Bossier Parish Police Jury appoints is own members to its parish library board; violation of dual office holding law?

The Bossier Parish Police Jury has descended into the abyss of totalitarian authority and it has done so with no prior notification, with no public comment, and most likely without even understanding he perilous magnitude of its actions.

By following the dangerous but inexplicably popular trend of making scapegoats of public libraries, the police jury is setting itself up as the moral police in much the same manner as the fascists did in Germany nearly a century ago.

Except it has never been about library content or book placement.

It’s all about power and control. Nothing else.

All this nonsense about protecting the minds of children is just that: nonsense. Misdirection. Lies. And it’s playing right into the hands of the fascists who, while screaming “socialism” and “communism,” are slowly and most assuredly chipping away at the very freedoms upon which this country was founded.

The growing battles over local libraries which began in Florida and quickly spread to other states have been popping up all over the state map: Lafayette Parish, Livingston Parish, and now Bossier Parish.

And in Bossier Parish, it seems, they don’t mind breaking a few state laws to achieve their goal.

Those who advocate clamping down on what libraries can offer are people with ulterior motives and their actions are not directed at the overall benefit of the populace. Instead, it is to perpetuate one thing and one thing only: control.

The first thing any totalitarian movement does do when setting out to grab power and establish control is to destroy access to public information.

Oh, to be sure, they think they’re patriots carrying out God’s wishes. But in their zeal, they are taking a page right out of the fascist playbook. And to paraphrase George Burns in the movie Oh God!, they stopped doing God’s wishes a long time ago.

Were it up to these neo culture police and their war on drag queen shows, Flip Wilson’s hilarious Geraldine character (“If you can fly 600 miles per hour in the dark and find Los Angeles, you can find my luggage”) would never make on TV today. Robin Williams would never have been allowed to play Mrs. Doubtfire.

But back to Bossier Parish and the shenanigans of the parish police jury, which, according to its legal counsel, does not have to adhere to established Louisiana ethics laws. Even the parish manager may also be in violation of a state residency statute.

Take the police jury’s Sept. 21 meeting, for example. The parish library was not on the agenda but that did not stop member Doug Rimmer, vice president of the library board of control, from reporting that two members of the library board would be removed so that they could be replaced by two members of…the police jury.

There was a provision for public comment, all right, but since that item wasn’t on the agenda, there was no way for the “public” to know of the impending action (much like when the Livingston Parish Police Jury allowed audience members to sign up to comment on its proposal to send a letter to the parish librarian and then passed the resolution without allowing comment).

As it stands right now, four of the five Bossier Parish Library Board members – Rimmer, Charles Gray, Glenn Benton, and Bob Brotherton – are also members of the police jury and the fifth member is expected to be replaced by a police jury member.

So, how does Louisiana’s dual office-holding law apply in such a case. According to R.S. 42:61-66, a person holding a local elective office (police jury) MAY HOLD A PART-TIME APPOINTIVE POSITION. But the law does not specifically address that elected official’s ability to appoint himself or to hold a part-time appointive position on a committee or commission governed directly by the elective body on which he serves.

That would be prohibited according to several opinions by the Louisiana attorney general’s office, though Bossier parish attorney Patrick Jackson dismissed those as basically just another attorney’s opinion.

The police jury decided to appoint themselves after declaring that it was difficult to find five people out of the parish’s 130,000 citizens willing to serve on the board despite one individual’s assertion that no fewer than five people actually submitted their personal resumes and letters of interest to the police jury – which the police jury promptly ignored.

Nor should it be ignored that the police jury members who were being considered for appointment to the library board participated in the discussion and voting and did not abstain as they should have, thus creating an obvious conflict of interest and ethics violation.

Nor should it go with mentioning that the police jury on Facebook solicited names for membership on several other boards – but not the library board.

When the parish library director resigned under duress from the police jury, parish manager Butch Ford was appointed interim director despite having zero experience in the area of library management (he’s an engineer) and does not even possess a library card and despite the library’s already having someone in place who was qualified and who could’ve assumed the duties.

Ford, by the way, resides in Caddo Parish in direct violation of R.S. 33:1236.1 which says that a parish manager and his or her assistant shall reside in and be a registered voter in the parish for which he/she is employed.

Finally, the police jury also:

• Decided to suspend the Bylaws for the Library Board of Control to write new ones, effective immediately
• Decided to rewrite all library policies (this includes the collection policy that protects the library from censorship attempts)
• Decided to potentially shorten library hours of operation
• Cut the library operating budget by $1 million

The problem with all those is that they were done in executive sessions held behind closed doors, a violation of Louisiana open meetings laws.