With most through to another four years of office, in their latest meeting Bossier Parish police jurors reverted to their typical arrogance and obtuseness. Perhaps they should pay attention to the shape of their future: what happened at the last Bossier City Council meeting.

Recent election results guaranteed nine jurors would return to office. The one runoff that remains will send a new member to the Jury since District 10 four-decade veteran Jerome Darby retired, but vying as his replacement leading into the runoff is his brother Democrat Julius Darby. Republican challenger Keith Sutton defeated incumbent Republican Mac Plummer in District 12, while the GOP’s Pam Glorioso beat incumbent Democrat Charles Gray in District 9.

But over the past two years, all jurors had engaged in questionable, if not illegal, acts. They hired, knowing full well it was against the law, Butch Ford as parish administrator, because he was not a registered voter in Bossier Parish. He would not become one until ten months into his tenure, but even now some dispute remains over whether that residence qualifies for that purpose. They also filled completely the parish’s Library Board of Control with themselves, a move which is of uncertain legal status and unprecedented across the state.

When at that latest meeting a couple of citizens questioned the reappointment of Republican Juror Doug Rimmer to the Board, drawing upon attorney general documents that declared sitting jurors on library boards was dual officeholding, as well as questioning why all five board members had to be jurors when in a parish approaching 130,000 residents surely there were more than enough non-jurors willing to serve, the likes of Rimmer and another juror on the Board, Republican Julianna Parks, at jury meetings and other forums have asserted the necessity of having jurors on the Board because of alleged and nebulously specified problems with the Board. As well, at this meeting Rimmer stated, on the advice of Parish Attorney Patrick Jackson, that the ability for jurors to serve on the Board was unquestioned.

The problem is, in addition to the Attorney General’s office publicly taking the opposite position, case law not addressing this exact situation – at the meeting Jackson erroneously implied that it had and in favor of his interpretation – and conflicting statutes that seemingly give a parish the ability to dodge dual officeholding restrictions in this instance, Jackson himself doesn’t have a good track record when it comes to understanding what the law means concerning appointments in parish government. In the past, he told jurors that, absent a court ruling otherwise which eventually happened, that Jury appointee Robert Berry to the Cypress Black Bayou Recreation and Water Conservation District could serve in that capacity and as the agency’s executive director without violating dual officeholding law. And Rimmer stated at a recent Republican Parish Executive Committee meeting that Jackson also advised jurors they could appoint Ford as parish administrator despite his voter registration not being in Bossier while he looked to rectify that, which appears nowhere in the law and an action Ford showed no signs of pursuing until this space publicized his continued registration in Caddo parish ten months after his appointment.

Worst of all, Jackson either apparently was unaware of, tacitly approved of, or actually counseled in favor of the fact that the Board, then comprised of Rimmer, Republican Bob Brotherton who won reelection, and Gray illegally had made Ford interim library director in October, 2022, in contravention of R.S. 25:215 that states any head of a library system must have qualifications under R.S. 25:222, or a certification by the State Board of Library Examiners. Ford would serve six months in that job.

This unequivocally illegal action by three jurors (probably four, as minutes of that meeting never haven been made widely available, if they exist; the next meeting’s minutes imply at that previous meeting Republican Juror Glenn Benton had been appointed but it’s unknown whether he participated in the vote to appoint Ford) belies the argument that jurors were necessary to “clean up” the Board. In fact, they disgraced it and themselves by behaving illegally.

And the whole argument of juror necessity to respond to some problem is untenable, if not a mendacious excuse to justify the juror takeover. In fact, jurors were serving on the Board as long ago as 2016, when the Jury expanded the Board to include Rimmer and Brotherton with five other citizens (boards can have five to seven members). If there were alleged difficulties, not only have these been going on a long time, but also jurors by definition contributed to these so how can adding more jurors – and retaining the two already there – solve for problems jurors already are creating? So what’s so great about juror service on the Board if they act illegally and supposedly badly enough to need outside intervention?

Of course, to clarify about whether jurors can serve on the Board, a simple request to the Attorney General’s office for an opinion could be pursued. That would take a resolution passed by the Jury, but no juror has suggested this happen – perhaps because they know their policy might be in trouble. And the dismissive attitude that Rimmer and other jurors showed in the meeting towards citizen concerns on this issue illustrates their haughtiness and a belief they are above the citizenry, if not the law, emboldened now by recent electoral success.

If it stays that way. And it may not, if the latest Bossier City Council meeting indicates anything. Because three years ago, the Council was much like the Jury today. Back then five members of almost two decades or more service on the Council, actively supported by another more junior member, ran the show with little transparency, using their voting power and a compliant mayor to foist an avalanche of unneeded capital spending fueled by debt onto the backs of the citizenry.

However, the stench of that awakened enough voters so that two of the graybeards lost their jobs and eventually were replaced by newcomers Republicans Chris Smith and Brian Hammons. Since then, the pair have become increasingly vocal about use of tax dollars going to genuine needs rather than to monuments, figurative and literal, to long-serving councilors’ egos.

While Hammons missed the last meeting, Smith more than made up for the both of them with a display of this critical attitude over spending. On an item for more capital expenditures for parks and recreation, Smith pointed out that in recent years over $20 million in tax dollars had gone for capital expenditures at the Tinsley Park complex, yet tax-paying citizens often couldn’t use these in being crowded out instead by out-of-towners paying fees to use these.

Sparring with head of the Bossier City Department of Parks and Recreation Clay Bohanan, who with past mayoral and current Council graybeard support has pursued a model that puts revenue generation ahead of citizen ability to use certain facilities, Smith not only fought back against Bohanan’s arrogance, who was joined by graybeard Democrat Councilor Bubba Williams implying that their exclusionary pay-to-play model was unimpeachably correct, but he also made the heretical suggestion that in following that model it would make more sense just to sell off the facilities to private operators.

In the larger scheme of things, Smith’s argument was that instead of taxpayer dollars going to paying of the principal and interest on debt on things of little value to the citizenry, it could be reserved to fund employee raises, particularly for public safety personnel. When Williams subsequently challenged (actually calling untrue) a Smith statement that Bossier City’s salaries ranked at the bottom of the region by pointing to a study done a couple of years back comparing Alexandria’s public safety salaries to others in the state that put Bossier City police in the middle of the pack, Smith trumped him with his own very recent data looking at regional agencies, almost all in Texas, which had Bossier City salaries at or near the bottom.

Such argumentation would have been unheard of coming from the Council three years ago. But Smith and Hammons’ elections in 2021 brought a breath of fresh air into Council debates that until then had been almost always get-along-go-along with no dissension on big spending plans with total disregard of airing out negative implications of that spending.

Hopefully, those kinds of debates will commence and flourish now that at least one reform-minded outsider, Sutton, will join the Jury. Glorioso was part of the cabal united with the Council graybeards when she served as Bossier City chief administrative officer until her boss lost reelection, so it seems unlikely that she would act differently in opening up the Jury. Perhaps Darby’s opponent Democrat Mary Giles would ally with Sutton, while Julius Darby seems unlikely to.

But as the events surrounding Bossier City government over the past couple of years have shown, you don’t have to have a majority to change the atmosphere. Perhaps a couple of years from now the sunshine even one dissenter can bring will have started to show results in curbing the Jury’s penchant for lawless, sanctimonious behavior while deflating its members’ attitude of insufferably unaccountable behavior.