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BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA
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T u e s d ay, M ay 6, 2025
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2025 LEGISLATURE
“For too many years, we’ve just hung on to property without any real plan. That property needs to be reinvested back into the community.” MIKE GAUDET, East Baton Rouge Parish School Board vice president
Vacant EBR schools pose challenges
Group seeking to return assets back to community
Changes to jobless benefits eyed
House passes bill requiring work search actions BY MEGHAN FRIEDMANN Staff writer
Louisiana could require residents who get unemployment insurance to do more to find new jobs if a bill advancing in the Legislature becomes law. House Bill 153, which passed the state House by a vote of 73-24 on Monday, with most Democrats opposed, would require those collecting unemployment benefits to perform five work search actions a week. Currently, the Louisiana Workforce Commission requires three weekly work search actions, a standard that is not codified in state statute, Schowen said Secretary Susana Schowen. Work search actions can include attending interviews, filling out job applications, doing mock interviews and attending job fairs and networking events, said Schowen. Part of HB153 directs the commission to define appropriate work search actions through its regulations. The goal of the bill is to get jobless Louisianans back into the workforce more quickly, proponents say. “When you’re out of work, unemployment is a needed benefit, but it’s a benefit that comes with criteria,” said state Rep. Troy Hebert, R-Lafayette,
ä See JOBLESS, page 5A
STAFF PHOTO By HILARy SCHEINUK
School counselor Kelli Zima offers a fist bump and encouraging words as students leave Westminster Elementary School on Monday. Westminster is one of five school buildings that will become vacant when the school year ends. BY CHARLES LUSSIER Staff writer
When the school year ends May 23, nine public schools in Baton Rouge will cease operations and, in the process, five school buildings will become vacant. These newly vacant facilities, emptied thanks to a vote last week by the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board, join at least five other vacant school buildings and several more vacant properties where the schools have been demolished. This glut of unused and underused properties is challenging local leaders to figure out ways to prevent
these locales from devolving into blight and sources of criminal activity as has happened to other vacant school properties in the recent past. School Board Vice President Mike Gaudet said he recently sat in on the first meeting of a group seeking to do just that, to find the best ways to “return these community assets back to the community. “For too many years, we’ve just hung on to property without any real plan,” Gaudet said. “That property needs to be reinvested back into the community.” This ad hoc group is led by Build Baton Rouge, a public agency formed in 2007 to bring together
public and private partners to redevelop property in order to eliminate or head off blight. Build Baton Rouge’s board has appointees from city-parish government, the Baton Rouge Area Foundation and the Baton Rouge Area Chamber. Representatives from each also are participating in this new group. Deidre Robert, chief executive officer of Build Baton Rouge, said her office is working on a master mapping system that will identify publicly held property, not just schools, that could potentially be pooled together and reused.
ä See SCHOOLS, page 4A
Licensing boards may face changes Governor could have more appointment latitude
BY ALYSE PFEIL Staff writer
Louisiana’s governor could soon have more latitude on who to appoint to 32 of the state’s occupational licensing boards and commissions, including those that oversee accountants, plumbers, nursing home administrators, contractors, psychologists and engineers, among a slew of other professions. Current law requires the governor to appoint some members of these boards from lists of candidates put forward by industry trade associations.
ä See BOARDS, page 4A
Trump offers $1,000 to immigrants who self-deport BY REBECCA SANTANA Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Pushing forward with its mass deportation agenda, President Donald Trump’s administration said Monday that it would pay $1,000 to immigrants who are in the United States illegally and return to their home country voluntarily. The Department of Homeland Security said in a news release
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that it would also pay for travel assistance, and that people who use an app called CBP Home to tell the government they plan to return home will be “deprioritized” for detention and removal by immigration enforcement. “If you are here illegally, selfdeportation is the best, safest and most cost-effective way to leave the United States to avoid arrest,” Secretary Kristi Noem said. “DHS is now offering illegal aliens finan-
cial travel assistance and a stipend to return to their home country through the CBP Home App.” The department said it had already paid for a plane ticket for one migrant to return home to Honduras from Chicago and said more tickets have been booked for this week and next. Trump made immigration enforcement and the mass deportation of immigrants in the United States illegally a centerpiece of
his campaign, and he is following through during the first months of his administration. But it is a costly, resource-intensive endeavor. While the Republican administration is asking Congress for a massive increase in resources for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement department responsible for removing people from the country, it’s also pushing people in the country illegally to “self-deport.” It has coupled this self-deporta-
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tion push with television ads threatening action against people in the U.S. illegally and social media images showing immigration enforcement arrests and migrants being sent to a prison in El Salvador. The Trump administration has often portrayed self-deportation as a way for migrants to preserve their ability to return to the United States someday, and the president
ä See TRUMP, page 5A
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