Provides for retroactivity of certain provisions of Act No. 492 of the 2024 Regular Session

STATUTORY CONTEXT:

This bill addresses R.S. 42:1111(C)(6), a provision within the Louisiana Code of Governmental Ethics, which is codified in Title 42 of the Louisiana Revised Statutes under the broad heading of Public Officers and Employees. R.S. 42:1111 governs the receipt of things of economic value by public servants, and subsection (C) enumerates exceptions to the general prohibition. Subsection (C)(6) specifically was enacted by Act No. 492 of the 2024 Regular Session and created a new exception permitting members of school boards and parish or municipal governing authorities to continue employment with a person who has or is seeking a contractual or other business or financial relationship with the member's governmental entity or an agency under its jurisdiction or supervision, subject to six enumerated conditions. Those conditions require that the member be a salaried or wage-earning employee whose compensation is substantially unaffected by the employer's relationship with the governmental entity, that the member not serve as an officer, director, trustee, or partner of the employer, that the member not own more than one percent of the employing legal entity, that the member recuse himself from any vote or transaction involving the employer before the governmental entity, and that the member comply with applicable financial disclosure requirements. Prior to Act No. 492 of the 2024 Regular Session, no such exception existed in R.S. 42:1111(C) for these categories of public servants, meaning that school board members and members of parish and municipal governing authorities were potentially subject to the general prohibition under R.S. 42:1111(A) when their employer had or sought a business or financial relationship with their governmental entity. The general prohibition under R.S. 42:1111(A), which R.S. 42:1115(A)(1) and (B) reinforce through gift restrictions, broadly bars public servants and legal entities in which they hold more than a twenty-five percent interest from receiving things of economic value for services rendered to sources from whom gifts are prohibited. The effective date of Act No. 492 and the absence of explicit retroactivity language in that act left open the question of whether the new exception could benefit public servants who faced ethics proceedings arising from conduct that predated the act's effectiveness. HB 210 addresses that gap directly.

The bill also references Article III, Section 18 of the Constitution of Louisiana in its effectiveness clause, which is the constitutional provision governing the process by which bills become law, establishing the governor's ten-day period within which to sign or veto legislation, and the mechanism by which bills become law without gubernatorial signature upon the lapse of that period.

SCOPE AND NATURE OF THE CHANGE:

HB 210 is a narrow but legally significant measure. It makes no substantive alteration to the text of R.S. 42:1111(C)(6) itself; the conditions of the exception created by Act No. 492 remain entirely intact. The bill instead operates on the temporal plane, explicitly directing that R.S. 42:1111(C)(6) shall be applied both prospectively and retroactively. This is a purely interpretive and applicability directive, a legislative instruction to adjudicative bodies and courts about the temporal reach of an existing substantive provision.

The critical carve-out is the exception to retroactivity: the bill expressly provides that R.S. 42:1111(C)(6) shall not apply to any matter subject to a final decision of the Board of Ethics or Ethics Adjudicatory Board rendered on or before the effective date of this act. This carve-out is legally essential under Louisiana's civil law tradition. While Louisiana courts will give effect to retroactive legislation when the legislature clearly expresses that intent, as the Louisiana Supreme Court has consistently recognized, retroactivity cannot constitutionally disturb vested rights or final adjudications without offending due process principles embedded in Article I of the Louisiana Constitution. By protecting final decisions already rendered, the legislature attempts to thread this constitutional needle, avoiding the invalidation of completed administrative adjudications while still providing relief to persons whose proceedings remain pending or whose conduct has not yet been the subject of any final ruling.

The bill contains no [DELETED] or [ADDED] markers because it does not amend the text of R.S. 42:1111(C)(6) but rather enacts a freestanding statutory directive regarding its application. The mechanism is comparable to other retroactivity statutes found throughout Louisiana law, where the legislature separately enacts applicability language rather than embedding it within the amended provision itself. Under Louisiana's civilian statutory interpretation framework, this separate enactment carries the same legal weight as if the retroactivity directive had appeared within the body of R.S. 42:1111 itself, because courts look first to the legislature's manifest intent as expressed in the statutory text.

