Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards gives final end-of-year address

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards delivered his final end-of-the-year address Monday, highlighting some of his accomplishments in office over the past eight years and his vague plans for the future.

Edwards, first elected in 2015 and currently the lone Democratic governor in the Deep South, was unable to run for reelection this year due to consecutive term limits and Republicans seized the opportunity to regain the governor’s mansion.

Among his accomplishments during his two terms in office, Edwards touted the state’s Medicaid expansion, infrastructure investments, the state’s unemployment rate reaching record lows and helping take the state from a more than $1 billion budget shortfall to having surplus funds this past legislative session.

“A lot has happened over the last eight years that I have been governor,” Edwards said during his address at the governor’s mansion in Baton Rouge. “I can tell you that by any metric you can come up with and objectively speaking, we are much better off today than the day I first took office.”

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While Edwards said much has been accomplished over the past eight years, there are some goals that were not completed, including increasing the minimum age, adding exceptions to the state’s near total abortion ban and eliminating the state’s death penalty. Edwards said he is going to continue to talk about these issues on the way out of office in hopes of setting them up for success in the future — an uphill battle in the GOP-dominated Legislature.

Monday’s address was the second-to-last public event for the governor. His final public event will be his farewell address in his hometown of Amite on Jan. 3.

When asked about life after he leaves office, Edwards — who before entering the political world had opened a civil law practice — said he plans to move back to Tangipahoa Parish with his wife and go “back into private business.”

He added that he is “genuinely pulling for” Gov.-elect Jeff Landry and wants him to do a “wonderful job.” Landry is a Republican who Edwards has repeatedly butted heads with over political issues.

While Edwards said that he has “no expectation or intention” to run for political office in the future, he didn’t completely rule it out.

“I don’t leave here intending to run for office again, but I don’t say ‘never’ because I don’t know exactly what my situation is going to be. ... I also don’t know what the situation is going to be with the state,” Edwards said.

Landry will be inaugurated Jan. 8.