The Bossier City Council should take a good idea – to the chagrin of Republican Mayor Tommy Chnadler – and extend it further and seriously.
This week, the Council will take up an ordinance to give its members at least a passing acquaintance with all of the dozens of mayor nominees and Council potential confirmations. The intended new law would require the mayor to present nominees in some fashion, even if already serving and up for reappointment, to councilors along with biographical information and records for incumbents at least 30 days before an approval vote. Further, a previously denied nominee could not come up again for reappointment for at least 90 days after the negative vote. And all nominees would have to appear in front of the Council at a meeting of it.
Councilors, four of whom just started mid-year with the remainder having completed just one term, appear tired of the old wink-wink-nod-nod system characteristic of the graybeards washed out of the Council over the past two election cycles, allied as the deposed councilors were with former mayors who off to the side decided beforehand who would get to hand out what patronage plum to whom. Names, sometimes with no publicly-revealed qualifications and/or never appearing in front of the Council, would pop up on agendas without any warning to all councilors and stamped into their slot like on an assembly line.
No more, this crop of councilors seems to have decided led by Republican rookie Joel Girouard – to the displeasure of Chandler, who disapproved of the attempted ordinance (assent by various administration members is a formality unnecessary for introduction when proposed by a councilor). How this transparency can be objectionable is a point of wonderment that hopefully Chandler will be able to explain, if that’s all possible in a rational and coherent manner, at the meeting. With this in place, all councilors now will have a chance to vet nominees and not have to make rushed, if not snap, judgments on nominees.
Not that Chandler may be able to do much about it. The vote on the item will be telling, for if at least five of the seven send it to a second reading, that is a sufficient number to override an attempted mayoral veto (which Chandler never has exercised if ever he has harbored reservations about a passed ordinance, or whether he has been too squeamish to express public disapproval and have such ones overridden).
Yet the Council should go further. The bastion furthest from transparency in Bossier Parish, its Police Jury, actually maintains the practice of advertising many of these posts and from time to time even has the appearance of public deliberation over appointments. The dynamics are somewhat different since the parish has no elected chief executive making appointments so that falls directly on the Jury, and these typically are all inside jobs as has been the city’s case as well until now even if there’s a dog-and-pony show of herding applicants culled through the advertising process up in front of the Jury to give a pitch, but at least any eligible parish resident has a shot to apply and make a case, regardless that the fix is in and substantively advertising it is seldom unserious as to whether it makes a difference.
That’s a worthy amendment to the ordinance: require that the city make sufficient public notice, by news release and on the city web site, that a term on a body will commence in the near future and inviting applications. Even if grooved to a preferred candidate, at least the public merits of each applicant can be aired. And, if obviously inferior but insider choices get made, maybe the revelation of that through the process could serve to discourage out-and-out loser insiders from applying or being sought out, which would serve as an improvement to the current practice.
If the Council is really serious about transparency, it will write that into the contemplated ordinance. But even the half-measure as is marks a distinct improvement of the process.
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