BC Council changes portend same for Bossier Jury?

Blog: Between The Lines

Open Access

Abstract

With most through to another four years of office, in
their latest meeting Bossier Parish police jurors reverted to their typical
arrogance and obtuseness. Perhaps they should pay attention to the shape of their
future: what happened at the last Bossier City Council meeting.

Recent election results guaranteed nine jurors
would return to office. The one runoff that remains will send a new member to
the Jury since District 10 four-decade veteran Jerome
Darby retired, but vying as his replacement leading into the runoff is his
brother Democrat Julius Darby. Republican challenger Keith Sutton defeated
incumbent Republican Mac Plummer in
District 12, while the GOP's Pam Glorioso beat incumbent Democrat Charles
Gray in District 9.

But over the past two years, all jurors had
engaged in questionable, if not illegal, acts. They hired, knowing
full well it was against the law, Butch Ford as parish administrator, because
he was not a registered voter in Bossier Parish. He would not become one until
ten months into his tenure, but even
now some dispute remains over whether that residence qualifies for that purpose.
They also filled completely the parish's Library
Board of Control with themselves, a move which
is of uncertain legal status and unprecedented across the state.

When at that latest meeting
a couple of citizens questioned the reappointment
of Republican Juror Doug
Rimmer to the Board, drawing upon attorney general documents that declared
sitting jurors on library boards was dual officeholding, as well as questioning
why all five board members had to be jurors when in a parish approaching
130,000 residents surely there were more than enough non-jurors willing to
serve, the likes of Rimmer and another juror on the Board, Republican Julianna
Parks, at jury meetings and other forums have asserted the necessity of
having jurors on the Board because of alleged and nebulously specified problems
with the Board. As well, at this meeting Rimmer stated, on the advice of Parish
Attorney Patrick Jackson, that the ability for jurors to serve on the Board was
unquestioned.

The problem is, in addition to the Attorney
General's office publicly taking the opposite position, case law not addressing
this exact situation – at the meeting Jackson erroneously implied that it had
and in favor of his interpretation – and conflicting statutes that seemingly give
a parish the ability to dodge dual officeholding restrictions in this instance,
Jackson himself doesn't have a good track record when it comes to understanding
what the law means concerning appointments in parish government. In the past, he
told jurors that, absent a court
ruling otherwise which eventually happened, that Jury appointee Robert Berry
to the Cypress Black Bayou Recreation
and Water Conservation District could serve in that capacity and as the agency's
executive director without violating dual officeholding law. And Rimmer stated at
a recent Republican Parish Executive Committee meeting that Jackson also advised
jurors they could appoint Ford as parish administrator despite his voter
registration not being in Bossier while he looked to rectify that, which appears
nowhere in the law and an action Ford showed no signs of pursuing until this
space publicized his continued registration in Caddo parish ten months after
his appointment.

Worst of all, Jackson either apparently was
unaware of, tacitly approved of, or actually counseled in favor of the fact
that the Board, then comprised of Rimmer, Republican Bob
Brotherton who won reelection, and Gray illegally had made Ford interim
library director in October, 2022, in contravention of R.S. 25:215 that states
any head of a library system must have qualifications under R.S. 25:222, or a certification
by the State Board of Library Examiners. Ford would serve six months in that
job.

This unequivocally illegal action by three jurors
(probably four, as minutes of that meeting never haven been made widely available,
if they exist; the next meeting's minutes imply at that previous meeting
Republican Juror Glenn
Benton had been appointed but it's unknown whether he participated in the
vote to appoint Ford) belies the argument that jurors were necessary to "clean
up" the Board. In fact, they disgraced it and themselves by behaving illegally.

