Daily Report

The homestead exemption will apply to the transit tax passed in Baton Rouge and Baker April 21 after all. Before the vote, the public was told the exemption would not apply because the measure was a municipal tax, even though the Capital Area Transit System, which will benefit, is not a municipality. However, the Louisiana Attorney General's office has issued an opinion stating that it should in fact apply. According to estimates received by Together Baton Rouge, an interfaith coalition that supported the tax, applying the homestead exemption will mean a reduction in the amount of dedicated revenue of between $2.5 and $3 million, meaning a total dedicated revenue of about $14.2 to $14.7 million.

Backers of a new southeast Baton Rouge school district today fell four votes short of getting the proposal on the constitutional ballot this fall. The House vote was 66-34 on Senate Bill 299 by Sen. Bodi White, R-Denham Springs. Debate was brief, as three Baton Rouge Democrats—Reps. Ted James, Pat Smith and Regina Barrow—spoke against the measure, all citing the damage it would do to the parish school system. Two parish Republicans, Cliff Richardson and Erich Ponti, urged House members to allow people to vote on the question. After the vote, White huddled with Rep. Hunter Greene to go over the vote totals with an eye to bringing the measure up again. All 34 nay votes came from Democrats, while six Democrats voted with all 58 Republicans and two independents who supported the bill. Five Democrats did not vote. Both the Senate and House have approved the statute setting up the district, and the Senate has approved the constitutional amendment. Read the full column here for additional coverage on a bill that was killed today that would have required welfare recipients to take drug tests.(John Maginnis will publish a daily update throughout the legislative session on Daily Report PM. The report is also available to LaPolitics Weekly subscribers on the Subscribers Only page at LaPolitics.com. Registration is available on the homepage.)

Louisiana Public Broadcasting is providing a daily video update featuring highlights of the session, which you can see beginning at 6 p.m. here.

According to a new analysis of federal employment data by the Associated General Contractors of America, Baton Rouge had roughly 3,400 more people employed in the construction industry in April than it did during the month a year ago—a 9% increase. That makes Baton Rouge the 27th-strongest metro in the United States for industry hiring during April, according to AGCA rankings. Roughly 43,000 people were working in construction in the Capital Region in April, up from 39,600 a year previous. Todd Waguespack, a partner with Level Construction homebuilders, says he's more confident about local market conditions than he has been in years. "It's definitely a lot more consistent than it's been in a long, long time," he says. "The past few years, we've sporadically gone from some pretty hot months to some really cold ones, but I think we're going to continue to improve the rest of this year and be fairly stable." About half of the metro areas in the United States—157 of 337—saw year-over-year construction job losses in April. Of the six metro areas in Louisiana tracked by AGCA, just two saw losses: Shreveport (down 600 jobs, or -8%) and New Orleans (down 4,600 jobs, or -14%). New Orleans' losses were among the worst in the nation, placing it No. 329 in the rankings. With a gain of 900 jobs, or 14%, Lafayette had the eighth-strongest job gains in April. See the AGCA's complete rankings for metro construction employment gains here. —Steve Sanoski

Though specifics are "impossible to know" at the moment, the 24-acre hospital campus at Goodwood Boulevard and Airline Highway that Woman's Hospital will vacate this summer "is bound to become a specialty hospital," says Glen Duncan, spokesman for The Physicians Alliance Corp. TPAC announced Tuesday that it reached a purchase agreement for the campus with Woman's Hospital, which is moving to a new campus down Airline Highway. "The only dates that seem pretty clear-cut right now are July 11, which is when the sale will close, and August 5, when Woman's moves to its new campus," Duncan says. "When they move, that will really be the first chance we'll have to go in there and assess the building. … There's going to be some kind of remodel and rebuild, but I don't know how long that's going to take." Duncan says the number of physicians who will provide services at the hospital—and what services they'll offer—will be nailed down as discussions continue amongst TPAC's executives and its 3,000 members, most of whom are physicians. "These are local physicians, which we think is important to let the community know," he says, adding that there is "a clear understanding" with Woman's that services currently offered on the campus will not be duplicated by TPAC. Duncan says more details will become available after the sale closes. Read a story from Daily Report on the purchase agreement here. —Steve Sanoski

