Louisiana lawmakers overwhelmingly approved a set of dramatic changes to state ethics laws Wednesday that will make it much more difficult to charge elected officials and public employees with misconduct.
House Bill 674 alters the process the state ethics board used to bring charges against Gov. Jeff Landry two years ago that are still pending.
Landry’s charges won’t be affected by the legislation, but he pushed for the bill and is expected to let it pass into law. The governor’s personal attorney, Stephen Gelé, helped craft the language contained in it.
Beyond making it harder to bring ethics charges, the legislation also loosens limits on elected officials’ and state employees’ state travel, weakens restrictions on government contracts with public servants and their families, and reduces requirements for elected officials and political candidates’ disclosure of financial interests.
The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Beau Beaullieu, R-New Iberia, said it is a reaction to the ethics board’s overzealous enforcement that has frustrated officials in both parties. The anger toward the board was reflected in lawmakers’ overwhelming support of the bill.
The Louisiana Senate and House voted 34-2 and 92-1, respectively, for the ethics overhaul this week.
The votes came after ethics board members expressed concerns about the bill during their May meeting. Its top staff member, Ethics Administrator David Bordelon, described it as “skewing” the ethics investigation process in favor of the person accused of wrongdoing.
The state’s preeminent government watchdog group, the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana (PAR), also vociferously opposed the legislation.
“This is designed to make sure we don’t have ethics investigations,” PAR President Steven Procopio told lawmakers at a hearing last week.
The changes to the ethics board’s enforcement mechanisms affects a wide range of public servants, lobbyists and government contractors. The incoming laws will apply to every elected officer and public employee in state and local government – from a local librarian to the governor.
The bill becomes law in about three weeks or whenever the governor signs it, whichever comes first.
New barriers to enforcement
Once enacted, the legislation will create a loophole in the law that will allow any public official, government contractor or lobbyist to avoid ethics charges if they request an advisory opinion on their potential misconduct from the ethics board.
The bill prohibits the ethics board from bringing charges based on information that a person includes in their advisory opinion request, which could allow someone to sidestep charges by submitting such a document. If the board suspects there was ethical misconduct based on the advisory opinion request, it won’t be able to act on it anymore.
The board will also have to reach a higher standard to refer a matter for investigation. It will have to find “probable cause,” a legal standard that requires the board to have established it is likely a violation has occurred without the investigation being conducted, said Kathleen Allen, the state’s former ethics administrator who retired in December after 16 years.
“Also, it could open the Board up to litigation challenging its decision to refer a matter to investigation,” wrote Allen in a text Wednesday.
The ethics board will have far less time to investigate and decide whether to bring charges in cases. Under current law, the board has a year to act once an investigation is launched. The legislation would add several more steps to that process by allowing the subject of the complaint to object and respond to accusations more often during the board’s deliberations.
“They are lopping off a couple of months, minimum,” ethics board member Alfred “Butch” Speer, an appointee of former Gov. John Bel Edwards, said at a May meeting.
“If [the persons being investigated] drag their feet long enough, then we run out of time,” he added.
Governor’s influence
Once the bill becomes law, the governor will also have significantly more influence over whether charges are ever brought against someone.
The ethics board will now need to vote with a two-thirds majority multiple times in order for an investigation and charges against a person to go forward.
Following changes Landry pushed last year, the governor now controls nine of the 15 votes on the board. This means investigations and charges can’t proceed unless the majority of the governor’s appointees vote multiple times in favor of them.
Plane travel from political donors
Another portion of Beaullieu’s legislation targets the issue that got Landry in trouble with the ethics board – private plane travel. It eases restrictions on legislators’ travel for state business on private planes that political donors or outside organizations provide.
Legislators were previously only allowed to accept flights on private planes for public speeches if they were traveling within the United States or Canada. Once the new law takes effect, they will be able to accept private plane travel for government business anywhere in North America or the U.S. territories, including locations in the Caribbean, as long as they are making a public speech, participating in a panel discussion or making a media appearance.
More restrictions possible
Lawmakers are also close to passing a second piece of legislation that would place even more limitations on ethics complaints.
House Bill 160 by Rep, Kellee Hennessy Dickerson, R-Denham Springs, would require the identities of people who provide tips to the ethics board to be revealed to the person accused of misconduct, Currently, the board keeps this information confidential.
People who don’t pay to produce a “sworn” complaint – one made under legal oath attesting to the truthfulness of the allegations – would have to deliver their “non-sworn” complaint to the ethics board staff in person at their office in downtown Baton Rouge, even if they live hundreds of miles away.
Dickerson also wants to limit materials the ethics board can use to launch an investigation and bring charges solely to complaints and reports state agencies or officials produce. Currently, the board also regularly pursues investigations based on media reports.
Dickerson said she is bringing the legislation based on her personal experience with the ethics board, which fined her $1,500 in 2023.
Public employees are prohibited from being paid for outside work by their agency. The ethics board concluded Dickerson, when she was a member of the Livingston Parish School Board, helped a teacher get paid tens of thousands of extra dollars from the high school where he was works for removing trees and doing some light construction work at the school.
Dickerson said she was only reported to the ethics board because she was in a contentious election for her state representative seat that year.
“It’s a very chilling process,” she said at a legislative hearing Wednesday of the ethics board’s deliberations. “It’s a very derogatory process once the complaint has been made.”
Dickerson’s bill has already passed the House and only needs approval by the Senate and Landry to become law. The legislative session ends June 12.