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With the blessing of the Landry administration, the Louisiana Coalition to Fix Our Roads, an industry trade group, engaged Boston Consulting Group this summer to come up with a reorganization plan for the state’s transportation department—and the final report is expected to be ready this week.
David Madden, who is part of the coalition and led Gov. Jeff Landry’s Infrastructure Transition Council, says he has not seen a draft of the BCG report but received a preview in a recent meeting with the consultants, legislators and others. He says the report will be “quite similar” to what the council came up with earlier this year.
“What we will have with the [BCG] report is the facts, which you can substantiate,” Madden says. “Transition reports have a tendency to be lofty goals–long on goals, but short on substance.”
He says legislators generally don’t have a lot of faith in the Department of Transportation and Development, though he credits Secretary Joe Donahue with “working his tail off.” In the BCG report, he says, the administration and legislators will find “their suppositions over the years will be proven out in black and white,” along with substantive recommendations of how to address the issues.
As the moment approaches, expectations are building for how the report will frame the state’s gas tax.
Around the time the report was commissioned this summer, Erich Ponti, president of the Louisiana Coalition to Fix Our Roads, which paid Boston Consulting Group, told his membership that “it is our objective to move as quickly as possible and to get DOTD into a position where the Legislature will see fit to raise substantial revenue for roads and bridges soon.”
Still, lawmakers remain skeptical about giving the state highway department more money until they can convince themselves—and their constituents—the money will make a difference in their driving conditions, though the report could help to make that case.
In some ways, it appears an argument is already building.
In a recent hearing with the House Appropriations Committee, Donahue responded to a question about whether he would support legislation indexing the state gas tax to inflation.
“That would be a very wise choice,” Donahue said, calling the current tax a “stagnant” source of revenue.
Even if lawmakers see fit to hike the gas levy for the first time in more than three decades, “if you don’t index that to inflation, you begin losing the value the moment that you do that increase,” Donahue noted.
Landry has already taken the position in an executive order that Louisiana’s transportation infrastructure needs more funding. Donahue’s statement sheds additional light on how the administration is thinking about that issue.
“Any additional funding would be put to good use,” he added.
Senate Transportation Chair Patrick Connick didn’t want to “jump the gun” by publicly discussing the substance of private meetings he attended, but says the report will recommend significant changes.
Connick says he is willing to consider supporting legislation tying the gas tax rate to inflation if the governor backs the change, noting DOTD’s massive project backlog that is said to be in the $19 billion range.
“DOTD’s got to get its act together first,” Connick says, adding the department should do a better job of ensuring its contractors minimize the impact on residents and businesses while work is ongoing.
“From what I know, it was pretty much a little bit of everything,” House Transportation Chair Ryan Bourriaque says of the BCG report. “It was funding, it was staffing, it was procedural and administrative issues.”
As for the funding question, Bourriaque points to $285 million the Legislature appropriated this year for shovel-ready projects that are supposed to be completed by the time the current fiscal year ends June 30. The progress of that work could provide a litmus test for DOTD’s current performance, he says.
“If it looks like we’re falling short, then maybe it’s not the right time [to boost funding],” Bourriaque says.
The political timing is not likely to improve past the fiscal-focused session that kicks off in April. The 2026 regular session is nonfiscal, and the year after that is an election year, when lawmakers will be even more reticent than usual to raise taxes.
Jeremy Alford publishes LaPolitics Weekly, a newsletter on Louisiana politics, at LaPolitics.com. Follow him on Twitter, or Facebook. He can be reached at JJA@LaPolitics.com.
