www.thecentersquare.com – By Emilee Calametti | The Center Square – (The Center Square – ) 2025-03-31 15:37:00
(The Center Square) — A recent audit showed the town of Montgomery lacked several supporting documents, including vendor payments, operating losses, and meeting minutes for the Board of Aldermen.
After failing to complete an audit report before the deadline and reconcile financial accounts, the Louisiana Legislative Auditor’s Office released an audit summary on March 26 detailing its findings for Montgomery’s 2023 fiscal year.
The independent auditor did not provide an opinion due to the findings.
“We do not express an opinion on the accompanying financial statements of the governmental activities, business-type activities, and each major fund of the town,” the report said. “Because of the significance of the matter described in the Basis for Disclaimer of Opinion section of our report, we have not been able to obtain sufficient appropriate audit evidence to provide a basis for an audit opinion on the financial statements.”
The auditor could not perform necessary procedures due to the lack of documentation concerning transactions and bank reconciliations. An analysis by management showed that the town overlooked adopting a budget for the audited period.
No meeting minutes for the Board of Aldermen were recorded, for the year ending Dec. 31, 2022, concerning budget. The lack of minutes is reported by the auditor to be an administrative oversight. Failing to adopt a budget violates state law and the Home Rule Charter.
The schedule of findings provided by the independent auditor states no documentation was available to support various vendor payments for the first quarter of 2023.
Findings also showed the utility system reported substantial operating losses, which resulted in a depletion of finances. Rates were not adjusted to offset costs, resulting in a significant decrease in funds. Montgomery officials submitted the audit late in violation of state law.
There were also cases of reconciliation issues and payroll documentation. According to the auditor, the bank accounts operated by the town had not been properly reconciled. As for payroll, employees recorded their timesheets but there is no record of supervisor approval for some.
The different findings were originally reported in 2021, some in 2022, and now again for the 2023 audit.
Montgomery, population 620, is located in north central Louisiana on the west bank of the Red River.
Emilee Ruth Calametti serves as staff reporter for The Center Square covering the Northwestern Louisiana region. She holds her M.A. in English from Georgia State University and soon, an additional M.A. in Journalism from New York University. Emilee has bylines in DIG Magazine, Houstonia Magazine, Bookstr, inRegister, The Click News, and the Virginia Woolf Miscellany.She is a Louisiana native with over seven years of journalism experience.
SUMMARY: In New Orleans, Toups Meatery is determined to combat child hunger this summer by preparing and delivering up to 80,000 free meals, despite federal cuts to USDA programs affecting food banks. Co-owner Amanda Toups emphasizes the urgency, noting one in three local children are hungry. With traditional support dwindling, the program relies heavily on community donations and fundraising efforts, including the upcoming Toups Fest on June 22. Volunteers deliver meals weekly to families, aiming to ensure no child goes hungry. Toups urges the community to unite in supporting children, highlighting the importance of collective action to fight poverty and food insecurity.
SUMMARY: Heavy rain returns Sunday with possible flooding, continuing a wet pattern through much of the week. A flood advisory was in effect for parts of the metro area Saturday afternoon, and today’s forecast calls for numerous showers and thunderstorms, especially in the afternoon and evening. Morning hours will be drier, but rainfall and heavy downpours are expected later on. Temperatures will reach the low 90s with high humidity, creating a muggy atmosphere. A tropical wave in the Caribbean remains disorganized, and the tropics are quiet for the next week. Conditions may improve slightly by Friday and Saturday, but heat and humidity will rise.
In the 2025 Louisiana legislative session, lawmakers passed a budget focusing on infrastructure, insurance reforms, and a major ethics law overhaul. Key battles included Gov. Jeff Landry’s clashes with Senate President Cameron Henry over private school vouchers and pharmacy regulations, where Henry largely prevailed. Insurance Commissioner Tim Temple gained authority but lost public disputes with Landry. Transparency weakened as laws restricted public access to officials’ personal info. Tort reform favored insurers, while critics of carbon capture faced setbacks. Public school teachers won pay stipends, but abortion medication providers faced legal risks. Other notable outcomes included strengthened ethics protections for officials, stalled NIL tax exemptions for athletes, and expanded nursing home liability limits.
Louisiana lawmakers adjourned the 2025 regular lawmaking session Thursday having passed a budget with hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure spending; bills aimed at lowering insurance races; and a massive rewrite of state ethics laws.
In its early days, the eight-week session was at first dominated by a battle between insurance companies and the personal injury attorneys over how to lower car insurance rates.
That policy dispute also led to a showdown between Insurance Commissioner Tim Temple and Gov. Jeff Landry, both Republicans, over who should be held responsible for Louisiana’s sky-high insurance costs.
At the end of the session, the governor engaged in a power struggle with Senate President Cameron Henry over private school vouchers and prescription drug regulations.