Since 1997, Business Report has annually honored women in the Capital Region who are leaders in their businesses and our community. The 10 women included in Business Report's Influential Women in Business class of 2012 are drivers of the health care, banking, economic development, legal, government and nonprofit sectors in Greater Baton Rouge. The honorees are: Barbara Auten, Alzheimer's Services of the Capital Area; Shelly Dick, attorney; Kay Goodwyn, president & CEO, Roco Rescue; Jamie Haeuser, senior vice president of operations, Woman's Hospital; JoEllen Kearny, CPA/Financial adviser, Daigrepont & Brian; Dee LeJeune, CEO, St. Elizabeth Hospital; Janet Olson, relationship manager, Capital One Bank; Christy Reeves, director of community relations, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana; Erin Monroe Wesley, senior vice president of governmental affairs, Baton Rouge Area Chamber; and Monica Zumo, managing partner, Hannis T. Bourgeois. Check out profiles of this year's honorees in the new edition of Business Report here. Each will be recognized at the 2012 Influential Women in Business Awards luncheon at the Crowne Plaza Hotel on Tuesday. The luncheon will feature internationally recognized speaker and author Lisa Johnson, who helps organizations accelerate growth by applying the latest techniques in storytelling to common business challenges including leadership, sales, innovation and marketing communications. Tickets for the luncheon are $40 each—with tables of 10 available for $400—and they can be purchased online here through Thursday at noon. After that, tickets can be purchased by calling 928-1700.

Take advantage of the great weather on Sunday to wander downtown and enjoy free admission to the LSU Museum of Art and the USS Kidd. The best of Baton Rouge's museums will welcome visitors free of charge from 1 to 5 p.m. that day. You can read more on this "first Sunday" special and check out the complete 225 Weekender e-newsletter, which debuts today—replacing the 225 Select e-newsletter—for more local events happening this weekend and beyond here. 225 Weekender is being released in connection with the new website for 225. Each Wednesday afternoon, readers will be presented with a host of local events in the arts, music and movie scenes. Those who were already subscribers of 225 Select do not need to re-register to begin receiving 225 Weekender. If you're not already receiving 225 Weekender in your inbox, you can sign up here.

Editor's note: This story has been changed since its original publication.

Dana Nunez Brown has worked for 33 years as a landscape architect and planner in her native New Orleans as well as Baton Rouge, Boston, and Orange County, Calif. After 15 years in California, she returned to Baton Rouge—where she had lived as an undergraduate—to take a teaching position at LSU and be near her mother. Brown left teaching six years ago to practice full-time with her firm, Dana Brown & Associates, which has offices downtown and in New Orleans. Her work focuses on community planning, ecological design, public outreach and project leadership. Read the complete Q&A here. Here's a sample:What is the greatest personal or professional obstacle you've overcome?
"Attending and graduating from Harvard University Graduate School of Design while starting out with $750 to live on. I worked at several jobs at the same time to pay expenses, including teaching fellow, landscape architect at a Boston firm, and modeler at the Harvard Lab for Computer Graphics."

A new report from CoreLogic says the foreclosure rate in Baton Rouge stood at 2.41% in March, down from 2.67% during the same month a year previous but up a scant 0.01% from February. Baton Rouge's foreclosure rate has hovered around the 2.4% mark since last summer, when it fell to that level from a peak high of 2.8% in February 2011. That's put it slightly lower than Louisiana's rate, which was at 2.5% in March, down from 2.85% a year previous but also up from February, a mere 0.02%. The foreclosure rates in both Baton Rouge and Louisiana at large have remained well below the U.S. rate in recent years. Nationwide, the March rate stood a full percentage point higher than Baton Rouge's, at 3.41%. That was down from 3.54% in March 2011 and unchanged from February. The mortgage delinquency rate in Baton Rouge—that is, the percentage of home loans three months past due or more—was at 5.69% in March: almost even with the 5.71% rate in March 2011 but nonetheless lower than Louisiana's rate of 6.26% and the U.S. rate, 7.18%.

Four startup businesses—including a digital marketing agency, an LED products supplier, an environmental permitting and compliance consultant, and a specialized testing services firm—have graduated from the Louisiana Business & Technology Center's student incubator program are and joining the LBTC business incubator at LSU's south campus. "The entrepreneurial activity in the area is thriving as we are attracting many new companies to the incubator," says LBTC Executive Director Charles D'Agostino. "Many of these companies want the strong linkage with LSU that the LBTC provides." Meanwhile, Secure Nation, an information security–focused IT consulting and sourcing firm, is graduating from the business incubator on Friday. Since Jon Davis founded Secure Nation four years ago with two employees, it has grown to 14 employees. The startups entering the business incubator include BluReach, a digital marketing agency created by LSU students Trevor Reeves and Sean Simone; HITLights, which is already one of the leading LED products suppliers in North America; Global Environmental Solutions Inc., or GESI, which was established in 2010 by Brian Soucy and helps clients navigate the complex environmental permitting and regulatory process; and SCTCS Group, which was established in February by William Moe and offers a narrow range of specialized testing services related to settling and compression properties of hydraulically dredged sediments.

