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Leroy Trimm Jr., 43, a resident and native of Franklin, died Saturday, May 27, 2017, in New Orleans.
Visitation will be Saturday at Pilgrim Grove Baptist Church in Morgan City from 9 a.m. until services at 11 a.m. Burial will follow in the Greenwood Cemetery with military honors.
He is survived by his father, Leroy Trimm Sr. (Charlotte) of Morgan City; one son, Tidas Trimm of Jeanerette; one daughter, Liana Trimm of Buffalo, New York; his companion; three brothers, Darren Watson and Makye Richard, both of Morgan City, and Lawrence Watson Sr. of Bossier City; six sisters, Trina Dural of Verdunville, Tia Verrett of Norfolk, Virginia, Lakeisha Green and A’lter Moore, both of Houston, Michelle Fernandez of Franklin, and Nicole Moore of New Iberia; and a host of other relatives.
He was preceded in death by his mother, and both his paternal and maternal grandparents.
Jones Funeral Home is in charge of arrangements.

Louisiana implemented the largest tax increase in the United States in 2016, according to a 50-state survey compiled by the National Conference of State Legislatures.
The report estimates the overall increase in Louisiana at $1.5 billion, driven by changes in the state sales tax structure that were approved by the Legislature and governor during last year’s regular session.
South Dakota was the closest to the Bayou State’s tax burden, with its net revenue boost weighing in at $107 million.
To put that into perspective, more than half of the total net increase seen nationally in 2016 came from Louisiana alone, based on the report’s math.

Dems ponder pro-Stokes PAC
With a field of only Republican candidates angling for treasurer and no marketable names surfacing from the other side, there are plans quietly coming together for a possible political action committee, funded primarily by Democrats, to support state Rep. Julie Stokes, R-Kenner.
But nothing is etched in stone quite yet.
The sales pitch would be straightforward, those involved say — Democrats could end up with a Republican who would mimic the brand U.S. Sen. John Kennedy put in place, which was geared towards criticizing whoever was governor, or they could back a candidate who has little to no record of throwing political bombs.
For the purposes of the ask, of course, the latter refers to Stokes. And the protection referenced in the sales pitch would be for Gov. John Bel Edwards, who has proven himself as a prolific fundraiser if nothing else.
During the recent treasurer forum hosted by the Louisiana Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives, Stokes spent some time talking about “working across party lines” and how party wouldn’t guide her decision-making.
The possibility of a PAC is certainly not an encouraging sign for those hoping a big-name Democrat gets in the contest.
LaPolitics has cycled through a number of personalities who could run statewide, but none of the Democrats interviewed seem eager to bite.
New Orleans attorney Derrick Edwards is in the race, but local politicos consider it a true challenge for him to solidify the Crescent City and to raise enough money to compete elsewhere.
But all hope is not lost for Democrats. Qualifying doesn’t commence until July 12 and recruitment efforts are underway.
Other major Republicans running include Angele Davis of Baton Rouge, state Rep. John Schroder of Covington and state Sen. Neil Riser of Columbia.

Supremes to GOP: No
The U.S. Supreme Court has stuck a fork in the fundraising challenge filed by the Louisiana Republican Party.
Justices last week affirmed an earlier ruling from a three-judge court on a looser framework for the use of certain donations raised by state and local parties.
Attorneys for the state party argued that the current system prohibits parties from using state-regulated contributions for traditional party activities, even if the activities involve communications done with no candidate coordination.

EWE’s party
A big birthday party is being planned for former Gov. Edwin Edwards. But it’ll cost you.
Tickets are said to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $250, with all of the proceeds benefitting the birthday boy.
The event, scheduled for Aug. 12, will coincide with the paperback release of the EWE bio that was penned by Leo Honeycutt.

Political History:
Seersucker and you
“Seersucker Thursday” on Capitol Hill was kicked off in 1996 by lobbyist and then-U.S. Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi. Today it’s U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy of Baton Rouge who’s helping lead the striped charge.
It’s scheduled for June 8 this year, which is when senators will be sporting their best puckered prints and posing for a morning snapshot at the Ohio Clock in the U.S. Capitol. Lobbyists and staffers will be seersuckered up as well.
The tradition seems to grow a little each year, which is fortunate.
The political holiday was actually scrubbed from Beltway calendars in 2012 when legislators were worried that such fashion-forward fun would send the wrong message during what was supposed to be a very serious term.
Those were dark times for seersucker enthusiasts.
The next year, in 2013, a Missouri state senator tried to push an amendment banning most residents from wearing seersucker suits because, as the lawmaker put it, they “look ridiculous.” That effort — it actually happened — went down in flames.
In 2014, Cassidy, then in the House, revived Seersucker Thursday alongside U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, who got the upper chamber involved again and who still the co-sponsor.
For a bit of historical context, Cassidy put the following into the Congressional Record recently: “The storied history of this uniquely American fashion dates back to 1909 when Joseph Haspel designed the first seersucker suit at his Broad Street facility in New Orleans. Louisiana is proud to have played an important part in introducing the country to seersucker apparel. During the hot summer months, Americans across the country have worn and enjoyed this lightweight cotton fabric, known for its signature pucker. Mr. Haspel said it best, ‘hot is hot, no matter what you do for a living.’”
For more Louisiana political news, visit www.LaPolitics.com or follow Jeremy Alford on Twitter @LaPoliticsNow.

