BC Council needs resolution not to act illegally

It’s nothing new for Bossier City to make end runs around the law to accomplish what a handful of governing elites want. But at the first City Council meeting of the year it’s unusually ambitious in its attempts both to tempt constitutional fates over public expression and, yet again, violate its own charter and ordinances.

Already this year a Council majority has brought infamy onto itself by rejecting a charter imperative – all of Republicans David Montgomery, Jeff Free, and Vince Maggio, Democrat Bubba Williams, and no party Jeff Darby on multiple occasions – to schedule a pair of ballot items on term limits for elected officials, resulting from certified petitions following charter guidelines. It also managed to get itself sued over conduct relating to restrictions on public comment at meetings and attempted secret meetings.

Part of that suit addresses behavior under the existing rules for comments, but another part asks to have the entire set declared unconstitutional because it is overly restrictive. Existing jurisprudence suggests that those rules are on thin constitutional ice, and certainly leave much room for patently unconstitutional behavior in their application.

Yet at the Jan. 2 meeting, the Council has an opportunity to moot these concerns as part of other changes made to the Council rules. Last year, the Council decided to change its meeting schedule so that it would meet regularly just twice a month, but this requires a rule change to go into effect.

This provides a perfect opportunity for the Council to change in conjunction with that the vagueness of some terms used in public comment policy to define indecorous behavior and to remove the facially unconstitutional option of banning speakers, thereby avoiding future litigation that, if vigorous applying enforcement, the city surely would lose. However, the introduced language to be considered and potentially passed in this section remains unchanged.

Worse is an illegal attempt to renew for four years the city’s public-private partnership with Manchac Consulting in a no-bid arrangement and accepting its designee as city engineer. Troubling enough is the parent firm, Waggoner Engineering, recently had its chief executive officer abandon his post for a month to indulge in political activism.

But it’s the legal questions surrounding the deal that bring real liability, as well as the possible waste of taxpayer dollars, to the city. A few aspects of the renewal don’t obviously violate legalities, but they may well and so must be avoided:

• The four-year term violates the charter’s prohibition on any contract lengthier than three years, but state law does allow up to five years.
• Ordinance maintains that the state’s public bid law must be followed, which the mayor could waive but of which no record exists than he has, although that law and the ordinance when read together creates ambiguity as to whether the city must follow state public law when contracting services of this magnitude ($195,000 a month).
• The contract would make Manchac designee Ben Rauschenbach “interim” city engineer – a dodge to try to circumvent the charter’s wording regarding the hiring process for that post untested legally.
• Whether that succeeds in making the arrangement legal, there is conflict in that the charter says the mayor may discharge the city engineer at any time, yet the contract prevents the mayor from doing so.

Regardless, one part of the deal unambiguously violates existing ordinance: the prohibition against single-source contracting unless the purchasing agent or his designee above the level of purchasing agent determines in writing that there is only one source for the required service. Not only is that a ridiculous proposition to accept, since contracting for city services is common with thousands of vendors nationally including some in Bossier City other than Manchac, but also a public records request confirmed that not for any of the three contracts, original and extensions including the one upcoming, has a purchasing agent or his designated superior made the required written determination.

With the process in violation of ordinance, plus the additional legal ambiguities attached to the deal that puts the city at risk, the item dealing with the contract extension needs to be postponed, if not defeated in favor of soliciting competitive bids for a deal approaching $10 million in taxpayer funds. The Council should make a New Year’s resolution to stay within the bounds of the law, and addressing the ticking time bomb of defective public comment rules and its delaying or axing the Manchac contract extension would give it the chance to make a great start on upholding that promise.