The new club that has formed as a subset of the Bossier City Council, the Oathbreakers, have kept true to their subversive and taxpayer-unfriendly strategy in the hopes for a political payoff – which may be thwarted because what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander (not just in Springfield, OH but everywhere).
The Oathbreakers – or Councilors Republicans David Montgomery, Jeff Free, and Vince Maggio and Democrat Bubba Williams and independent Jeff Darby – resemble the namesake character of the fantasy game Dungeons and Dragons who break their sacred oaths to pursue some dark ambition, in this instance to satisfy their cravings for power for them and for their allies by violating the city Charter in refusing on multiple occasions to resolve to put on the ballot language from a certified petition as required by the Charter, with the latest example coming last week. If voters approve the measure prior to 2025 city election qualification, this would amend the Charter to impose retroactively limits of three terms on councilors and the mayor that would disqualify all but Maggio from running for reelection.
Getting to this point has been long and convoluted, starting with a petition to accomplish this amending last year eventually invalidated over a legal technicality strictly interpreted but which prompted the first votes to subvert the Charter. That attack in all likelihood represented a chunk of over $480,000 spent on outside legal consulting from Jul. 1, 2023 to Jul. 31, 2024, which in 2024 was budgeted for only $10,000 within an entire Legal Department budget of about $536,000.
