICAN PRESS FRIdAy, FEbRuARy 1, 2013
From pAge A1 l locAl
“national agenda of gun con-trol.” President Barack Obama recently introduced legislation and executive actions and has called on Congress to pass a ban on assault weapons and require universal background checks on gun purchases.
“It just doesn’t accomplish anything,” Geymann said.
“The fundamental problem is society is deteriorating; some people turn to crime to survive. Criminals are going to get their hands on weapons whether they’re illegal or not.”
Rep. Mike Danahay, D-Sulphur, said Louisiana voters spoke loud and clear last No-vember when they overwhelm-ingly approved a constitution-al amendment to strengthen gun possession rights.
“We just passed the stron-gest Second Amendment provision into the state con-stitution,” he said. “That’s a message to the federal gov-ernment that Louisiana is a very strong proponent of gun owner rights.”
In House Bill 5, by Rep. Jim Morris, R-Oil City, the state would not have to enforce any federal law adopted after Jan. 1 that bans or restricts people from owning “a semi-
automatic firearm, magazine, accessory or ammunition.” The bill would also apply to federal laws or regulations that require those firearms and accessories to be regis-tered. Geymann coauthored the bill with Morris.
In House Bill 6, by Rep. John Schroder, R-Covington, law enforcement would be exempt from the crime of carrying firearms on school property or school functions.
Rep. A.B. Franklin, D-Lake Charles, said he does not support the idea of allowing teachers to carry firearms at school.
“Teachers as a whole have enough responsibilities, like trying to educate these chil-dren,” he said. “To me, pack-ing a gun won’t work. Any kid can say that the teacher pulled a gun on them, which could cause a lawsuit.”
Franklin said the state
should have “some type of gun control.” He said he does not understand why some people choose to have assault weap-ons in their home.
Danahay said he “doesn’t see any harm” in Schroder’s legislation.
“We entrust law enforce-ment agencies to protect society; that includes schools just as well,” he said.
The legislative session begins April 8.
open and flesh out their ideas. There will also be programs offered for clients’ businesses. New programs will be added according to needs and avail-able resources, Wallace said.
Expectations for the incubator are that it be used “as the economic catalyst to facilitate the development and sustainability of early stage ventures and existing businesses,” its mission state-ment reads.
“If you walk in with a business idea or you’ve been running a business for a while, we will have all the resources that are needed to service you,” Wallace said.
The premise is that a business will move in for three to five years and once sustainable will move out, he said. It will be a year-to-year lease. Wallace prefers to call them “clients” rather than “tenants” because they will not just occupy a space but will work with the services provided to them to cultivate their business. He hopes to help the clients with manage-ment skills, technical train-ing and developing business relationships.
The SEED Center, deemed the entrepreneurial hub, will encompass a number of enti-ties, including the McNeese State University Small Busi-ness Development Center, Service Corps of Retired Ex-ecutives, Louisiana Procure-ment Technical Assistance Center, and the Southwest Louisiana Economic Develop-ment Alliance.
The expected move-in date will be sometime in April. The complex is owned by the city, parish, the university and the alliance.
No business has been for-mally accepted yet, Wallace said, and he expects it to take about three years to reach full capacity. The application period is open and interested applicants should contact Wallace at 337-433-3632, ext. 221, or [email protected].
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that cost is escalating every year,” he said. “So far we’ve been able to absorb it.”
Burleigh said that he is expecting an economic boom in the next three to five years, but that if this doesn’t come about, funding may become tighter. He said that as fewer outside funds are being al-located for teacher retirement the board has had to find other ways to provide addi-tional funding in every area.
Superintendent Wayne Savoy said what has worked
in favor of the district is stay-ing ahead financially is the transparency with the budget process as well as keeping aware of financial trends and how to anticipate them. Savoy said they will continue to use this system as the financial responsibility for retirement increases.
“We’ve always been able to pay our bills and we’re going to do everything we can to continue to do so,” he said. “We’re very conservative. We understand the concept of reoccurring funds, and we manage it accordingly. We’re very careful on how we spend our money.”
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debt cap. The problem stems from state officials authoriz-ing more construction spend-ing than what they’ve actually funded through either upfront cash payments or borrow-ing, Kling said. He said over the past decade, Louisiana governors and lawmakers have given lines of credit to $1.6 billion more in projects than the state has sold bonds to pay for.
Among the options avail-able, lawmakers in the upcom-ing regular session could seek to exclude certain types of debt from the calculation of the cap, change the limit or vote to breach the ceiling. Phillips-Hymel said each pro-posal would require a hefty two-thirds vote.
A limit enacted in the early 1990s requires that the state’s annual debt-repayment requirements fall under 6 percent of the state’s yearly income from taxes, licenses and fees. The state has never exceeded the limit, and Kling said lawmakers have never voted to spend above the cap.
“There is no easy response here. There’s no easy way out,” Kling said.
A spokesman for Gov. Bobby Jindal’s Division of Administration wouldn’t say Thursday what the Republi-
can governor will recommend to keep the dollars for con-struction work from running out. But Michael DiResto said the administration won’t seek a legislative vote to breach the debt cap.
“We will live within our means and we will look for opportunities to achieve savings so that capital outlay projects can continue to move forward,” DiResto said in a statement.
He also blamed Treasurer John Kennedy’s office, which oversees the Bond Commis-sion, for offering past inac-curate guidance on borrowing limits.
“It’s important to note that the treasurer’s office previous-ly advised that the state had more money to borrow than was actually available. They have recently corrected their calculations,” DiResto said.
Kling said the treasurer’s office didn’t miscalculate anything or provide incorrect information. He said the office delivered its annual report on state debt months ago, but since then, the state’s income estimates have fallen twice, which then dropped the debt ceiling by more than $50 mil-lion.
“Once you lower the revenue estimate, the debt capacity goes down. That’s not rocket science,” Kling said. “I didn’t think this was a blame game.”
BUDgeTContinued from A1
Rick Hickman / Special to the American PressTop: The Sideline Group and their All-Star performance team, Sideline Dolls (comprised of NFL Cheerleaders from various teams) made an appearance on their way to Super Bowl XLVII as a part of their Road To The Big Game event. Bottom: The Lake Charles Charter Academy cheerleaders perform for students.
cheering for the biggest game of the year
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