"Loose Lips Sink Ships"
This phrase was coined in Word War II by the U.S. Office of War Information. This was an effort to mitigate the risk of leaking information to enemy spies.
And it served a great purpose during the war.
Evidently Shreveport council members John Nickelson and Grayson Boucher realize the significance of this phrase.
Rather than buttoning their lips, they have publicly made many comments about the yet to be released 2018 Legislative Audit of Shreveport’s Finance Department.
Both Nickelson and Boucher voted NO on placing the bond propositions on the ballot for Shreveport citizens.
Their public comments obviously serve to undercut passage of this bond propositions.
Nickelson sounded off on the audit at Monday’s council work session.
Boucher followed up with similar remarks during a KEEL radio interview yesterday. He even said Shreveport was teetering on bankruptcy.
Both of these council members received a draft of the audit–as did other council members.
All council members were cautioned in the transmittal of the draft audit to not publicly discuss it.
Draft audit documents are not public records under the Public Records Act. The completed audit reports are public records and by statute must be made available within 3 days of completion of the reports.
Council members are entitled to review draft audit reports. The Public Record Act does not entitle them to discuss or release these documents.
On Sept. 10, the Shreveport city attorney responded to a public records request for the audit.
"The legislative auditor, not the City of Shreveport, is the custodian of the Single Audit and the CAFR. These are complete when the legislative auditor office has done its final review and approved the report."
The audit has not been published on the Louisiana Legislative Auditor website as of noon, Sept12.
Bombastic self-serving sound bites are not consistent with good government principles.
These two council members ran their campaigns on this platform.
As they say, talking the talk is much different from walking the walk.