The Louisiana Board of Ethics will be required to broadcast its monthly public meetings starting in January under a new state law.
The law, sponsored by Rep. Steven Jackson, D-Shreveport, will require the meetings to be available live through internet streaming or television. Recordings of the meetings will be stored for at least two years in an online archive reached through the ethics board’s website.
The state ethics board oversees the enforcement of political campaign finance laws and the state ethics code for public employees, elected officials and lobbyists for local and state government. Anyone from a public school teacher to the governor can be subject to the board’s investigations.
The board’s public proceedings mostly deal with fines for not filing political campaign paperwork properly, requests for advisory opinions on ethics laws and charges brought for breaking ethics laws.
A large portion of the board’s work takes place in private, however, and still won’t be broadcast.
Who the board votes to investigate for potential ethics violations, for example, is confidential and not released publicly unless the board files charges against someone. Details of allegations against officials over misconduct are also kept secret unless the board brings charges over those accusations.
Legislators have been frustrated with the ethics board’s decisions over the past year, and part of the motivation for broadcasting its meetings is to allow more scrutiny over its deliberations.
Jackson, the Shreveport lawmaker who authored the law, has had several disputes with the ethics board after racking up over $10,000 in fines for improperly submitting state ethics paperwork.
Over the past decade, Jackson has accused the board of unfairly targeting him. His accusations were in emails the Illuminator acquired through a public records request last year.
“You all are nothing more than a debt collection agency that harasses and bullies elected officials who don’t have the means to defend themselves,” Jackson wrote to the board staff in 2022, when he was a Caddo Parish commissioner and before he joined the legislature.
The broadcast law builds on two other new ethics board statutes Jackson passed last year as a freshman lawmaker.
One reduced how often elected officials have to file their personal financial disclosure forms with the board. Another dramatically cut the fines lobbyists pay if they submit paperwork late.
In addition to the broadcast requirement, legislators passed two other bills this year that will make it much harder for the ethics board to charge public servants with misconduct.
The first bill, sponsored by Rep. Beau Beaullieu, R-New Iberia, has already been signed into law by Gov. Jeff Landry. It raises the threshold for the board to charge a person with ethical wrongdoing and provides more avenues to the accused for blocking those charges.
The second, sponsored by Rep. Mark Wright, R-Covington, is on the governor’s desk awaiting his signature. It increases the threshold for charging a person with political campaign finance violations and provides more mechanisms to the accused for pushing back against those charges.