By Laura Hunt Miller
Have you ever seen a headline about a police jury meeting and wondered, what on earth do those folks actually do anyway? Or read about tension between city council and parish leadership and thought, how are these not the same people?
Even with a few decades of Louisiana living under my belt, I have blanks in my “how this actually works” category when it comes to local governance. So here is a series on the subject, just in case anyone else out there is wondering where the water meets the levee.
Let’s start local then work our way out.
Our state has a number of elected and appointed officials influencing how things are run day to day. We can divide them into four groups:
Group 1: The Local Level
- Mayor
- 3 or more City Council members or Aldermen
- City Police Chief (elected in some municipalities, appointed in others)
- City Court Judges & Marshals (where applicable)
Group 2: The Parish Level
- 5 or more Police Jury members, or Parish President and Council
- Tax Assessor
- Coroner
- Sheriff
- Clerk of Court
- Judge
- District Attorney
- 5+ School Board members
Group 3: The State Level
- Governor
- State Legislature (39 Senators, 105 House Representatives)
- Attorney General, Treasurer, Commissioner of Agriculture
- 5 Public Service Commission members
- 11 Board of Elementary and Secondary Education members (BESE)
Group 4: The Lagniappe Level
- Judges
- Justices of the Peace
- Constables
- Special districts like levee boards, hospital districts, port authorities, and more
That is roughly 50-plus officials connected to any given parish at all times. This scale can feel overwhelming, which may in part explain why so many residents disengage from local governance. It’s not out of apathy, but disorientation.
So let’s see what we can do to change that. Throughout this series we’ll look at what each of these roles actually does, where their authority comes from, how they interact, and how we as average citizens fit into it all.
Local Foundations
To understand local politics, it helps to understand how our local governments were formed. Louisiana, like most states, grants local governing powers through a process called incorporation: a community petitions for legal recognition, and the state grants it specific powers it may use to govern its own affairs, like levying taxes, maintaining a police force and providing public services.
An incorporated community is called a municipality, an umbrella term covering villages, towns, and cities, formal classifications based on population. Villages have 1,000 or fewer residents; towns have between 1,001 and 4,999; cities have 5,000 or more. Ruston, with about 22,000 residents, is classified as a city. That’s right Ruston residents, we’re technically one of the big dogs.
Before 1898, each Louisiana municipality was created by individual pieces of legislation at the state level with a custom charter defining each local government’s structure, boundaries, and authority. That created a grab bag of local government types across the state, resulting in state senators and representatives spending a lot of time amending individual charters each time a municipality’s needs changed.
The Lawrason Act, a state law proposed by West Feliciana Parish state senator Samuel McCutcheon Lawrason and adopted in 1898, changed that. The Act created a template that became the default organizational scheme for any new local government formed from that point on. Older municipalities with original charters could convert to the Act’s framework if they chose to, and many like Ruston did.
The Act was revised to make it more adaptable in the mid 1980s by allowing municipalities to “exercise any power and perform any function necessary, requisite, or proper for the management of its affairs not denied by law,” but its structural framework has remained largely unchanged for the past 125 years.
It sets the default local government structure of a mayor, board of aldermen (also known as a council), and requires officers like an independently elected chief of police. Like our federal government, the framework divides power by design with a mayor serving as the executive officer and a council serving as the legislative body.
Some cities found their unique conditions difficult to govern effectively under the leadership structure of the Act, so in 1974 the state Constitution was amended to allow cities to adopt home rule charters. These custom governance structures, written and approved of by local voters, are community-designed alternatives to the Lawrason default. Home rule cities are also protected from state-level legislative changes because of their internal structure, Lawrason cities are not. If the state legislature amended the Act tomorrow, all Lawrason-based governments would have to comply.
Home rule charters have also been used to consolidate city and parish leadership when the two concerns tend to heavily overlap. Four Louisiana parishes currently operate under this consolidated structure: Orleans, East Baton Rouge, Lafayette, and Terrebonne.
Under these agreements other existing incorporated municipalities within the parish may retain their separate local governments, as smaller municipalities have done in Lafayette Parish’s consolidated structure.
Shreveport, Bossier, Alexandria, West Monroe and Monroe all have home charters. Ruston, and the other smaller municipalities around us, remain Lawrason-based governments. In the next installment we’ll look at the roles laid out for us that make up our local government.
Next up: The Mayor, City Council, and who holds what powers.
