(Wesley Muller/Louisiana Illuminator)
For seven months, the Louisiana Board of Ethics kept private documents about the financial interests of a handful of Gov. Jeff Landry’s staff that are supposed to be public under state law.
Personal financial disclosure forms for five of the governor’s top staff members should have been posted on the ethics board website in May, but the documents weren’t publicly available until last December.
The board’s online database includes similar forms from hundreds of other elected officials, government employees and state board members.
Forms were initially hidden for the governor’s chief of staff Kyle Ruckert, policy director Millard Mulé, general counsel Angelique Freel, deputy chief of staff Andrée Miller and legislative director Lance Maxwell.
Disclosure documents filed by Elise Cazes, chief of staff to First Lady Sharon Landry, also weren’t posted on the ethics board website until last month, but Cazes wasn’t legally required to submit the forms like the other members of Landry’s staff.
Personal financial disclosure paperwork is supposed to be an anti-corruption measure. The documents Landry’s top staff members filled out reveal information about all of their personal income sources, their spouses’ jobs, investment holdings, property ownership and ties to charities.
The transparency is supposed to help the public hold officials accountable and guard against public leaders enriching themselves or their families through their government jobs.
The forms are due every year on May 15 and typically get loaded into the ethics board’s database shortly afterward. The reports for Landry’s staff showed up on the ethics board’s website on or after Dec. 19.
When the forms were eventually posted, the personal addresses of Landry’s staff members – which state law requires to be on the documents – were blacked out.
In May, the ethics board either pulled down or never uploaded the forms from the governor’s top aides – its staff doesn’t remember which happened – after Landry’s general counsel’s office complained that revealing the home addresses poses a security risk.
“State employees are entitled to privacy in their homes, and no one should fear for their safety because of filing their ethics disclosure,” Emily Andrews, special counsel to Landry, wrote in a letter to the ethics board at the time.
Former ethics administrator Kathleen Allen, who left her job in late December, said she had waited to post the financial disclosure documents with the addresses blacked out until after the ethics board discussed whether that was appropriate at its meeting in early November.
The redacted documents also appeared on the ethics board website a few days after a journalist asked the board and governor’s office questions about the missing paperwork.
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Top tier
While Louisiana requires hundreds of elected officials and government appointees to fill out personal financial disclosure forms each year, just a few are required to include their home addresses.
Only 33 state officials must submit a tier 1 personal disclosure form that requires them to disclose their residences. Most officials fill out a tier 2 or lower disclosure form and can list a mailing address different from their home address.
Tier 1 officials include some of the most powerful in Louisiana government, such as the governor and other statewide elected officials, the heads of major state agencies and leaders of the four public higher education systems.
It also applies to a handful of lower-profile positions, including five members of the governor’s staff, the executive secretary of the Public Service Commission and state civil service director.
Andrews, from Landry’s general counsel’s office, told the ethics board that the home addresses of the governor’s office should be redacted because legislators made it clear they want to protect state employees.
She pointed to a state law approved earlier this year that keeps public employees’ personal phone numbers, email addresses and home addresses confidential in personnel records automatically.
“These employees [in Landry’s office] are not elected officials and the legislature has ensured a reasonable expectation of privacy for them,” Andrews wrote.
Yet lawmakers are the only reason anyone on the governor’s staff has to fill out tier 1 financial disclosure forms at all. The Legislature insisted that the governor’s top staff members were subjected to the highest level of financial transparency during a 2008 overhaul of state ethics laws.
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‘Let’s shoot the messenger’
Former Gov. Bobby Jindal pushed hard to dramatically expand transparency into public officials’ financial interests during his first few weeks in office in 2008. Shortly after being elected, he called lawmakers into a special session on ethics that included a complete rewrite of the disclosure laws for public officials.
Prior to Jindal taking office, the governor was the only elected official in Louisiana that had to file something akin to tier 1 financial disclosure form. Jindal advocated for a much broader swath of government officials to have to reveal similar details as part of an overall push to establish what he called a new “gold standard” of ethics.
State lawmakers, annoyed they were being asked to reveal more of their own personal information, deliberately added the governor’s staff to the list of people who had to file tier 1 disclosure forms.
“I think the governor’s staff was pushing really hard on this ethics package,” said Barry Erwin, president and CEO of the good government Council for A Better Louisiana, who lobbied for the wider disclosure at the time. “I think the thought was, ‘If you are pushing so hard for us to do these things, maybe the governor’s staff should have to do these things as well.’”
Jimmy Faircloth, Jindal’s general counsel at the time, agreed that legislators likely included he and other members of the governor’s staff in the disclosure laws as retaliation for parts of the ethics package.
“All of our positions were included [by legislators], and we didn’t push back,” Faircloth said in an interview last month. “You don’t want to say we’re not willing to do what we are requiring others to do.”
“I did feel a bit targeted, like a ‘let’s shoot the messenger’ thing when I was added,” Faircloth said.
A 2008 recording of legislative debate on the bill backs up Faircloth’s assumption. The Louisiana House broke into loud cheers and applause when Kirk Talbot of River Ridge, a current state senator who was a member of the House at the time, changed Jindal’s financial disclosure bill to include two members of the governor’s personal staff among the people subjected to tier 1 forms.
During debate over the bill, legislators also repeatedly argued that the governor’s staff has more power over state government than individual legislators do and should be subjected to more stringent public disclosure requirements.
“In the governor’s office, I assure you that you can peddle a lot more influence than I can,” former legislator Noble Ellington of Winnsboro said to Faircloth during a committee hearing on the bill.
Ellington later became the director of legislative affairs for former Gov. John Bel Edwards and was required to submit the disclosure form himself.
Attorney general backs calls for privacy
Before the ethics board posted the governor’s staffs’ redacted forms online in December, a few members had expressed doubts they could do so without violating the law.
The board shouldn’t obscure the home address on the forms without the Legislature changing the statute the address to be listed first, they argued during their public meeting in November.
“We’re constrained by the law,” board member and former clerk of the Louisiana House Alfred “Butch” Speer said. ”[The legislators] should go in and surgically protect those rights by creating these exemptions for state employees.”
Attorney General Liz Murrill disagreed with Speer’s assessment. In a legal opinion issued to the ethics board, she argued a right to privacy included in the Louisiana Constitution trumps the 2008 ethics law mandating the residency disclosure.
“The home address of a public servant has minimal if any value to the public in relation to the employee’s public duties,” she wrote.
Murrill personally has filed tier 1 disclosure forms with her home address included as both the current attorney general and the former general counsel for Jindal.
Still, a public transparency advocate said it would be best for state lawmakers to address the disagreement through legislation.
“It is a reasonable discussion to have about whether your home address should be there, but this should be something the Legislature has to weigh in on,” said Steven Procopio, president of the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana, which advocates for accountability in government.