Following the Spirit of an Intra-Governmental Revolving Door Law in Louisiana

Here's an interesting conflict situation from Louisiana that involves a good intra-governmental revolving door provision and unforeseen circumstances. According to an article today in the Advocate, the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board made the wise decision to ask the state ethics board, which has jurisdiction over local officials, whether it could hire the city's deputy mayor as its executive director.

What is interesting here is that, over the past three years, the deputy mayor has attended nearly every water board meeting and, sitting in for the mayor, has chaired them. Thus, although not a member himself, he had more power than any member.

The state intra-governmental revolving door provision is as follows:

§42-1121(A)(2)  No former member of a board or commission shall, for a period of two years following the termination of his public service on such board or commission, contract with, be employed in any capacity by, or be appointed to any position by that board or commission.

A strict interpretation of this law would argue that the deputy mayor was never a "member" of the water board. But even a strict interpretation would have to deal with the reference to "his public service on such board." No one can deny that he served on the board, even though not himself a member. But even without the reference to "public service," the spirit of the law is clear:  a board member should not be permitted to use his office and his relationships with fellow board members to get himself a personal benefit, such as a job working for the board. Participation on a government board is a service, not a stepping stone to a job, not a way of getting preferential treatment. The legal status of a person participating on the board is irrelevant.

Therefore, it is good that the ethics board's staff, in a draft opinion (which I haven't read, but which is referenced in the article), has said that the deputy mayor cannot accept the executive director position for two years.

To see the kind of preferential treatment that can be involved in such a transaction, one can look at the "work-around" that the mayor's office tried to put together to get around the revolving door provision. According to an article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the work-around involved the mayor and the water board entering into "a cooperative endeavor agreement" that would keep the deputy mayor as a City Hall employee while he served as the water board's executive director. The difference here would be that the preferential treatment would be coming from the mayor's office rather than the water board, so it would be legal. But this preferential treatment would be worse, because it is essentially fraudulent. In fact, according to state law, it could be considered public contract fraud:

§14-140(A).  Public contract fraud is committed:

(1)  When any public officer or public employee shall use his power or position as such officer or employee to secure any expenditure of public funds to himself...

I hope the state ethics board accepts its staff's draft advisory opinion. The water board might not get the best person for the job, but the ethics board will be sending the right message to boards and commissions, not to mention elected officials and their staff, across the state.

For more about this sort of revolving door law, see a City Ethics blog post from five years ago.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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