Are you a state worker in Louisiana? Your paid parental leave is staying....

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With no fanfare, Gov. Jeff Landry signed a new executive order Monday that continues paid parental leave for thousands of state government employees after expressing skepticism about the policy last year.

Landry’s predecessor, Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards, was the first to authorize paid parental leave for nearly 69,000 state workers on his way out of office last November. The benefit kicked in Jan. 1, about a week before Landry took office, and the current Republican governor had previously questioned whether the state could afford the policy.

“We can be aspirational as governors, but the Legislature are the ones that have to find the money to pay for it,” Landry said about paid parental leave at a press conference last November.

The governor didn’t repeal the parental benefits Edwards approved, however.

Landry had to issue an executive order by the end of this week in order to keep paid parental leave in place for 30,000 unclassified state employees working for the executive branch. Otherwise, they would have lost the benefit when Edwards’ order expired Saturday.

Landry’s office said he was not comfortable pulling the benefit from unclassified workers when 39,000 executive branch employees in the classified civil service system would have still had access to it.

“The [executive order] governs unclassified civil service, and we just want them to be consistent,” Landry’s spokeswoman Kate Kelly said in a written statement Friday night. “It would be very difficult for an agency with both classified and unclassified to have different rules on leave.”

At Edwards’ urging last year, the Louisiana State Civil Service Commission voted to extend the paid parental leave he ended up giving unclassified workers to the classified cohort. Only the commission, which Landry does not control, can repeal it.

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