PURPOSE AND LEGISLATIVE INTENT:

The legislative purpose here is discernible and narrow. Act No. 492 of the 2024 Regular Session created a remedial exception to what the legislature apparently concluded was an overly broad prohibition that penalized certain elected officials for maintaining ordinary employment relationships that posed little genuine risk of corruption, provided they recused themselves from relevant governmental decisions. However, because Act No. 492 did not expressly provide for retroactive application, the Board of Ethics and the Ethics Adjudicatory Board faced the question of whether pending matters involving conduct that predated the act could benefit from the new exception. Under the general rule of Louisiana statutory construction codified in R.S. 1:2, substantive laws apply prospectively only unless the legislature expressly provides otherwise. The absence of express retroactivity language in Act No. 492 therefore created a gap that left similarly situated public servants exposed to adverse rulings based on a legal standard the legislature had already determined to be inappropriate. HB 210 closes that gap by supplying the explicit retroactivity declaration that Act No. 492 omitted.

The limitation protecting final decisions reflects a deliberate policy choice to balance fairness to persons whose matters remain pending against the principle of finality in administrative adjudications. The legislature apparently concluded that reopening fully adjudicated matters would be both administratively disruptive and constitutionally suspect, while failing to extend relief to persons with pending matters would produce the inequitable result of punishing them for the same conduct that others, prosecuted later, could avoid penalty for entirely.

PRACTICAL IMPACT AND AFFECTED PARTIES:

The affected parties are school board members and members of parish and municipal governing authorities throughout Louisiana who are or were employed by entities that have or have sought a contractual or business relationship with their respective governmental entities. These are elected officials at the local government level who, as a practical matter, may hold day jobs in the private sector and whose employers may have dealings with their school boards or governing authorities. Under the pre-Act 492 framework, such officials could face ethics charges for receiving compensation from employers engaged in business with their governmental entity, even if the officials conscientiously recused themselves from all relevant votes.

HB 210 benefits this class of officials by allowing those with pending ethics investigations, complaints, or proceedings before the Board of Ethics or the Ethics Adjudicatory Board to invoke R.S. 42:1111(C)(6) as a defense or exception, provided the six statutory conditions are satisfied. The bill provides no relief to any official whose matter has already been resolved by a final decision of either body on or before the effective date of this act, meaning that officials who have already been found in violation and subjected to penalties cannot seek to have those decisions revisited on the basis of the new exception.

From the perspective of the Board of Ethics and the Ethics Adjudicatory Board, the bill requires those bodies to apply the R.S. 42:1111(C)(6) exception to pending matters without regard to whether the underlying conduct predated Act No. 492. This creates an administrative obligation to re-evaluate the posture of pending proceedings against school board members and municipal or parish authority members to determine whether the exception now applies.

There are no apparent conflicts with federal law given the wholly state-law nature of the subject matter. A potential constitutional concern worth noting is whether the retroactive application of an exception, even a remedial one, could be challenged by parties who might argue that they were harmed by relying on the prior legal standard — for instance, a losing bidder who might have contracted differently had the exception been in place earlier — but such a challenge would face substantial obstacles because the exception benefits rather than burdens the public servants to whom it applies, and the legislative interest in uniform and fair application of its own ethics standards provides a rational basis for the retroactivity directive under Louisiana constitutional analysis.

CURRENT STATUS:

HB 210 carries a status indicator of 1, suggesting it is at the earliest stage of the legislative process, having been introduced but not yet advanced through committee hearings or floor consideration in the 2026 Regular Session. The bill becomes effective upon signature by the governor or, if not signed, upon the lapse of the gubernatorial review period established by Article III, Section 18 of the Louisiana Constitution, and takes effect the day following legislative approval if vetoed and