BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — The Louisiana Board of Ethics has a new chairman.
Baton Rouge attorney Frank Simoneaux was elected Monday by the mostly new board that was appointed after mass resignations over the summer.
Also at Monday’s meeting, seven administrative law judges were selected randmomly to form a panel that will decide whether alleged ethics board violations have occurred. The Ethics Board once had that authority but now only investigates and prosecutes the cases. The transfer of authority to administrative law judges was one of the changes in the law that led most members of the old board to quit last summer.
Though the judges were selected, there’s no date in sight for the scheduling of hearings into the pending cases.
“I don’t have an idea of how many cases are coming, or what’s coming or exactly when,” said Vivian Guillory, general counsel of the state’s Division of Administrative Law, which employs the judges.
The board’s new vice chairman Scott Frazier said rules need to be adopted for procedures for handling cases that range from conflict of interest and nepotism to campaign finance and personal financial disclosure laws.
The governor and the Legislature had to fill 10 spots on the 11-member board in recent months. Most members resigned in late June because power was transferred to the administrative law judges — state employees who are hired by an appointee of the governor.
Some new board members already indicated that they are uncomfortable with some provisions of the new law, including one that requires the board to sign off on the findings of the administrative panels.
State law required the panels of law judges to be selected randomly. Seven people were chosen out of a pool of 10 state administrative law judges who already work resolving disputes between individuals and a number of state agencies.
One panel will be composed of William Cooper, David Griffith, and John Kopynec. The other will be William Cleveland, Nancy Goodwin and Charles Perrault.
The alternate will be Robert Aguiluz, who is the deputy general counsel of the Office of Administrative Law.
As it met, the board started erasing a backlog of requests for advisory opinions that have mounted since June, including those from board and commissions that wanted to know whether their members would have to abide by new personal financial disclosure laws.
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