Last week’s meeting of the Monroe City Council provided yet another chance for its majority to butt heads with independent Mayor Friday Ellis, over both old and new issues, with the power of the mayor’s office triumphing again.
Some closure finally came to the city’s disciplining of former interim police chief Reggie Brown. He had been appointed temporary top cop by Democrat former Mayor Jamie Mayo a few months before delayed 2020 elections and immediately courted controversy when he denied to multiple requestors public records requests that in the past had been fulfilled and was backed in this by the Mayo Administration, with Mayo seemingly intent on having Brown take the job permanently.
Then, a few days prior to elections, a police brutality incident that later would send the officer involved to prison Brown initially refused to refer to the Louisiana State Police despite the city attorney recommending that, and did so only the Monday after the election where Ellis defeated Mayo. Ellis and others believed the delay not only was poor administration but also political favoritism for Mayo. After Brown failed a polygraph exam (later disputed by one legal expert) on whether he had allowed politics to interfere with his decision – because revealing a police brutality incident could make negative news for Mayo right before the election – and denied in subsequent official forums he ran any interference, Ellis’ new chief Vic Zordan fired him for that breach.
A subsequent civil service board found punishment legal and appropriate but disagreed with the penalty’s severity and ordered reinstatement after a 90-day suspension and loss of pay. Years and a few hundred thousand taxpayer dollars later, recently the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled the suspension rather than firing appropriate.
With the majority Council Democrats all allies of Mayo – Rodney McFarland and Juanita Woods had scored Mayo endorsements for runs at offices and Verbon Muhammad had worked with Mayo on his controversial 2017 honoring of Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan – they applauded the reinstatement but expressed outrage that the Ellis Administration had spent considerable taxpayer dollars on the case and that Ellis reinstated Brown, as he legally could do, at his former rank of sergeant and had him put into a low-level job.
As a result, the majority passed a resolution, opposed by Republicans Doug Harvey and Gretchen Ezernack, asking Ellis to drop legal maneuvering about Brown. But it would take an ordinance to force the mayor to act in accordance with the Council Democrats’ wishes, while a resolution he can ignore.
And that, Ellis made clear on another matter, won’t happen as long as the minority Republican are on his side on an issue. They had voted against an ordinance the Democrats had passed the previous meeting that put a timeline on mayoral appointments. This was in response to the protracted, still ongoing, fire chief search where, after his initial selection was shot down by the Democrats. Ellis took several months to produce another nominee, who the Democrats proceeded to reject as well.
Ellis vetoed this ordinance, saying it conflicted with the city charter in circumscribing mayoral powers. That’s not necessarily the case – the Council can pass whatever executive guardrails it wants that don’t conflict with the charter – but as a practical matter a mayor should not have that kind of constraint on him in picking important administrators. And as the charter mandates four of five councilors to override a veto, it was clear the matter was dead.
Really the only leverage the Council majority has practically over the mayor is on money matters, and it has tried to flex its muscles on that account such as by contract approvals with higher disadvantaged business enterprise requirements. The way the sparring between the Council Democrats and Ellis is going, that ought to make next spring’s budgeting process very interesting.
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