Exclusive TV rights for the Baton Rouge NCAA Baseball Regional at Alex Box Stadium that begins Friday were today awarded to Cox Sports Television and Jumbo Sports Network. All games will be produced by Jumbo Sports Network and will air on Cox Sports Television and Comcast Sports Southeast. Games on Friday and Saturday are set for 2 and 7 p.m., with Sunday's games at 1:30 and 6:30 p.m. Monday's "if necessary" game is set for 6:30 p.m. Joining top-seeded LSU in the Baton Rouge regional is No. 2 Oregon State, No. 3 Belmont, and No. 4 University of Louisiana-Monroe. The Tigers will play their first game of the regional at 7 p.m. Friday against ULM. See the complete regional schedule and details at the LSUsports.net website here. Calling all of the games of the Baton Rouge regional on CST will be Lyn Rollins, who will be joined by former LSU pitcher and Jumbo Sports Network Executive Producer Ronnie Rantz. The Baton Rouge regional is one of 16 four-team tournaments that will take place throughout the country this weekend. The winner of the Baton Rouge regional will advance to face the winner of the Miami regional, which is comprised of Miami, UCF, Missouri State and Stony Brook.

225 magazine invites you to join in a conversation. With the goal of creating a more engaging and relevant community gathering place, 225 is proud to announce the launch of its brand-new website. Beyond the fresh look and ease of navigation the site affords, 225's new online home features a number of significant improvements for users to enjoy. Streamlined comments sections and a new multimedia uploading tool allow users to converse with 225 staff and other readers, as well as easily upload content to our site. If readers attend an event or dine at a restaurant the magazine writes about, submitting their personal photos or videos from that event or restaurant is now a snap. In addition, we have rebranded our free weekly events e-newsletter, released each Wednesday, as 225 Weekender. With updated staff picks for the week and our community calendar, 225 is the best resource for filling your social schedule with excitement. Our restaurant directory is also updated and easier to navigate, and we continue to produce the free weekly e-newsletter 225 Dine each Thursday, featuring the latest culinary news and reviews from around the city. In addition to being Baton Rouge's guide for what to do and where to eat, 225 aims to stir community conversation on the news stories, people and local issues that are most important to the magazine's readers. 225's new site features an expanded roster of bloggers who are discussing a range of topics from politics, food and fitness, to arts, movies, music, television, smart growth and development, startups and other business news. Check them out and add your voice to the conversation. It's all at the new website here.

In the three years since President Barack Obama took office, Republicans have made the Environmental Protection Agency a lightning rod for complaints that his administration has been too tough on oil and gas producers. But an Associated Press analysis of enforcement data over the past decade, released today, finds such claims don't reflect the Obama administration's record. In fact, the EPA went after producers more often in the years of Republican President George W. Bush—a former Texas oilman—than under Obama. Also, the agency's enforcement actions have declined overall since 2002 and reached their lowest point last year, the review found. Accusations of EPA overzealousness peaked in April. That's when a regional administrator resigned after a two-year-old video surfaced in which he compared enforcement of oil and gas regulations with how the Romans used to conquer villages: apprehending "the first five guys they saw and they'd crucify them." GOP critics publicized the video of Al Armendariz, who headed the region that includes Texas and other major oil- and gas-producing states, as an example of what was wrong with an agency that Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney calls "completely out of control." "We have a genuine concern that his comments reflect the agency's overall enforcement philosophy," six Republican congressmen from Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma said in a joint statement the day Armendariz stepped down. Get the particulars of the AP analysis in the full story here.

Iran's key oil industry was briefly affected by the powerful computer virus known as "Flame" that has unprecedented data-snatching capabilities and can eavesdrop on computer users, a senior Iranian military official announced today. The comment is the first direct link between the emergence of the new malware and an attack inside a highly sensitive computer system in Iran, which counts on oil revenue for 80% of its income. The full extent of last month's disruptions has not been given, but Iran was forced to cut Internet links to the country's main oil export terminal, presumably to try to contain the virus. It would be the latest high-profile virus to penetrate Iran's computer defenses in the past two years, boosting speculation that Israeli programmers could have struck again. Experts see technological links between Flame and the highly focused Stuxnet virus, which was tailored to disrupt Iran's nuclear centrifuges in 2010. Many suspect Stuxnet was the work of Israeli intelligence. Gholam Reza Jalali, who heads an Iranian military unit in charge of fighting sabotage, claims that Iranian experts detected and defeated the "Flame" virus. He tells state radio that the oil industry was the only governmental body seriously affected and that all data that had been lost has been retrieved. "This virus penetrated some fields. One of them was the oil sector. Fortunately, we detected and controlled this single incident," Jalali says. The Associated Press has the full story here.

