Law may force sunshine onto Bossier Jury actions

Many local governments across Louisiana, and inside Bossier Parish especially the parish’s Police Jury, will have to increase substantially transparency as the result of a bill poised to become law.

HB 103 by Republican state Rep. Mike Johnson headed to GOP Gov. Jeff Landry’s desk just before the 2024 Regular Session of the Louisiana Legislature ended this week. The bill, which Landry is expected to sign into law, expands real-time broadcast of governing authority meetings, in whole or part, for a number of jurisdictions across the state.

At present, any multimember taxing authority in the state must record, by audio or video, meetings of the entire body, but it doesn’t have to broadcast these live. The bill changes that to require live broadcast of parish governing authorities and school boards in jurisdictions of greater than 24,999 residents and for municipalities with populations greater than 9,999. All in all, that means 36 parishes, 58 cities, and 41 school districts, if they already aren’t, by the effective date of Aug. 1 must broadcast (presumably through video and audio) their parish commission or police jury, city council, and school board meetings live and advertise how to view that for each meeting.

Many already do. As Bossier’s Police Jury has demonstrated, you don’t need the high-quality apparatuses that Bossier City and the parish school district employ to comply with a broadcast requirement, as for several years it has used a cheap phone/tablet capture system that spools to Facebook Live with its attendant low audio quality and eyestrain-inducing visuals that do an excellent job in obscuring who speaks and what they say. Thus, compliance shouldn’t be a problem for smaller-populated jurisdictions willing to spend a few hundred bucks and to call upon a modicum of technical knowledge.

Bossier Parish has promised for years to upgrade this and its administration continues to claim soon the new, professional system will be up and running in the jury chambers. Perhaps that will happen just in time to ramp up the much greater transmission volume requirements of the new law.

For not only does it make mandatory what was optional for these jurisdictions, the revised statute also requires them to broadcast live all of their committee meetings as well. This won’t be anything new to the School Board, which has done that for some time, and new only to Bossier City in that it has no regular committees but on rare occasions will form something temporary which recently they have broadcast (when, of course, they don’t try to hide their activities with a walking quorum). But it will be harsh sunlight on the Jury, which only in the last couple of years even began posting on the Internet agendas to its committee meetings, and never has broadcast or even recorded these.

It also leads to an interesting legal question. Since 2016, in apparent violation of statute the Jury has placed one or more of its members on the parish Library Board of Control. An attorney general’s opinion on whether police jurors can serve on a board is (still, after seven months) pending, but the Jury unambiguously is breaking the law since the start of the year by assigning all 12 jurors to it when a maximum membership of seven is all the law countenances. Agendas and minutes of meetings since then have disappeared on the Internet.

But the new law may force the Jury, if it is at all allowed to have a portion of its members be the entirety of the Board, to follow the new law in regards to it. If it comprises the entire membership of the Board, it’s reasonable to consider the Board as a committee of the Jury and therefore it must broadcast its meetings live and by implication disseminate its agendas widely as part of the informational requirement.

That may turn out to be one more instance of the Jury’s penchant for breaking the law and daring anybody to do anything about it. In recent years, besides the composition of the Board it also illegally made Parish Administrator Butch Ford head librarian for a period of several months (although another bill in front of Landry could make the practice of requiring a library director to have certification as a librarian optional), illegally appointed Ford as parish administrator initially, and made an illegal appointment to the Cypress Black Bayou Recreation and Water Conservation District on multiple occasions. Most recently, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit chastised it for essentially trying to extort a homeowning pair into surrendering property rights.

Should the bill become law, it will be interesting to see whether the Jury becomes hoisted on its own petard when it comes to web dissemination of Board meeting content.