BC extending transparency, Jury still obscurant

While Bossier City continues to make progress with its transparency, Bossier Parish’s easily-fixed struggles continue.

In its meeting this week, the City Council approved a measure that ultimately could make ordinances and other legal items readily available. This will enable digitization of decades-old material, as part of a preservation effort, that potentially could make it all available online.

At present, for these records Bossier City’s online access is hit and miss. On its Municode website that presents the charter and ordinance, the listing for ordinances by year and number is maddeningly incomplete. For example, all passed in 2016 are archived, but there are none for 2015, and even the most recent 2022 only has seven out of 127. Hopefully, this will lead to an online searchable database that lists every passed ordinance and resolution text going several decades into the past.

By contrast, when the Police Jury meets tomorrow, it will consider its 2024 budget – but unless citizens took an extraordinary amount of effort, they have no idea what it looks like. Nor do they have any details, beyond bland broad agenda descriptions (and maps for some zoning items), for a variety of things such as requests for zoning changes, contract parameters, the qualifications of appointees to various boards, liquor licenses renewed or granted, change order requests for let contracts, acceptance of public works by the parish from private entities, tax exemption requests, and details on the Three-Year Road Overlay Program that is annually.

At least the text of ordinances could be found in public records notices filed according to state law, which must appear prior to meetings in the parish’s journal of record, the Bossier Press-Tribune. Except that, for whatever reasons, the Press-Tribune hasn’t placed any public notices online at the Louisiana Press Association’s web site since Nov. 1, leaving only print versions or a trip to the Jury’s clerk to see these actual texts.

Not that these online are that helpful. The LPA site is cumbersome to search and presents material in a pop-up box fashion, and it supplies just the text without any supporting material. That the parish failed to make available the actual budget to be considered online through the LPA site may not be its fault if the BPT fell down on the job, but it’s the 21^st, not 20^th, century and there is such a thing as broadband Internet. The BPT failure would have no real consequences if the parish simply made available online as part of Jury agendas – as well as its committee agendas, which it only recently began posting online – the same materials jurors have electronically.

Difficult citizen access to such important items as the 2024 budget and latest overlay program is inexcusable in a parish of over 120,000 residents who, according to a summary of the 2023 budget, will end up paying $43 million in taxes to fund a budget spending $128 million that requires whacking three-eighths of its funds’ reserves to drop those to a combined $61 million. It would cost noting to put Jury agenda items in the same posture as those produced by Bossier City. It only takes genuine commitment to be transparent, as opposed to obscurant maneuvering, all the while with allegedly enlightened jurors complaining that the presumed benighted citizenry can’t understand what they are doing.