Won and Dunn: Baton Rouge native and former NFL star running back Warrick Dunn is being honored by the nonprofit A Little Hope for his charitable contributions and work with the Betty's Hope Children's Bereavement Program, a new initiative of Warrick Dunn Charities Inc. Dunn will be recognized at an event in New York City on June 7. A Little Hope was founded in early 2002 in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks; it aims to raise money to advance the growth of children's grief support and to expand bereavement centers for children. Learn more about Dunn's charitable work in the full news release here.Buzz biz: Gov. Bobby Jindal has signed into law a 10-year, $37 million tax break for the New Orleans Hornets, part of the state's deal to keep the NBA team in Louisiana. Jindal announced the signing Tuesday, in a list of bills that he agreed to enact into law. The bill by Rep. Cameron Henry, R-Jefferson, extends an existing tax break that saves the Hornets $3.7 million a year through Louisiana's Quality Jobs Program. The rebate will be extended through the 2024 NBA season. You can read the full bill here.Let the games begin: They've been talking about each other for months, but as The Washington Post reports, President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney spoke to each other for the first time today since the general election campaign has begun in earnest. According to the White House, Obama called Romney just before noon to congratulate him on securing the Republican presidential nomination after he won the Texas GOP primary on Tuesday.

In the pocket: New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees and his wife, Brittany, through their Brees Dream Foundation, are launching an apparel company this fall, reports The Times-Picayune, citing the foundation and the Idea Village—the business incubator that is partnering with the foundation to find someone to run the New Orleans-based venture. Idea Village founder Tim Williamson says the apparel line will be much like Product Red, a licensed brand that partners with companies like Gap and American Express to sell everything from shirts to credit cards bearing the Red logo. That company was founded by Bono, frontman of the band U2, as a way to get the private sector involved in raising awareness and money to help eliminate AIDS in Africa. Read the full story here.Seeing red: China moved to temper expectations of another massive stimulus plan amid reports the country was green-lighting more infrastructure projects to stabilize its slowing economy, The Los Angeles Times reports. "The Chinese government's intention is very clear, it will not issue another large-scale stimulus plan to boost robust growth," the official New China News Agency says in an article published Tuesday. The statement helped drive stock markets down across Asia today, as investors sought clues as to how the world's second-largest economy would respond to its biggest economic challenge in three years. Read the full story here.Black gold: A Kuwaiti-led energy consortium today won the right to search for oil and gas in southern Iraq as part of the country's fourth postwar energy auction. Two natural gas exploration deals meanwhile attracted no bidders. Exploration rights in a dozen areas of the country are on offer in the two-day auction, with 39 foreign energy companies registered to compete. Iraq holds the world's fourth largest oil reserves and oil revenues make up nearly 95% of the country's budget. Since 2008, Iraq has awarded 15 oil and gas deals to international energy companies, the first major investments in the country's energy industry in more than three decades. The Associated Press has the full story here.

Today's poll question: Do you think a second chamber, as proposed by Woody Jenkins, is necessary in East Baton Rouge Parish?

Backers of a new southeast Baton Rouge school district today fell four votes short of getting the proposal on the constitutional ballot this fall. The House vote was 66-34 on Senate Bill 299 by Sen. Bodi White, R-Denham Springs.Debate was brief, as three Baton Rouge Democrats—Reps. Ted James, Pat Smith and Regina Barrow—spoke against the measure, all citing the damage it would do to the parish school system. Two parish Republicans, Cliff Richardson and Erich Ponti, urged House members to allow people to vote on the question.After the vote, White huddled with Rep. Hunter Greene to go over the vote totals with an eye to bringing the measure up again. All 34 nay votes came from Democrats, while six Democrats voted with all 58 Republicans and two independents who supported the bill. Five Democrats did not vote.
Both the Senate and House have approved the statute setting up the district, and the Senate has approved the constitutional amendment.—On a 3-1 vote, a Senate committee deferred a bill to drug test welfare recipients today, effectively killing the bill for this session.“I’ll be back next year,” pledged Rep. Sherman Mack, R-Albany, who characterized his bill as a deterrent measure that would help make people on cash assistance ready to work. Rob Tasman of the Louisiana Conference of Catholic Bishops questioned the morality of the bill and doubted its constitutionality.The bill had been amended by Judiciary B Committee Chairman Sen. J.P. Morrell, D-New Orleans, to convert the random testing program to a pilot program to test 500 recipients of Family Independence Temporary Assistance Program payments.