Board has questions about ethics law

• By MARSHA SHULER
• Advocate Capitol News Bureau
• Published: May 27, 2009 - Page: 6A

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Reprints
• Twitter
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

Some Louisiana Board of Ethics members are angling to get back the power to decide the guilt or innocence of accused ethics law violators.

But the chairman of the House panel overseeing state ethics laws put a wet blanket on that idea Tuesday.

“I know there has been conversation that we reverse course. I don’t suspect there will be any U-turn,” said state Rep. Rick Gallot, the Ruston Democrat who as chair of the House and Governmental Affairs Committee hears legislation that concerns ethics issues.

“We will have to play that out and see where it goes,” Gallot told the Ethics Board.

Gallot met with the Ethics Board Tuesday as it opened its two-day May meeting. He encouraged board members to provide input on legislation under consideration and offer ideas of their own.

Board members had questions for Gallot. Many of the queries concerned a 2008 law that changed the operations of the Ethics Board.

The law, pushed by Gov. Bobby Jindal and key legislators, took away the board’s judicial authority to decide whether people have violated state conflict of interest, nepotism and other laws it polices.

The Ethics Board now investigates and decides whether charges should be filed. Under the new law, ethics attorneys, generally, become prosecutors who try cases before a panel of administrative law judges hired by a governor’s appointee.

Proponents of the law said the board should levy charges, then be the judge.

Board chairman Frank Simoneaux, of Baton Rouge, said the transfer of power from the board to the law judges was a “very substantive change.” Some board members were appointed before their powers had changed, he said.

Simoneaux said he thought the law could be changed “to make the board neutral and resolve that so we could retain the adjudicatory power.”

Simoneaux said he researched the 1973 Constitutional Convention records and found 10 places where delegates talked about more than one board. He said the separate boards were for different constituencies, such as for elected officials and public employees.

“But no place among the 10 references did anyone ever suggest two boards in one unitary ethics system,” Simoneaux said. “You have two boards, which is going to create a conflict.”