By: Julie O’Donoghue – Louisiana Illuminator
Two members of the Louisiana Board of Ethics pushed back on their employees’ decision to black out the home addresses of Gov. Jeff Landry’s staff members on financial disclosure forms that state law makes public.
“The Legislature is the body that required the home address for certain public officials to be filed,” board member Alfred “Butch” Speer said at the board’s meeting last week. “It’s not up to us to expand that law or to constrict that law because we think someone has come up with a specious right of privacy.”
Board member La Koshia Roberts and Speer also questioned whether the board ever had told the ethics staff to alter the forms.
“We authorized it? I thought our position was that it was not to be redacted,” Roberts said.
The ethics board staff held off on posting personal financial disclosure forms for five of Gov. Jeff Landry’s top aides on its website for months, even though they were required to make the documents publicly available.
When the forms were eventually posted online, the home addresses for the five Landry staff members were blacked out. The omission was made at the request of Landry’s general counsel’s office, which said having the residences available on the documents posed a security risk.
The staff members whose forms were hidden and altered include Landry’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.
Speer served as clerk of the Louisiana House of Representatives for decades. He suggested the ethics staff had broken the law when it redacted the home addresses from the forms before making them public.
A 2008 statute requires people who hold these specific positions in the governor’s office sto ubmit financial disclosure forms that include their “full name and residence address.”
“If we put something on our website that has been altered from the public document that is filed with us, then I don’t see how we don’t admit that we are altering public records without legal grounds to do so and that is a criminal act,” Speer told the ethics board staff.
“If the law requires they put their home address, then they put their home address on there, and we put that out on the web,” he said.
The only people who have the power to legally allow for a redaction are state lawmakers, Speer argued. The Legislature would have to vote for a law change and remove the requirement for the home addresses.
“We say this to ourselves all the time, and we say it to people who appear before us all the time: We don’t make the law. Our job is to apply the law as written,” he said.