[StBernard] Governor Blanco strengthens capital outlay process

[Westley Annis]

Governor Blanco strengthens capital outlay process Reforms include objective priority assessments 

BATON ROUGE-When the state's list of capital outlay projects is presented to the Bond Commission on Thursday, September 21, it will have gone through a new system to evaluate the merits of every project based on objective priority assessments. 

Under the instructions of Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, the Office of Facility Planning (OFP) created and implemented a system placing all proposed projects into categories, such as hurricane recovery, economic development, education or health care. This allowed for similar projects to receive an "apples to apples" analysis in determining which to recommend to the Bond Commission for approval.

"For the first time in our state's history, Louisiana has a new system for evaluating capital outlay projects and a better ability to provide the best possible return on investment for our citizens," Governor Blanco said. "This reform ensures that Louisiana will make sound decisions in distributing state funds." 

Before the implementation of the new system, all projects, regardless of category, were considered against every other proposed project.

Each year the Legislature proposes a list of capital outlay projects which would exceed the state's bonding capacity if all projects were approved, making a selection process necessary. This year, Governor Blanco directed OFP to create a new system for recommending projects to include value-oriented criteria.

"Our OFP was told by the Governor to make sure that we were making good decisions based on an analysis of the projects and this new system is the result," Commissioner of Administration, Jerry Luke LeBlanc, said. "Many people have talked about the reform of capital outlay but this is the first time someone has moved to put a system in place to help make these critical priority decisions." 

Blanco required the change this year because it is the first major list of capital outlay recommendations for this administration.

In the past two years, capital outlay was severely constrained. The first challenges resulted from the loss of new project capacity from the previous administration. The latter was due to the effects of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

"This is our first 'normal' capital outlay recommendation and I wanted to make sure that it is based on priority assessments in order to bring maximum value to the people of the state," Blanco said.

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The Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation Louisiana's Fund for Louisiana's People www.louisianahelp.org