It’s time for one of Bossier Parish’s plenary-run governments – in this case, the Police Jury – to pick a new administrative leader, and yet again it’s going to be another inside job.

Both the Jury and the Bossier Parish School Board have a long history of disdaining outsiders for their top jobs of, respectively, parish administrator and superintendent. Last year around this time it was the Board’s turn to pick the district’s head and, after actually having a search outside the parish for the job the previous time it was open in 2019 (but which then predictably ended up picking the then-interim superintendent Mitch Downey), dispensed with any search and elevated another long-time employee — the health clinic-mastermind and flogger of parents who want school choice as Jim Crow acolytes Jason Rowland was into the position.

Now it’s the Jury’s turn with current administrator Butch Ford riding off into the sunset. In the past, this often meant the parish engineer – as Ford had been – would take the helm, which in this case would have been Eric Hudson (meaning he might have had to take a pay cut, as he makes about $5,000 more than does Ford).

But last April, with little fanfare – not even a news release covering it, but just a short mention of it at the last Jury meeting that month – former Caddo Parish Assistant Director of Public Works Ken Ward was hired into a new assistant parish administrator’s job. Ward is no stranger to the parish, having been a long-time resident (and thereby avoiding the situation with Ford who was hired illegally as he didn’t have a Bossier residence, which lasted ten months until he tried to claim a shack as his residence, which dragged out the controversy several months more) and known to the Jury as it had appointed him multiple times to serve on the Bossier Parish Communications District One (which handles 911 services).

Befitting the Jury’s penchant for trying to make its actions as opaque as possible – disseminating publicly next to no information about agenda items for its meetings, making available almost no details about its budget, refusing to archive accessible recordings of most of its committee meetings, etc. – in a recent public information request for salaries of Jury employees, Ward’s position and salary doesn’t appear. You can’t find a mention of him on the parish website save his attendance at various meetings, recently of the Jury and its committees and in the past communiques from the District. And, of course, just as there has been no public job search for the administrator’s job, neither was there one for Ward’s present position, which appears to have been created out of thin air for him.

None of this is to say that Ward, or Hudson, or any insider that will be anointed parish administrator can’t do a competent, even good, job in the position. However, Bossier Parish citizens deserve a better process to fill the post.

There’s zero reason that the Jury could not have engaged in a regional, if not national, search to hire an administrator. It’s certain that had that been conducted, at least half a dozen candidates who are or have been parish administrators in smaller parishes/counties or city chief administrative officers or something of that nature, or assistants of that kind who have served in larger jurisdictions than Bossier, all with years, even decades, of experience in such jobs, would have applied for the post. What is the compelling reason to bank on an individual with none of that experience, arrived at behind closed doors?

There isn’t one, except that jurors are a bunch of good old boys and girls burrowed in like ticks as part the Bossier political establishment who don’t want anybody who could cause dissension within their club. That attitude may not guarantee inferior governance going forward, but it sure increases the chances of it.