BATON ROUGE — Changes to tax and spending policy were presented by the Louisiana Department of Revenue to the Louisiana Tax Institute at the State Capitol on Tuesday.

Voters are set to decide on those changes on March 29 when they vote on a constitutional amendment that will double the standard deduction for people over 65, which would provide an additional income tax break and lower the maximum rate of income tax.

"Creating some barriers for special interests to create new breaks in the future and then giving teachers a permanent pay raise, paying off $2 billion or so of the teacher's retirement debt. So, we can give teachers about a $2,000 pay raise," Louisiana Secretary of Revenue Richard Nelson explained.

However, a lawsuit challenging the changes and the wording that voters will see on the ballot was filed by two teachers and one preacher Monday.

The changes the lawsuit targets were showcased at the meeting, where the Department of Revenue also reviewed tax reform legislation enacted during the 2024 Third Special Session.

"The legislature had a pretty significant special session last November where we had two weeks and we essentially rewrote the entirety of the tax code. So since we made those sweeping changes, we wanted to have an opportunity to kind of go through with a group of tax experts to kind of look at some of the changes and see if there's anything we need to fix," Nelson said. 

William Most is the lawyer behind the lawsuit and claims the language that will go before voters cannot briefly summarize all of the changes as required and that the ballot language proposed includes only the "appealing" changes.

According to the lawsuit, more than 100 pages of proposed changes were submitted.

"So there's a lot of changes in there, but at the end of the day, we summarized it the best that we could, or the legislature did as best as they could. The amendment is online, so I encourage everyone to go read it. I encourage you to read the language and make your own opinion and go vote on March 29," Nelson said. "The Amendment is over a hundred pages, there's a whole lot of changes. The constitution basically gives the legislation the ability to rewrite an article which is what was done in this instance."

Nelson said the state's budget is stable right now and gave insight into the implications the amendment has on the Louisiana budget.
"As a result of that tax special session, we were able to stabilize our budget going forward. At the end of the day, it would prevent, obviously the teacher pay raise. It would prevent some more flexibility for the legislature to fund things infrastructure, higher ed improvements," Nelson said.

If the amendment is passed by voters, Nelson says that a teacher pay raise would go into effect this year on July 1. The doubling of the standard deduction for seniors would take effect Jan. 1, 2026.