The immediate past chairman of the Louisiana Board of Ethics said Gov. Jef Landry and state lawmakers are tearing down government ethics enforcement with the massive overhaul of ethics and campaign finance laws they enacted last month.
“With these new changes, we are not slowly – we are expeditiously – veering into an arena into which we are being made nonessential,” said La Koshia Roberts, an attorney from Lake Charles who has served on the board since 2018 and is its longest-serving member.
“They are hamstringing us,” she said in an interview following the board’s meeting Tuesday. “They are essentially dismantling the Board of Ethics starting with this legislation.”
At the urging of Landry, state lawmakers passed sweeping changes to ethics and campaign finance laws last month that loosen dozens of existing restrictions on public servants and create new ways for people accused of government misconduct to push back on charges they face for allegedly breaking the law.
The ethics board enforces statutes that are meant to protect the public against misconduct, inappropriate influence and favoritism in government. It oversees the conduct of elected officials, public employees, public contractors and lobbyists in state and local government. Everyone from the governor and state lawmakers to trash collectors and public school teachers are subject to its scrutiny.
Legislators criticized the ethics board for being too aggressive. They said the board’s investigations and questioning was overly invasive and required law adjustments.
“The catalyst for this bill came from me and came from the testimonies that I received regarding the egregious nature of the ethics investigations,” said Rep. Beau Beaullieu, R-New Iberia, who authored some of the ethics proposal.
“They felt like they had no due process,” Beaullieu said. “Our whole goal is to give due process to the system in which they operate. … We did not change the laws to undo the ethics laws.”
The legislator also said he incorporated adjustments into his bill after working with the ethics board staff and nonprofit groups that promote government transparency.
Yet Roberts, who was appointed by the Louisiana House of Representatives, said the governor and legislators rewrote the ethics laws to benefit themselves. She said some adjustments had been made so that people who were not complying with the law will not be forced to do so.
“They’ve done exactly what I thought they were going to do. They were going to carve out a law that was going to accommodate and satisfy certain people across the street,” who work in the Louisiana Capitol, Roberts said.
In an interview after the meeting, Roberts said she was specifically referring to the governor and Louisiana Legislature when she mentioned “people across the street.”
She contends the law changes created a new hierarchy for ethics enforcement, in which the governor and legislators were entitled to flexibility that wasn’t afforded to public employees with less power.
“I know we don’t write the law, but it’s our job to apply the law which we’ve done for years now, but apparently, until just recently, certain people felt like they didn’t have to follow it and we should not apply it,” she said during the meeting.
To what extent the governor or legislators have been investigated and reprimanded by the board is difficult to discern.
The board’s deliberations only become public when it files charges or issues a fine. But it’s common for the board to drop an investigation, which keeps the matter confidential. The board can also take other types of actions to reprimand someone that are secret, such as issuing a letter with a warning.
Board members and staff can face criminal charges for sharing information about ethics investigations considered privileged.
Landry has had several run-ins with the board that have become public however. The board has repeatedly fined him for filing his campaign finance reports late, according to documents obtained through a public records request, and asked him to stop using his political funds to pay off his personal car loan.
In the most high-profile incident, the board charged the governor two years ago, when he was still state attorney general, with violating a government transparency law. Landry did not disclose to the ethics board that he had taken a flight to and from an attorneys general conference in Hawaii on a political donor’s private plane.
His case has not been closed yet because the board and Landry are still negotiating over what the consequences should be for the violation.
Landry’s attorneys have said the new ethics laws will not impact his case. The portion of the law which he failed to follow remained untouched through the recent changes.
Roberts also accused legislators of attempting to intimidate the board last fall when a few attended a board executive session, which is not open to the public, in person. She said one of the lawmakers who came was Beaullieu, who is chairman of a legislative committee that handles ethics laws.
At the time, the board and legislators were in a dispute over when the board should hire a new state ethics administrator, who serves the board’s attorney and who oversees ethics investigations.
“It was only during that time that members of the legislature found it necessary to come in and sit in on our executive session,” she said. “And in my opinion, it was a way to try to bully this board to not conduct our business the way it should be conducted.”
Beaullieu said he attended the meeting because of the concerns he had heard about their treatment of people appearing before the board. He also witnessed some problematic behavior in a public board meeting he attended.
“I’m embarrassed for the people who were being interrogated in the general [public] session,” Beaullieu said in an interview.
The ethics board ended up hiring David Bordelon as the state ethics administrator on an interim basis in December, but only after legislators unsuccessfully sued to stop the selection process.
The lawmakers were attempting to stall the hiring of a new administrator until at least January, when the makeup of the board changed with new appointees from Landry and the state lawmakers.