As Maj. Reisman in The Dirty Dozen told prisoner Wladyslaw, in the stockade for shooting a deserter, “you only made one mistake, huh … You let somebody see you do it.” That’s why the Caddo Parish Commission majority Democrats are in trouble, and why the Bossier Parish Police Jury continues to skate, largely by its own design of secrecy.

This week, Republican Atty. Gen. Liz Murrell lowered the boon on the seven commissioners, charging them with violating open meetings law. The precipitant event was during a visit to the area by socialist provocateur independent Sen. Bernie Sanders presenting him with a laudatory proclamation not voted upon by the entire Commission in an open meeting. Republican Commissioner Chris Kracman caught this and publicized the matter, lodging the complaint (which led to retaliation against him).

It gets worse. Even after Kracman publicized it, the suit contends the majority did something similar twice more. The eventual penalty is more embarrassing than punitive, with the suit asking for what would be minor civil penalties, court costs, and acknowledgment of future compliance.

But they did get caught and will face justice for lawlessness, something that the Police Jury has avoided on a few issues. In part, this has come from public apathy about what the Jury does as its functions typically are somewhat lower profile compared to those of municipalities.

Yet the deliberate opaqueness of the Jury also tries to discourage citizen oversight of its doings. Unlike every other major governing authority in Caddo or Bossier Parishes, it hardly provides online (or in print) any background material for its posted meeting agenda items (just maps for some zoning issues), it gives out none whatsoever for its committee meetings, it archives transmission of its meetings only for 30 days in an online setting, it doesn’t archive online transmission of its committee meetings at all, and it posts budget information only after the fact of passage. If the public wants any of this information outside these boundaries, essentially the bare minimum required by law, they have to file cumbersome and delayed-fulfilled public records requests. Keep in mind that to have online budgets and agendas with supporting documents before and after meetings and archived transmissions would cost almost nothing, yet it eschews trivial efforts and instead chooses to do its best to keep people in the dark.

That’s why the consequences of its recent obstinacy in the face of legal requirements didn’t come to attention outside the courthouse until after it could dodge consequences of that behavior for the most part. One was the illegal appointment of former Parish Administrator Butch Ford to his post when statute clearly disqualified him. Only after ten months had passed when finally the fact of his disqualification became publicly circulated was there any attempt to begin legal maneuvering to make him appear to fulfill that qualification, which then took several more months before the chimera was satisfactorily in place. Meanwhile, the Jury reappointed him and suffered no legal consequences for all of this.

Ford also was at the center of another controversy, this involving the Library Board of Control. It appointed him head of libraries, which also was illegal under statute since he didn’t have the requisite professional qualifications. That lasted several months until a new and qualified director came on board.

And added on to that, explaining his interim appointment in the first place, was the Board was comprised entirely of police jurors, an arrangement then and now unique in Louisiana. At the time, the AG’s office considered that illegal, but eventually ruled that by the letter of the law it was acceptable (even as this arrangement surely violates the spirit of the law that citizens should be appointed to and serve on such boards, but they were swept off of Bossier’s about five years ago).

However, the Jury still is in trouble on this issue. After the last elections, the Jury installed all 12 of its members onto the Board – yet another violation of statute as the law limits membership to seven parish citizens. It then met once in Jan. 2024 and had a meeting scheduled the next month, but hasn’t met since, perhaps to avoid meeting illegally.

But in avoiding any meetings, it also broke the law. Among its other duties, statute requires the Board to adopt annually a library budget. It never met so it didn’t do so in 2024 for 2025 and shows no signs of doing so this year for next year. Even a change in statute in 2024 that explicitly gives parish governing authorities control over library budgets requires board adoption of a budget that may be vetted.

All of this strategic ambiguity designed to hide its activities from the public would be solved best if next year legislation passed specifically prohibiting juror service on boards and requiring that boards meet periodically. Until then, the Jury can keep behaving this way with impunity until somebody with some authority to penalize it calls its members on this.

There’s one other thing the Jury could do which, while not legally required, would reassure citizens that it is wielding power in their best interests. Last year, Ford retired, but was (through representation) back in front of the Jury on Jun. 18 concerning a public hearing for a zoning change for a property on which he and his wife planned to build a convenience store. Joining him in the application was Bruce Easterly and his wife. Easterly is the principal in Beast Engineering, which over the years occasionally wins contracts for parish business. While residents opposed the move, the Metropolitan Planning Commission had approved and assured that when permitting time came, safeguards to alleviate citizen concerns could be put in place, and the change was granted unanimously (it would be great to link to the meeting, but, as noted above, they aren’t archived online any more).

As private citizens unconnected currently to parish government employment, Ford and Easterly should have every right to conduct this business, whether their connections to the parish had anything to do with jurors’ willingness to grant the variance. But at the very least the Jury should enact some kind of ethics reporting requirement where anybody who had worked for or who has won a contract from the parish in, say, the past four years must file a statement attesting to that and such statement should be read into the agendas and minutes whenever the Jury votes on a matter in front of it concerning them. At least then the public would be made better aware of the relationship and weigh whether that made a difference in the outcome.

Of course, asking the Jury on its own to increase its transparency in any way is like dropping a newborn baby into a wastebasket. History shows jurors will try to keep themselves as unconstrained as possible by the public they are supposed to serve so they will make their operation more open only when being stared down by the barrel of legislation demanding that they do so. And that’s why they keep getting away with things that their less-clever compatriots over in Caddo can’t.