Some of these laws actually exist to protect you

The reason we, who do not wish to run our democratic institutions "like a bidness," insist our elected people follow all these boring open meetings and public records laws is not only because we enjoy annoying them.  Don't get me wrong. We also enjoy annoying them. Maybe that would be different if they didn't lie all the time.

At the meeting, Councilman Jason Williams questioned how the decisions could have been made without a formal, public meeting of the Sewerage and Water Board. He said it appeared that the decision was made over the previous weekend, outside of public view.

“This should have happened in a public meeting, as I understand it,” Williams said at the committee meeting.

Cantrell’s spokesman Beau Tidwell denied that at the time.

“To be absolutely clear: there was no ‘secret meeting’ held to install a new Executive Director at the S&WB,” Tidwell wrote in an August 20 email to The Lens. “As the Mayor said in her press conference today, a decision will be made at a public meeting— called for tomorrow afternoon.”

But emails obtained by The Lens show that Cantrell called two secret meetings.

It's not just that, though. The other reason we'd prefer they at least try to follow the law is because it protects them from themselves. As in, it keeps them from making a bigger mess of the messes they are trying to clean up. 

Three former Sewerage & Water Board deputy directors ousted by Mayor LaToya Cantrell claim they were dismissed without due process, and they want the pensions they haven't received.

In late August, Cantrell demanded that deputies Ronald Doucette, Sharon Judkins and Valerie Rivers resign after the three were given pay raises as the agency struggled to pay its bills.

But the deputies' attorney, Sharonda Williams, said in a letter to the S&WB dated Aug. 27 that the S&WB’s governing board never publicly ratified that move, a step required under state law.

“There is no clear authority by which the mayor of the City of New Orleans may direct the termination or resignation of an employee of the S&WB,” Williams wrote.

Maybe it's pointless, in the age of Trump, to ask that we try to not all act like clumsy little tyrants all the time. But it's still pretty good advice.