The following list evaluates how certain political figures and causes fared in the lawmaking session:
WINNER: Senate President Cameron Henry
Henry, a Metairie Republican, resisted pressure from Landry and the conservative House to push through more radical policy proposals than he said the Senate, which has a more moderate approach to politics, felt uncomfortable adopting.
The Senate president blocked a ban on diversity, equity and inclusion policies that the House endorsed. His chamber also turned down a proposal from Landry to give the governor more control over licensing boards and commissions.
TOSS-UP: Gov. Jeff Landry
As noted above, Landry lost a couple of high-profile legislative fights with the Senate over his signature private education voucher initiative and prescription drug regulations.
Some of his strong-arm tactics also simply weren’t effective at getting his agenda passed, particularly in the Senate.
Landry’s public rally with school children that was meant to pressure legislators into funding more vouchers didn’t elicit the response he wanted. The ultimatum he issued to call lawmakers back into a special session also didn’t force the Senate into passing the pharmacy bill he was backing.
On other fronts however, he had legislative victories. He was largely able to get his agenda to address Louisiana’s car insurance crisis through the Legislature. A number of bills that reworked the way state agencies – including the Louisiana Workforce Commission, Department of Transportation and Development and the Department of Children and Family Services – function also passed.
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LOSER: Government transparency
Lawmakers approve a handful of bills that will make it difficult to scrutinize government officials for inappropriate behavior, government corruption and conflicts of interest.
House Bill 681 by Rep. Marcus Bryant, D-New Iberia, could subject people to jail time and fines if they post personal information about state lawmakers, statewide elected officials and Public Service Commissioners on the internet.
It prevents the elected officials’ home addresses, phone numbers, personal email addresses, Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, federal tax identification numbers, bank account numbers, credit and debit card numbers, license plate numbers from being published in government records or on a public website. Also protected under the law are marital records and birthdates.
An official’s church, the school or daycare their child attends and the employment location of their spouse, children or dependents would also be shielded.
Two other pieces of legislation that massively write government ethics and campaign finance laws would also lead to less disclosure of who is donating to and spending money on political campaigns.
The change to the board’s investigative process may simply allow those accused of wrongdoing to run out the clock on the board’s ability to even bring charges against them, according to the board’s own members.
The board is only given a year to investigate and charge a person with a violation before it reaches a legal deadline to do so. The new process for investigations is more time consuming and will make it difficult to finish on time, board members said.
Louisiana Insurance Commissioner Tim Temple speaks to reporters about his legislative agenda to tackle high insurance rates, Thursday, April 10, 2025. (Photo credit: Wes Muller/Louisiana Illuminator)
LOSER: Insurance Commissioner Tim Temple
Temple successfully pushed most of his legislative agenda through, but he lost a public feud to fellow Republican Landry over a bill that would allow the governor to cast blame onto him for the state’s insurance crisis. He will now have greater authority to reject insurance rate hikes, a responsibility he doesn’t want to have. He will now be open to criticism when he doesn’t turn down rate increases that are not popular with the public.
WINNER: Insurance industry
Insurance companies are the real winners of Temple’s agenda of “tort reform” bills they have been trying to get on the books for years. The new laws are supposed to tamp down lawsuits and reduce the amount of money plaintiffs can recover from bodily injury accidents.
LOSERS: Carbon capture critics
Carbon capture and sequestration made a cozy home for itself in Louisiana this session. Bills attempting to assert local control over where and whether projects to store injected carbon dioxide underground happen largely died in committees.
Other moves to ban the practice entirely or tax CO2 injection also got little love. Surviving CCS measures that made it into law are provisions restricting the use of eminent domain for CO2 storage transport pipelines and keeping court venues for these eminent domain claims local to the parish in question.
WINNER: Rep. Dustin Miller
Miller, an Opelousas Democrat, holds a key seat as chairman of the House Committee on Health and Welfare in a legislature where Republicans hold the supermajority. One of his bills was amended in the late stages of the session to prohibit companies from owning both drugstores and pharmacy benefit managers in Louisiana. Although the legislation was denied a final vote in the Senate on the last day of the session, Miller still received a bipartisan standing ovation from his colleagues in the House for his effort.
He did manage to finesse an exclusion for his home city in one of the year’s most contested bills. A statewide ban on speeding enforcement cameras everywhere but school zones will take effect Aug. 1, except in Opelousas.
The lawmakers are also putting another constitutional amendment on the ballot next year that would raise teacher pay slightly if the voters approve it. Teachers and school support staff would get $2,250 and $1,125 more respectively in their permanent pay if the ballot proposition passes.
The teachers also successfully fought off legislation that would have made it harder for their unions to collect dues that are automatically deducted from paychecks.
LOSERS: Abortion medication providers
Doctors and activists who provide abortion-inducing medications to Louisianians could be sued under a proposal approved by lawmakers.
House Bill 575 by Rep. Lauren Ventrella, R-Greenwell Springs, easily passed both chambers. She dubbed her proposal the “Justice for Victims of Abortion Drug Dealers Act,” though it would apply to all forms of the procedure.
