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As the Legislature prepares to end an exceptionally busy year, what happens next year is already an intense focus of those who work in and around Capitoland.
A mini-preview kicked off last week with a joint meeting of the House committees on insurance and civil law, which have been discussing what will surely be one of the hottest topics of 2025: automobile insurance.
While there will be some debate over property insurance next year, including finding more funding for the fortified roof program, many lawmakers are happy with the work they did on the property side during this year’s regular session.
But legislators and Gov. Jeff Landry were unable to agree on how to address the high cost of auto insurance, which is why the House and Senate committees that regulate it have been meeting for months to come up with legislation that all stakeholders can live with.
“I think we’re really coalescing around identifying those cost drivers and, maybe most importantly, discovering what is not driving the cost of our automobile insurance,” says House Insurance Chair Gabe Firment.
“We’ve heard testimony from the secretary of transportation that only 2 percent to 3 percent of accidents are attributable to road conditions, so I think we can reasonably say that road conditions are not a factor,” Firment adds. “Catastrophic storms are not a significant factor in the cost of automobile insurance. But we have discovered things like distracted driving, unrestrained drivers are much more likely to be in fatal accidents. Maybe most importantly, we have identified that here in Louisiana, we file bodily injury claims at two times the national average. And we litigate at a much higher rate than the rest of the nation.”
Firment and his counterpart in the upper chamber stressed the same factor: transparency. Specifically, making sure the judge or jury knows how much the injured party actually paid for their medical procedure, not just the sticker price.
“The paid amount is what you actually owe your insurance company, right?” Senate Insurance Chair Kirk Talbot says. “In our court system, only the billed amount is admissible. So that increases bodily injury payouts, which increases premiums.”
Next year’s fiscal-focused session dovetails nicely with the tax session lawmakers just wrapped up. By the time the regular session begins on April 14, lawmakers will know whether voters approved the Article VII rewrite they passed last month.
Many legislators say they want to revisit what they did in November, address any unintended consequences, and try to get closer to being able to eliminate income taxes. That work will include another look at exemptions and incentives, including the popular programs supporting film and renovations of old buildings that took a haircut during the special session but survived.
Louisiana Economic Development Secretary Susan Bourgeois expects to have a strategic plan for the department by February. By the time the session starts, she plans to be able to pitch legislators on a new suite of economic development tools, which might look a lot different from what the state is doing now.
Some aspects of Landry’s special session tax plan were dropped amid pushback from the locals. However, the administration believes the outreach they did with local officials has laid the foundation to revisit those proposals next year.
While the special session was in full swing, Landry released a letter to House Speaker Phillip DeVillier and Senate President Cameron Henry about his plans to create a “fiscal responsibility program.” Each body would appoint four members to the task force, led by a “fiscal responsibility czar” Landry would appoint.
Accordingly, House Appropriations Chair Jack McFarland expects government efficiency to be a major theme for 2025, adding that he has a head start on the issue since DeVillier asked him to tackle it months ago.
McFarland compares Landry’s proposal to what President-elect Donald Trump is calling his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
“That’s resonated with a lot of people in Louisiana,” he says of the DOGE idea. “And I think that’s where the governor’s task force he’s creating is going to come in.”