And the whole argument of juror necessity to respond
to some problem is untenable, if not a mendacious excuse to justify the juror
takeover. In fact, jurors were serving on the Board as long ago as 2016,
when the Jury expanded the Board to include Rimmer and Brotherton with five
other citizens (boards can have five to seven members). If there were alleged
difficulties, not only have these been going on a long time, but also jurors by
definition contributed to these so how can adding more jurors – and retaining the
two already there – solve for problems jurors already are creating? So what's
so great about juror service on the Board if they act illegally and supposedly
badly enough to need outside intervention?

Of course, to clarify about whether jurors can
serve on the Board, a simple request to the Attorney General's office for an opinion could be pursued. That
would take a resolution passed by the Jury, but no juror has suggested this
happen – perhaps because they know their policy might be in trouble. And the
dismissive attitude that Rimmer and other jurors showed in the meeting towards
citizen concerns on this issue illustrates their haughtiness and a belief they
are above the citizenry, if not the law, emboldened now by recent electoral
success.

If it stays that way. And it may not, if the
latest Bossier City Council meeting indicates anything. Because three years ago,
the Council was much like the Jury today. Back then five members of almost two
decades or more service on the Council, actively supported by another more
junior member, ran the show with little transparency, using their voting power
and a compliant mayor to foist an avalanche of unneeded capital spending fueled
by debt onto the backs of the citizenry.

However, the stench of that awakened enough voters
so that two of the graybeards lost their jobs and eventually were replaced by
newcomers Republicans Chris Smith and
Brian
Hammons. Since then, the pair have become increasingly vocal about use of
tax dollars going to genuine needs rather than to monuments, figurative and literal,
to long-serving councilors' egos.

While Hammons missed the last meeting, Smith more
than made up for the both of them with a display of this critical attitude over
spending. On an item
for more capital expenditures for parks and recreation, Smith pointed out that
in recent years over $20 million in tax dollars had gone for capital expenditures
at the Tinsley Park complex, yet tax-paying citizens often couldn't use these
in being crowded out instead by out-of-towners paying fees to use these.

Sparring with head of the Bossier City Department
of Parks and Recreation Clay Bohanan, who with past mayoral and current Council
graybeard support has pursued a model
that puts revenue generation ahead of citizen ability to use certain facilities,
Smith not only fought back against Bohanan's arrogance, who was joined by graybeard
Democrat Councilor Bubba Williams
implying that their exclusionary pay-to-play model was unimpeachably correct,
but he also made the heretical suggestion that in following that model it would
make more sense just to sell off the facilities to private operators.

In the larger scheme of things, Smith's argument
was that instead of taxpayer dollars going to paying of the principal and
interest on debt on things of little value to the citizenry, it could be
reserved to fund employee raises, particularly for public safety personnel.
When Williams subsequently challenged (actually calling untrue) a Smith
statement that Bossier City's salaries ranked at the bottom of the region by
pointing to a study
done a couple of years back comparing Alexandria's public safety salaries to
others in the state that put Bossier City police in the middle of the pack,
Smith trumped him with his own very recent data looking at regional agencies,
almost all in Texas, which had Bossier City salaries at or near the bottom.

Such argumentation would have been unheard of
coming from the Council three years ago. But Smith and Hammons' elections in 2021 brought a breath of fresh air into Council debates that until then had been
almost always get-along-go-along with no dissension on big spending plans with
total disregard of airing out negative implications of that spending.

Hopefully, those kinds of debates will commence
and flourish now that at least one reform-minded outsider, Sutton, will join
the Jury. Glorioso was part of the cabal united with the Council graybeards
when she served as Bossier City chief administrative officer until her boss
lost reelection, so it seems unlikely that she would act differently in opening
up the Jury. Perhaps Darby's opponent Democrat Mary Giles would ally with
Sutton, while Julius Darby seems unlikely to.

But as the events surrounding Bossier City
government over the past couple of years have shown, you don't have to have a
majority to change the atmosphere. Perhaps a couple of years from now the
sunshine even one dissenter can bring will have started to show results in curbing
the Jury's penchant for lawless, sanctimonious behavior while deflating its members'
attitude of insufferably unaccountable behavior.