By RICHARD THOMPSON
The Advocate
In the aftermath of the BP oil spill, Scott Angelle’s experience in Washington as a leading voice against the federal deepwater drilling moratorium imposed by the Obama administration offered him a glimpse into the federal culture that one day he’d set out to change.
“It was abundantly clear that there was a bias against the energy industry, that for anybody who was seeking hydrocarbons and bringing them to the marketplace, there … was disdain. There was almost hatred for it, I found,” Angelle recalled in 2015.
Last week, a collective sigh of relief could almost literally be heard throughout Louisiana’s hard-hit energy sector when President Donald Trump tapped Angelle to head the federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, a branch of the U.S. Interior Department that regulates offshore drilling. In his new role, the Breaux Bridge native will help craft Trump’s vision for an “energy revolution,” which proposes accelerating the permitting process for oil and gas exploration on federal lands and potentially new drilling in U.S. Arctic waters.
Angelle has spent nearly three decades in Louisiana government, including eight years at the helm of the state’s Department of Natural Resources, where he oversaw oil and gas, coastal restoration and protection, and mineral resource issues. After three years of slumping oil prices that have led to thousands of job losses, Angelle now is tasked with striking a balance between Trump’s pledge to reduce the drilling industry’s regulatory costs and the need to protect workers’ safety and the environment.
“Regulatory reform doesn’t mean relaxing safety standards,” he said.
Angelle is the agency’s fourth director since it was established after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig caught re in April 2010 and exploded about 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, killing 11 men and spilling millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. After the BP spill, the former Minerals Management Service was reorganized into the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, which itself was later broken into two agencies, including the one that Angelle now leads.
Once the federal moratorium was lifted in late 2010, the agency continued to draw criticism from many Republican lawmakers and energy executives for what they considered to be the slow pace at which new drilling permits were being issued.
Though his new job is based in Washington, Angelle said he plans to spend “a lot more time than my predecessors” out in the oil field.
In an interview, he worked to portray himself as a “change agent” who will realign a bureau that he said has become too focused on red tape rather than the country’s bigger economic picture.
He said he plans to consider the views of many stakeholders, from industry leaders to environmental groups and oil-patch workers themselves, a group that he believes was marginalized by the Obama administration.
“Obviously, I live in the area that believes very strongly about the value of offshore production to the American economy, and we’ll be engaging those folks,” he said.
Throughout last year’s presidential campaign, some of Trump’s most ardent support came from the energy industry, as officials praised his vision for fostering a friendlier business climate. That included rolling back new restrictions imposed in the aftermath of the BP spill, which they said added new costs just when the industry was suffering economically.
Oil prices have plunged since hitting $115 per barrel in June 2014, and federal forecasters see little relief in sight. Brent crude prices are expected to average $53 per barrel in 2017 and $57 in 2018, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Trump already has taken steps to pare back regulations, and last month he instructed the U.S. Interior Department to reconsider rules that would adjust some aspects of drilling operations and that targeted changes to some equipment that failed during the BP disaster.
While Angelle declined to specify what regulations in particular may be headed for the chopping block — it was only his second day on the job — he said that many of the newer ones, including the so-called well control rule, would be given close scrutiny.
“We’ll certainly be taking a look at that and determining what kind of new rule-making activity we might need to be able to streamline,” he said. That’s welcome news to many in the industry, who have bemoaned the Obama-era regulations as overly burdensome.
In addition, a 2016 study by Wood Mackenzie, a business research firm, predicted that annual exploratory drilling would be cut by as much as 55 percent, although that estimate envisioned a scenario in which oil was at $80 a barrel.
For his part, Angelle is seeking and a middle ground.
“We don’t have to either have robust production or safe drilling,” he said. “We can have both, and I’m going to make that my No. 1 responsibility.”
Angelle earned his bachelor’s degree in petroleum land management at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette before getting started in public office.
During a nearly three-decade career, he’s held a variety of posts: parish president; interim lieutenant governor during the response to the BP oil spill; former Gov. Bobby Jindal’s legislative liaison; and chairman of the state Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities, telecommunications and intrastate trucking.
At the Department of Natural Resources, he said, he helped reform the state’s coastal permitting system to make it more effcient, which helped Louisiana’s drilling rig count grow by more than 150 percent during his tenure.
In Angelle’s view, the federal agency he’s inherited has “an extremely high value on safety and very little regard for economic activity, and rather than lowering one, I will raise both to the same level.”
“We’re not going to sacrifice safety,” he said. “We’re not going to sacrifice environmental safeguards, but we’re going to embrace a culture that says we can do all of those things.”
However, Angelle has drawn flak in the past from some environmentalists and others for his close ties to the industry.
During Angelle’s 2015 run for governor, a race eventually won by John Bel Edwards, U.S. Sen. David Vitter, a fellow Republican, ran attack ads labeling Angelle “Sinkhole Scott,” tying him to a frustration expressed by some Assumption Parish residents, who blamed Angelle for not acting sooner to help mitigate the impact of the Bayou Corne sinkhole.
Over the course of years, the sinkhole swelled to more than 30 acres. But Angelle noted that he resigned from his Department of Natural Resources post only a few days after the hole emerged in 2012, contending that he had already been planning a run for the Public Service Commis-sion seat.
In an interview, Angelle defended his brief role in the episode, saying it wasn’t under his jurisdiction. It was the commissioner of conservation, in fact, who had “the absolute authority to regulate the issue that happened over there at that event,” he said, declining to even use the word “sinkhole,” but adding that state law prevented him from “exercising any jurisdiction over that matter.”
Though some residents blamed him regardless, Angelle’s perspective jives with at least one local official who was involved in the response.
“We know a whole lot more now, but at that time, no one knew really what was happening,” said John Boudreaux, Assumption Parish’s homeland security director.
At an industry conference in Pittsburgh last year, Trump said the country is sitting on a “treasure trove of untapped energy” and boasted that clearing away regulatory hurdles — as Angelle will have a hand in doing — would mean “more jobs, more revenues, more wealth, higher wages, and lower energy prices.”
His role in that effort is not lost on Angelle.
“This is big stuff, and it affects a lot of families, and it affects the nation’s economy,” he said.

