Strange things are happening in the current legislative session. Usually when a bill fails to pass in either the House or the Senate, that bill is dead for the session. Apparently, that's not the case this year.
HB 780 (pdf alert), the bill that would have prohibited the state from buying up the land necessary to build the Charity Hospital that LSU wants that was killed in the Senate Education Committee by none other than New Orlean's own State Senator Ann Duplessis.
However, since LSU is bickering over the composition of the board to oversee the new Charity, the state has decided to halt the acquisition process in an attempt to leverage their power of the purse. More importantly, it appears that the State Senate may have revived a bare-bones version of HB 780 ... thanks to State Senator Jack Donahue, who is the sponsor of Senate Resolution 116 (pdf alert), which:
"requests the LSU Board of Supervisors to submit all of its existing business plans and all supporting data for the development of a replacement for the Medical Center of Louisiana at New Orleans to the Senate by 3 pm on Tuesday, June 23, 2009."
It'll be interesting to see if LSU wins this battle, or lose it. For what it's worth, as an LSU Law grad, I think they ought to lose this one for the simple reason that the money just ain't there for LSU to build all three phases of their proposed complex. Makes far more sense to gut Charity, and use the shell to rebuild a world-class facility. And it can be done, according to this report, for half the cost of building a whole new complex:
