Shadow Government

Neat trick

The public isn’t entitled to see all the applicants for the next police superintendent, and Mayor-elect Mitch Landrieu’s transition team screening the applicants isn’t a public body or subject to public records law, its leader said today.

Xavier University president Norman Francis took these positions at a press conference to address the resignation of NAACP President Danatus King from that search team serving Landrieu. Francis is the co-chairman of the search team.

Asked what exemption in the public-records law allowed them to keep the names of applicants secret, Francis said simply that they weren’t a public body, arguing they were merely an advisory committee to Landrieu.

Landrieu spokesman Todd Ragusa said he didn’t know what the mayor-elect’s position is regarding whether his advisory committees are public bodies.

The next administration is currently being formed by a collection of these transition team task forces. We guess each of those panels is similarly exempted from public-records law. We're sure that the very important community leaders who people these task forces would love to make the public business they're engaged in more transparent and re-traceable and all that, but being themselves actually not technically public they just can't. Only when Landrieu's advisers are officially endowed with the imprimatur of public titles will they be fully empowered to inform us of the stuff they're doing on our behalf. Inauguration day can't come soon enough! In the meantime we'll just have to take it on faith that as long as all the "right" people are making the decisions, it must still count as "good government" somehow.

We can't wait to see how the official actual public Landrieu administration goes about keeping the citizenry abreast of its actual public business. Unless it finds some way to not technically have to.

Several participants urged Landrieu to revive the so-called "public-private partnership" outgoing Mayor Ray Nagin killed last year. The organization would mimic similar bodies in other major cities by turning over business recruitment and commercial planning to a professional staff jointly overseen and financed by business and government leaders.

In which case we'll just keep our fingers crossed that the "right sort" of business and community leaders keep at it.