By RICHARD READ
There’s a storm a-brewin’ in Louisiana over alternative vehicle tax credits. (There’s a sentence that didn’t end like you’d expect.)
In 2009, the state legislature passed Act 469 (PDF), which offers a tax credit of up to $3,000 to anyone who purchases a low-emissions vehicle that runs on alternative fuel, “including but not limited to compressed natural gas, liquefied natural gas, liquefied petroleum gas, biofuel, biodiesel, methanol, ethanol, and electricity.”
Which is fine. Many states have such laws on the books, so Louisiana wasn’t breaking new ground here. And in the grand scheme of things, Act 469 was cheap: estimators expected it to cost the state just $900,000 over five years.
All went smoothly until April 30, 2012, when Louisiana’s Revenue Secretary Cynthia Bridges made an “emergency” ruling, which expanded the type of vehicles that qualified for the tax credit. Specifically, she added flex-fuel vehicles to the list, which seems reasonable, since “ethanol” was mentioned in the original bill.
As the always-astute Clancy Dubos at Gambit Weekly points out, this might not have been a problem, except for three curious things:
