Bossier Jury breaking laws over library board

The new year marks just on two years that the Bossier Parish Police Jury has been breaking the law concerning how it governs its libraries, and it gives no indication it’s going to stop doing that any time soon.

Mark Jan. 10, 2024 as the day the Jury began to rack up legal violations. Statute places library governance in the hands of a library board of control for municipalities and, in this case, parishes. R.S. 25:215 states that the board of control shall have authority to establish rules and regulations for its own government and that of the library not inconsistent with law. This includes employing and evaluating the library director, establishing and adopting written library policies, working to secure adequate funding for the library system, adopting the library system’s annual budget, and takes responsibility for providing and maintaining library facilities, resources, and services.

The governing authority, in this case the Jury, has its involvement defined largely in R.S. 25:214. It appoints members to the board and, through R.S. 33:1415 mentioned in this statute and R.S. 25:220.1, also exercisers budgetary and fiscal control that includes approval of annual operating budgets with the right to veto or reduce line-items and vet for approval any submission to the people to levy any tax or issue any bonds. In succeeding sections, statutes say that the head librarian (synonymous with director of libraries) and the Jury are to deliver an annual report, the Jury must pay expenses monthly for the library out of any special tax levied for that purpose and if insufficient its general fund, and must approve of any gifts received for the library system while the board must approve of any expenditures from these.

Court schedule may challenge nat'l GOP, Landry

Unless they get a satisfactory judicial ruling within the next couple of weeks, it looks like Louisiana will end up using its current congressional map, which may challenge Republicans nationally and GOP Gov. Jeff Landry specifically.

The country waits upon the U.S. Supreme Court to decide in Callais v. Louisiana, which fundamentally could change how reapportionment for legislative bodies occurs. The case itself directly addresses Louisiana’s present congressional map, which is built on the assumption that unless the proportion of districts that have a minority-majority (of blacks) is roughly equivalent to the (black) minority proportion in the population (where “black” is defined as someone claiming descendancy from a black person), it is assumed racial discrimination is occurring in the drawing of that map.

Callais challenges the ability of the federal government to use statute (specifically, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act) to enforce this, calling it a contravention of the Constitution’s 14^th Amendment. The Court head the case in October, and when it issues a decision is anybody’s guess.