BATON ROUGE (AP) — Gov. John Bel Edwards’ administration has presented to senators a grim picture of the fallout from the House-proposed version of next year’s budget, with the governor threatening a veto if anything resembling the spending plan reaches his desk.
Over dozens of hours of hearings, agency leaders say they’d have to release prisoners early, shutter health programs and damage critical services in the financial year that begins July 1. House Republican leaders who drew up the plan call that scare tactics and say state government can’t afford the spending trajectory proposed by the Democratic governor.

Budget dispute
The House passed a budget, opposed by nearly all of its Democratic members, that would leave $206 million on the table, to hedge against GOP leaders’ expectations that state income estimates are too rosy.
Appropriations Chairman Cameron Henry, a Republican who had a heavy hand in drafting the House version, predicted agencies would tell lawmakers “the world’s going to fall apart” under the scaled-back spending plan. But he said he didn’t believe that was true.
Edwards replied that without the money, health services, the child welfare agency and prisons would face unnecessary, harmful cuts.
The Senate Finance Committee is expected to unveil senators’ version of the spending plans this week. Chairman Eric LaFleur, a Democrat, said senators of both parties want to add more money into the spending plan, but he said he’s also been told by House Republicans that tapping into the unspent dollars is “a deal-breaker” for them.
Lawmakers have two weeks to reach a deal before the legislative session ends June 8.

Health care
The budget proposal includes $237 million less in state financing than Edwards wanted. Health Secretary Rebekah Gee said the number balloons to nearly $1 billion when counting lost federal match dollars.
Gee told senators she’d have to eliminate Medicaid mental health services, Zika prevention efforts and a program that provides specialized health services to disabled children.
“By and large, we would have no mental health services. Think of what that would do to our communities,” she said. But she said other options for divvying the reduction would be equally unsavory: “I could cut hospice and people would die in pain. I could cut hemodialysis and people could die next week.”
House Republicans note that even with the reduction, the total health department budget would grow by nearly $2 billion in federal financing, largely tied to the Medicaid expansion program.
Sen. Jack Donahue, a Mandeville Republican, told Gee during her budget hearing that health care spending in Louisiana over the last eight years has grown at a rate that is jeopardizing other needed services.
“It’s burying us. It’s not sustainable,” he said.

Higher
education
College leaders, facing a $16 million cut proposed both by Edwards and the House, said they are struggling to keep up with peer institutions in other states after years of state funding reductions.
“This has been a decade of cuts. This is the 17th one on its way. And now you’re seeing the consequences,” said LSU System President F. King Alexander, describing lost faculty and students choosing to leave the state for other schools.
“We’re outpunching our weight, but the question is how long can we keep doing this, losing our best people?” Alexander told senators.
House Republicans took $82 million Edwards proposed for health care spending and shuffled it to the TOPS free college tuition program, to give full tuition funding to eligible students, rather than a pro-rated, lesser amount.
Republican Senate President John Alario and LaFleur said senators want to keep TOPS at full funding as the House proposed, though LaFleur acknowledged that “with a limited amount of dollars,” it will be at some other program’s expense.

Other agencies
Corrections Secretary Jimmy LeBlanc said the House version of the budget could jeopardize safety at the prisons and would force him to release nearly 4,700 nonviolent inmates early over the next year. The head of the military department said the House proposal would require him to shrink a popular boot camp program for troubled youth.
Treasurer Ron Henson was among the rare budget hearings in the Senate, telling senators two weeks ago: “We feel like this is an adequate budget, and we appreciate it.”