What is characterized as a slip-up at a recent Bossier Parish Police Jury meeting illustrates a yawning gap in Louisiana’s public records laws that the Legislature needs to fix next year.
If you weren’t in the Jury’s chambers of the Bossier Parish courthouse for its meeting this week, you’re out of luck in knowing any details about some vital issues. At it, the fiscal year 2023 budget was dealt with, as well fee changes and restructuring its utility arm the Consolidated Waterworks/Sewerage District No. 1, and also the outcome from the Jury placing a new member on the parish’s Library Board of Control, which over the past couple of years has seen citizen members depopulated in favor of jurors.
Perhaps the most important meeting of the year citizens only can find out about if they wait around about a month to have posted in print and online the official minutes, which contain ordinance texts and vote results, but no real detail about discussions. If they want any details, they will have to resort to copious and burdensome public records requests.
The reason? According to the parish’s public information officer, a “transmission error” occurred with the cheap Facebook Live Internet streaming broadcast and archiving system. Despite being alerted early in the meeting that the streaming wasn’t happening, during the meeting no broadcast restoration occurred, meaning no recording at all of Jury activities was made.
That the Jury already has a reputation for cloaking its activities, as if jurors were trying to avoid accountability, only makes this incident look worse. But, in a sense, citizens are lucky to have any transmission and recordings at all of this local government that will spend well over $100 million in taxpayer money next year.
Because there’s nothing in Louisiana law that compels any local government authority comprised of elected officials to record and archive public meetings. R.S. 42:23 comes the closest, reading “All of the proceedings in a public meeting may be video or tape recorded, filmed, or broadcast live” (emphasis added). In other words, at their discretion public bodies may do this.
Some have, and for many years since the Internet has driven transmission and archiving costs close to zero. But many others only recently began that, compelled by the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. Bossier jurors started this only in May, 2020 as a result of the need to allow for jurors not to be present physically in Benton to have meetings.
That the state doesn’t mandate that municipal councils, parish police juries or commissions, or school boards transmit and archive meetings is way overdue. The Bureau of Government Research in New Orleans makes a good case for and has some good suggestions in this area, including legislating of livestreaming and archived video of meetings for entities with substantial responsibilities and public funding, based on a threshold established by the Legislature, and below that a minimum for entities should be an online archive of video recordings.
It also suggests some related records issues that in fact also should become law: posting online the meeting documents and other information that board members receive and maintaining an online archive of meeting minutes. Why the missing Bossier Jury meeting recording is so crucial is because the Jury now doesn’t post with its agenda (which by statute must be published online at least 24 hours prior to the meeting) just those kinds of documents, so this information that would substitute in part for no recording presently requires a public records request to gain access.
The times and technology have changed so that this kind of dissemination costs almost nothing, so there’s no reason for it not to happen. Legislators should have no qualms about extending requirements like these to public bodies of elected officials.
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