An effort to eliminate confidentiality for people who provide tips to the Louisiana Board of Ethics over government misconduct has failed.
Louisiana Senate President Cameron Henry, R-Metairie, said House Bill 160 won’t come up for consideration after it missed a crucial deadline for an initial vote in the Senate Monday.
“There weren’t the votes” to pass the proposal, Rep. Kellee Hennessy Dickerson, R-Denham Springs, who sponsored the legislation, said in an interview Monday night.
The bill would have required the ethics board to reveal the name of a person who provides a tip about alleged wrongdoing to whoever the person accuses of misconduct. Currently, the ethics board never shares a tipster’s identity with the target of an investigation.
The proposal would also have required ethics board tips to be either signed by a notary or delivered in person to the ethics board staff at their office in downtown Baton Rouge.
The board enforces the state’s ethics and campaign finance laws for elected officials, public employees, lobbyists and government contractors. On Friday, board members sent a letter to senators encouraging them to vote against the legislation, saying it would have a chilling effect on the public’s willingness to provide the board information.
Dickerson described the ethics board’s letter as “harassing” and said it helped kill the bill.
“I guess people fear the retaliation of the ethics board being against it,” she said.
Dickerson drafted the proposal in response to her own experience with the ethics board. In 2023, the board fined her $1,500 when she was a member of the Livingston Parish School Board and running for state representative. The ethics board concluded she had broken state ethics laws by inappropriately helping a public school teacher get a construction contract at the high school where the teacher was employed.
Before Dickerson’s bill stalled, lawmakers had already approved another piece of legislation that creates new barriers for bringing charges over an ethics violation.
A large share of the board will need to vote in favor of launching an ethics investigation, and the deadline for bringing charges will be more difficult to meet, under House Bill 674 by Rep. Beau Beaullieu, R-New Iberia.
