The Bossier Parish Police Jury made it over one obstacle in its doubling up as the parish’s Library Board of Control, but by no means is it out of the legal and political woods over that.
The Jury, unlike any other parish governing authority in the state, has inserted itself directly into Board affairs since 2016 by appointing its own to that. It grew increasingly bold in that regard and by 2023 all Board members were jurors. In public, at least one member has justified the complete takeover as necessary to safeguard children from unsupervised access to books with explicit sexual themes and descriptions.
A new statute aided in that task, which requires library systems to install a system that flags such material and gives parents the option of prohibiting their children from accessing that. That started as an initiative from the Attorney General’s office, then headed by Republican now-Gov. Jeff Landry, at present backed by GOP current Atty. Gen. Liz Murrill.
In support of that, Landry put out a document entitled “Protecting Innocence” that made the case for the law, which included a description of several works pitched at children questionable for unsupervised youth consumption – many of which were available in Bossier libraries without age restrictions. The report also stated that R.S. 42:64 “prohibits a member of the governing authority from serving in an office that they have the authority to appoint,” which would mean Bossier jurors couldn’t serve on the Board.
The AG website no longer links to this document or has it on there, perhaps because it reversed itself on this matter. Last week, Murrill’s office promulgated Opinion 24-0110, which actually appeared to combine two separate requests: one by me asking whether the Jury’s substituting its members for the Board was a case of dual officeholding and another by SOBO Live publisher Wes Merriott whether a juror – in this instance Republican Julianna Parks – could serve on the Bossier City Charter Review Commission without violating dual officeholding. Normally, an elected official only may ask for an AG opinion, but the one exception where anybody may ask is in instances of potential dual officeholding.
I made my request just about a year ago and Merriott’s was made not long after, and in both instances the AG found no violation. However, it reviewed only the dual officeholding statute and doesn’t evaluate matters under the Code of Governmental Ethics, which the Board of Ethics does.
So, the Jury is off the hook in at least that respect. Even if complying with the letter of the law, the spirit of the law would indicate citizens should comprise the Board, and perhaps legislation to the effect that jurors can’t serve on a board will come down the pike as early as next year.
But the Jury still is in legal trouble because starting this year it began seating all 12 jurors as Board members, in violation of state law that limits membership to as many as seven parish residents. Online, it lists all 12 as Board members. Of course, apparently it met this way only one time in January while pledging to meet again in February, which according to online records it never did. An inquiry made to the parish’s spokesman Rod White as to whether the Board met in February or anytime since has gone unanswered.
This legal issue aside, the Jury/Board also has courted political controversy over library affairs. Earlier this year supportive signage for renewing on Apr. 27 the parish millage dedicated for library matters at 7.43 mills appeared in seeming violation of both local and state law. The matter passed – only months later for the Jury to ratchet down the rate to a level more than offsetting rate increases for other millages seemingly to distract property owners from realizing, given the scope of library operations and capital outlay needs (mainly the new Central Library), that the tax had been too high to begin with and taxpayers overpaid for years.
And, as a recent investigation by an interest group revealed, three books that should fall under the new law as restricted from being available to children aren’t restricted so in Bossier Parish libraries (the report looked only at those three out of potentially many, and a large number of parish libraries across the state were in the same boat). If the rationale for the Jury takeover of the Board was to prevent this, jurors continue to fail in this regard.
Thus, the Jury may have skated on its Board takeover, but plenty of questions remain about the legality of this, the effectiveness in doing so, and whether part of the rationale in this was as a political ploy to make jurors seem like tax cutters instead of tax hogs taking more out of the hides of parish taxpayers than is justified.