Part 2 – A secret meeting?
What was Parish Government doing while many people were boiling snow to have enough water to flush their toilets? Spoiler alert – it appears that the Council was meeting in secret to discuss the proposed sales and use tax!
C’mon, you can’t be serious? Unfortunately, we are all too serious. Councilman Everhardt graciously provided us with copies of these documents to bring this information to the public. This is what real transparency looks like!
Take a look for yourself!
What this a public meeting? Perhaps in the strictest sense of a “public meeting” only because the meeting was open to the public. But in the normal sense of a public meeting, and perhaps the most important sense to most people, it was not a public meeting because the notice of the meeting was not posted in its usual and customary fashion. How then was the public supposed to know about the meeting?
Typically, all public meetings are posted on the Parish government website under the section “Agenda Center – Council agenda and minutes” accessible via the website https://www.sbpg.net/AgendaCenter/Council-2.
Here is a screenshot of that web page on February 13, 2025.
Do you see the agenda for any meeting for Sunday, January 26, 2025? Of course not! So if the agenda was not posted on the website, how then was the public supposed to know about the meeting? And if they didn’t know about the meeting, how was the public supposed to participate in the democratic process?
Unfortunately, it appears that this was a concerted effort to conceal this meeting from the public so that they could not participate and potentially derail the Council’s plan to place this tax measure on the ballot.
Even more, there is a serious concern as to whether this meeting violated the plain intent and spirit of the Open Meetings Law.
Disclaimer: We are not attorneys and the following is not intended and should not be construed as a legal opinion. With that said, we can read the English language and piece together simple concepts as can you. So, let’s take a look at the Open Meetings Law.
Open Meetings Law
§19. Notice of meetings
…
(2) Written public notice given by all public bodies, except the legislature and its committees and subcommittees, shall include but need not be limited to:
(a) Posting a copy of the notice at the principal office of the public body holding the meeting, or if no such office exists, at the building in which the meeting is to be held; or by publication of the notice in an official journal of the public body no less than twenty-four hours, exclusive of Saturdays, Sundays, and legal holidays, before the scheduled time of the meeting. If the public body has a website, additionally by providing notice via the Internet on the website of the public body for no less than twenty-four hours, exclusive of Saturdays, Sundays, and legal holidays, immediately preceding the meeting. The failure to timely post notice via the Internet pursuant to this Subparagraph or the inability of the public to access the public body’s website due to any type of technological failure shall not be a violation of the provisions of this Chapter.
(b) Giving notice to any member of the public or the news media who requests notice of such meetings by providing the notice to the requestor at the same time and in the same manner as it is given to members of the public body.
…
I think we can all agree: the intent and spirit of the Open Meetings Law clearly required a notice of this meeting to be posted on the Agenda Center. A cursory review of the Parish’s agenda center fails to reveal the requisite notice of the January 26, 2025 meeting ever being posted.
Curiously, the Open Meetings Law goes on to exempt “the failure to timely post notice via the Internet” as a legal violation of the Open Meetings Law. So, it appears that no one can be held accountable.
But there is a nuance to the Parish’s failure to publish notice of the January 26, 2025 meeting. It’s not just that there was a “failure to timely post notice via the Internet.” There was a failure to post the notice on the Agenda Center at all. What does that mean? Certainly, that is an issue above our pay grade to answer that question, so we won’t even try.
Can’t we at least go back and watch the Council meeting on SBPG TV? No! It appears that the January 26, 2025 Council meeting was not recorded, or at least does not appear on the SBPG TV website.
It is hard to believe that this is just a string of bad coincidences: it appears that there was a conscious decision to keep secret from the public both before and after.
So the question remains: why was everything so secret about this proposed sales and use tax?