In addition to allowing out-of-state providers to be sued, it extends the window for filing litigation from three years to five.
TOSS-UP: College athletes
Louisiana college athletes will not be receiving a tax exemption on their name, image and likeness (NIL) income this year, as two proposals to do so stalled due to the state’s lean budget situation. But lawmakers may take another crack at it after a task force meets over the next year and submits recommendations for NIL legislation.
But each Division I college athletics program in Louisiana will be the beneficiary of an increased gambling tax, which will send nearly $2 million annually to be spent on expenses benefitting athletes.
Lawmakers approved a constitutional amendment that could weaken the state civil service system that provides protections to thousands of state employees. The proposal still needs approval from Louisiana voters before it’s enacted, but the fact that the bill made it out of the legislature this year signals that a two-thirds majority of lawmakers may no longer value a system that has held strong in Louisiana for roughly 70 years.
Democratic lawmakers stand together May 19, 2025, in the Louisiana House of Representatives to oppose Rep. Emily Chenevert’s House Bill 685, which prohibits policy on diversity, equity and inclusion in state government and prevents state colleges and universities from requiring DEI in their curricula with limited exceptions. (Wes Muller/Louisiana Illuminator)
WINNERS: DEI and academic freedom
A proposal that would have prohibited diversity, equity and inclusion practices across state government and prohibit state universities and colleges from requiring certain race and gender-based curricula for undergraduate students was purposefully stalled in the Senate.
Henry, the senate president, said the measure was unnecessary.
The bill was also opposed by The Louisiana chapter of the American Association of University Professors.
LOSERS: People incarcerated on split-jury verdicts
Louisiana voters amended the state constitution in 2018 to eliminate convictions through non-unanimous juries in felony criminal trials, but the change didn’t apply to such verdicts before the change. Two years later, U.S. Supreme Court ruled that split-jury verdicts were unconstitutional, but it left it up to Louisiana to determine whether their ruling would apply to older cases.
Lawmakers have tried multiple times since then to provide an avenue for those convicted by non-unanimous juries to seek a review of their cases. Sen. Royce Duplessis, D-New Orleans, managed to get his bill through committee this year, but it was shot down on the Senate floor despite having the support of the Louisiana Republican Party and GOP Congressman Clay Higgins, an ardent anti-crime proponent.
WINNER: Children’s teeth
Louisiana lawmakers opted against a conspiracy-theory fueled bill that would have prohibited public water systems from fluoridating their water. Water fluoridation is considered key in reducing dental complications in children.
LOSER: Wetlands
It is now easier to build in Louisiana’s isolated wetland areas— kind of. The state adopted a new definition of what counts as a wetland with Senate Bill 94 by Senator Mike “Big Mike” Fesi, R-Houma, excluding areas cut off from surface water connection to rivers and lakes or surrounded by levees.
Despite some legal confusion as to whether the legislation violates the Clean Water Act, there are now legal avenues to argue that these isolated wetland areas don’t need permits to drain, dredge and fill.
WINNER: Fortified roof program
Lawmakers have embraced the state’s fortified roof program as one of the only effective means of lowering homeowner insurance rates. This session, they established a new $10,000 income tax credit that should go a significant way in helping homeowners afford the hurricane-resistant roofs.
WINNER: Saudi Arabia
Louisiana has included $7 million in the state budget to spend on a LIV Golf League event that is expected to come to the Bayou Oaks golf course in New Orleans City Park next summer.
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which is one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world with nearly $1 trillion in assets, owns LIV Golf.
LOSER: Science
The governor has signed a bill that bans the dispersion of chemicals for weather modification. Technological advances in have safely produced results in rain-starved areas, but they have also launched far more unsubstantiated conspiracy theories. Louisiana joins Florida and Tennessee with new laws based on this speculation, and similar legislation is under consideration in other states.
Awaiting the governor’s signature is a bill that would allow the over-the-counter sale of ivermectin. The drug’s proponents praise it as a treatment for COVID-19 symptoms, though federal regulators haven’t approved it for that use.
Julie O’Donoghue, Piper Hutchinson, Wes Muller, Elise Plunk and Greg LaRose contributed to this analysis
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Louisiana Illuminator is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Louisiana Illuminator maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Greg LaRose for questions: info@lailluminator.com.
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Left-Leaning
This article from the Louisiana Illuminator exhibits a clear left-leaning bias in its framing, tone, and choice of language. While it presents factual reporting on Louisiana’s 2025 legislative session, it repeatedly casts Republican leaders—especially Gov. Jeff Landry—in a critical light, characterizing his policies as “radical” or “strong-arm tactics.” Terms like “government corruption” and “loser: science” carry a pointed evaluative tone, and the article emphasizes perceived negative outcomes of conservative legislation (e.g., weakened ethics laws, anti-DEI measures, anti-abortion efforts). Positive framing is more often applied to bipartisan restraint or Democratic figures, suggesting a clear but not extreme leftward tilt.
