By T. Scott Boatright
A pair of regional state representatives appeared before the Lincoln Parish Police Jury during its July meeting held Tuesday at the Lincoln Parish Courthouse to give up an update on the Louisiana legislative session that ended June 12.
And they showed Lincoln Parish’s two universities the money in the process.
Rashid Young of the 11th House District and Chris Turner of the 12th District spent 30 minutes providing the update with much good news concerning monies coming to Grambling State and Louisiana Tech following the legislative session.
Turner kicked things off by telling the LPPJ that Grambling State and Louisiana Tech had what he termed a very good session this year.
“Just on the GSU part, the Criminal Justice got $700K in P1 (top priority) which is cash. And in P2, which is the next level down, is (another) $1 million, and P5 (the lowest priority) is $16,000, so that means that’s going into planning (for the future),” Turner said.
“You hear about the roof problems and the library problems and things like that …. between those two they’ve got right around $1.3 million and another $6.5 (million) in P5. That way they can start doing some planning and things like that.
“Campus utility infrastructure got $7.9 million. This is all part of us getting together and doing a deferred maintenance package bill that ran last year. It didn’t get any no vote twice, and we put in about $100M last year and put in about $43M this year.”
Turner said the only holdup in getting even more money is because it takes so long to get those kinds of jobs up and going.
“We’re just now seeing them get to work on campuses, so there was a little hesitation in giving more money,” Turner said.
Turner said one of the bills he had the opportunity to run through facility planning (legislation) was a job bill, which is a job ordering contracting. Instead of waiting nine months, 10 months, 11 months to get started, you can start working in about one month because everything will be preapproved.
“That was one of my top pieces of legislation,” Turner said.
Turner also said Louisiana Tech got almost $18M to start the George T. Madison Hall renovation project.
“If you’ve been keeping up, more than a one-third of that building is not being used because of mold and everything else, and that’s the hub of the campus,” Turner said. “The Forestry Research Planning Bill, that is done. They’re going to start construction on that, and that’s big for our area because of the saw mills, paper mills and everything else we can do with lumber.
“Actually, we are renting space in that building to the federal government for research, too. You don’t hear that very often, so there’s so much cool stuff out there happening it’s not even funny.”
Turner said funding is also being provided for Louisiana Tech heating and cooling systems and for the Origin Bank Center for Student Athlete Success at Joe Aillet Stadium.
Young said that heading into the session he was a big proponent of athletics at both Tech and Grambling because he feels it helps to develop young people whether it’s men’s or women’s athletics.
“We did really well there,” Young said. “We also passed a bill to raise taxes on sports gaming. So, Grambling Athletics can expect a little over $2M extra of their athletic budget and Tech is a little bit more, about $3M.
“So, that’s big. Grambling is legendary for athletics and Tech has a strong athletic history as well, and they’ve (both) been struggling in recent years (in funding), so that’s a big one we were able to get through (legislation).”
Young said combined, between Capital Outlay funding and Appropriations funding, Grambling should receive around $20M this year and that there was another $1.5M that was put into GSU for general support.
“They can use that for operations, and that’s big, because one of the things Grambling is doing now is seeking R2 status, which is a research designation,” Young said. “You can get R1, R2 or Research University designation. It’s huge because that helps bring in federal dollars, and I think you’ve got to spend around $5M a year on research to get that designation, and they hadn’t been spending that, so that’s a huge thing for Grambling.”
