>>>>This is a good first step. Awesome job by our state senators to try and fix the damage by our house of reps. And all the while keep we just keep ministering here! Our team was in there tonight!
State Senator: Prison will close over my dead body . wwltv.com
Posted on June 15, 2011 at 6:25 PM
Doug Mouton / Northshore Bureau Cheif
BATON ROUGE, La. -- The Senate Finance Committee took steps Wednesday which they believe will keep five Louisiana prisons, including the Rayburn Correctional Center in Angie, open.
"I'm under the impression that the way that we handled it is going to not require any closure of any prisons," state Senator Jack Donahue, R-Covington, said after the early morning committee meeting.
Donahue and the other members of the finance committee voted to move money around and restore cuts to the Louisiana Department of Corrections.
The House had cut $27.5 million, roughly 5 percent of the total budget of the DOC, earlier in the current legislative session. Those proposed cuts prompted DOC Secretary Jimmy LeBlanc to send letters to five prisons including Rayburn outlining the state's "layoff timetable."
"It would seem hard that with a 5 percent cut, it would trigger the closing of all these prisons," Donahue explained, "but as they gave testimony, you could start to understand what some of the problems were. I believed them, so we did our best to try to restore those funds."
If Rayburn was closed, more than 300 Washington Parish employees would be out of work.
Washington Parish Senator Ben Nevers was very involved in the budget negotiations, and met with Rayburn employees last week.
"I told them, give us time to work through this situation and I asked them to have confidence in their legislators and let us do our job over here. And they have," Nevers said Wednesday. "Certainly they call, they're very concerned, but I feel much better today."
The full Senate is expected to take up the re-worked budget Friday, and then it will move on to the House.
The Governor's Office said Wednesday they were working through the details of the Senate plan, but they believe if the House approves it, Rayburn and the four other prisons can be kept open.
"I made a comment to you before, they would close Rayburn over my dead body and I stand by that. I'm not playing on dying, I'm going to be around and I plan for Rayburn to still be open," Nevers added.
The 2011 regular session of the Louisiana legislature ends Thursday, June 23.
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