Bossier Jury still doing best to stay in dark

Forced to make itself more transparent, we shouldn’t have expected the Bossier Parish Police Jury to do anything but the bare minimum that frustrates the spirit of the law – if not actually making matters worse for citizens who can’t watch meetings live – while jurors do their best to skirt the law.

Act 539 of 2024 expanded the responsibilities of local governments in transmitting live and archived their meetings. Now, municipalities, parish governing authorities, and school boards over certain population levels must transmit live (or close to it) not only their meetings, but meetings of any committees of them, barring those for municipalities whose committees are composed of unelected volunteers.

As it was. the Jury barely complied with existing law. Unlike the five other significant plenary bodies in the area – Shreveport’s City Council, Caddo Parish’s Commission, Caddo’s School Board, Bossier City’s Council, and Bossier’s School Board – which have had sophisticated professional video transmission and have archived meeting recordings for years, it limped along with Facebook Live transmissions from a phone or tablet placed on the end of the table where jurors sat. The transmissions were so terrible that a good chunk of the audio was unintelligible, unless the consumer knew the voices by person you couldn’t tell who was speaking, presentations weren’t shown, and neither were the outcomes of votes. Archiving is a mess, having to sift through the parish’s Facebook site. Nor was it reliable; the entire transmission of perhaps the most important meeting of last year, passing the budget, never came off due to what I was told was a “transmission error” (and therefore isn’t archived).

Keep in mind this was from an entity that received $128 million in revenues last year with around 128,000 constituents. And keep in mind almost four years ago I made inquiries about upgrading this and was told it was in the offing and to be patient.

As it was, it required the patience of a saint. Perhaps not surprisingly, the allegedly on-the-way upgrade dragged past last fall elections, and appeared only in time for the new law to take effect. The Aug. 7 meeting featured the first use of the system.

Which had its positives. Consumers simultaneously can receive up to four views – of five jurors, of the other seven, anybody at the podium, and a panel for presentations and voting information which even can clue you into who is speaking. But it still failed on the reliability criterion. At least a dozen times in the three-quarters-of-an-hour running length of the archived meeting – still kept on the Facebook site and not in its own dedicated receptacle (the other significant area entities redirect to and store on YouTube, where they stream live, which is no more difficult than on Facebook) – it skipped several seconds of action, rendering several statements in progress as disconnected gobbledygook, frustrating any consumer trying to keep track of the issue at hand (it’s unknown whether this occurred live). Until this is fixed, anybody trying to view past proceedings is as bad off as before, trading unintelligibility for incomprehensibility.

The law said committee meetings of the Jury had to be shown, and it seems they were. But in an unfathomable decision if transparency is the goal, these apparently were done via Zoom Workplace and, moreover, they apparently weren’t archived. For the uninitiated, Zoom is a platform designed for interactivity for a workgroup that requires an account with Zoom, unlike Facebook or YouTube, and an invitation to view (which was posted under a news story, rather than at a dedicated place on the website, once again making it more difficult for the public to find it). It is a much clumsier way to transmit a meeting unless you count on logged in members of the public having an opportunity to speak.

There’s zero reason to choose Zoom over YouTube or even Facebook is you want to transmit a meeting, especially as the committee meetings occur in the same Jury chambers with its new transmission/recording capabilities. Even so, Zoom has an archiving feature, which apparently the Jury didn’t use as legally it doesn’t have to archive. Thus, now the only way in which Bossier citizens who want to observe committee meetings are better off than before is if they happen to have availability in the latter part of Wednesday mornings once a month or so and have access to a device utilizing Zoom software, as opposed to having to go to the courthouse and sit in person. But otherwise, you’re out of luck if you want to see any recording of what happened if you can’t catch it live.

Not that the Jury doesn’t violate other transparency laws. Its committee meeting agendas don’t include an explicit solicitation of public comment, mandated by R.S. 42:19, either on each item on which there is a vote or a general comment period on any subject, or both as demanded by R.S. 42:14, although this defect can be cured by the person running the meeting asking for such for each item. But neither these nor the Jury’s agenda contain Act 393 of 2023 information which for a year now has been required to facilitate the ability of people with disabilities and their caregivers to make public comments remotely, something on which the Jury apparently hasn’t acted upon in another violation of the law.

(And in a peculiar postmodern way, one of the very first things captured at this meeting in this new format was another reminder to the Jury of its opaqueness. Travis Morehart, the husband of Sandra Morehart who played a key role in the implosion of Bossier City’s Charter Review Commission and principal of the firm involved, presented a short spiel on the recently-completed annual audit required of the parish. In the audit, his firm notes it had to levy an adverse opinion because the Jury didn’t provide financial information about its component units, either for the purpose of including it in the parish’s audit or as a series of separate audits for each component unit.)

All of this extreme hesitancy to be transparent fits a growing trend of the Jury seemingly to keep the public in the dark as much as possible and as non-participatory as possible in overseeing its affairs. Which begs the related questions of how long jurors will keep thumbing their noses at citizens and how long citizens will keep putting up with their elected officials’ dereliction of duty?