A state lawmaker is asking the attorney general to investigate the Ethics Board for violations of state transparency laws. He claims the ethics board is using an illegal and secret process to hire a new state ethics administrator, the board’s most important employee.
“It appears the board is choosing to engage in political games rather than hold itself to a higher standard,” wrote Rep. Beau Beaullieu, R-New Iberia, in a letter sent Tuesday to Ethics Committee Chairwoman La Koshia Roberts and copied to the attorney. General Liz Murrill.
Beaullieu hopes the investigation can stop the current hiring process for administrators. Republican legislative leaders had asked the ethics board last month to wait to select a new administrator until January, when most of the board will be filled with new hires from Gov. Jeff Landry and the Legislature.
However, the current ethics board members, mostly chosen by former Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, are moving quickly through the hiring process. It plans to have a new one the administrator in place at the end of DecemberRoberts told a reporter at the board’s Oct. 25 meeting.
The board is scheduled to interview four potential candidates privately for the job Thursday, including: David Bordelon, Matthew McConnell, Charles Reeves and Scott Whitford. At least two of the candidates, Bordelon and Reeves, already work for the ethics board as staff attorneys.
This hiring dispute is just the latest in a series of escalating disagreements between the current ethics board, Gov. Jeff Landry and Landry’s Republican allies in the Legislature.
The ethics committee has reprimanded and fined Landry several times over the years for violating campaign finance requirements and ethics laws. Shortly after becoming governor in January, he pushed through a law to take more control of the board’s operations by 2025.
The legislators have also criticized the ethics board for being “abusive” and aggressive in their investigations of potential wrongdoing. The board has been crack down on the activities of political action committees run by legislatorswhich seems to annoy them.
Beaullieu, a Landry ally, chairs the Louisiana House and Governmental Affairs Committee that oversees the ethics board. In his letter to Roberts, he chastised the ethics board members for moving too quickly to select a new administrator and for too much of their discussion of the new hire in private meetings on Sept. 5 and Oct. 25.
“My question during the meeting about ‘who is watching the monitors’ seems most appropriate in this chain of events,” he wrote in his letter.
Beaullieu wants the Minister of Justice to investigate whether the board violated the state’s laws on open meetings, which are supposed to guarantee transparency in the government. Government officials are required to conduct certain types of business in public meetings, but may also conduct certain conversations about personnel matters in private.
Roberts and the current ethics administrator, Kathleen Allen, could not immediately be reached for comment Wednesday.
Beaullieu also seems particularly upset that the application period for the ethics administrator position was open for just 10 days, from Oct. 15 to Oct. 25, and was not widely disseminated.
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“Such a short time frame to advertise an important role limits the opportunity for a diverse applicant pool,” he wrote. “It appears that the board met the minimum requirements on the timeline to advertise the position, but without much effort.”
In this case, Beaullieu argues that too much of the ethics board’s conversation about the retirement of Allen, the current ethics administrator, and the hiring of Allen’s replacement has taken place behind closed doors.
Specifically, Beaullieu claims the board did not take the public vote needed to go into private session to discuss the search at the board’s Sept. 5 meeting. He also said that details of what was to be discussed at that meeting were not properly announced in advance or recorded. Many of the decisions made in the private session — including when to announce the ethics administrator — should also have been discussed publicly, he said.
Beaullieu also said the board acted inappropriately at its Oct. 25 meeting by not specifying whether it would discuss a written request from Louisiana Senate President Cameron Henry, R-Metairie, to delay the hiring of a new administrator until January. If Henry’s request was discussed in the board’s private session, the board violated the state’s open meetings law because the matter should have been discussed in a public meeting, Beaullieu argues.
In an interview Wednesday, Beaullieu said he had not discussed his request for an investigation with Henry or the attorney general before sending the letter.
This is an evolving story. Come back for more information.
