The state’s classified civil service employees came close during the recent legislative session of losing the job protections they currently enjoy. Legislation sponsored by Sen. Jay Morris, R-West Monroe, would have made major changes in the civil service system.

Daniel E. Sullivan, executive vice president of the Louisiana Civil Service League, in a letter to The Advocate said if Morris’ proposed state constitutional amendment had passed “it would have decimated and politicized one of the most successful reforms in the history of our state.”

Morris’ bill passed the Senate 26-11, the exact two-thirds vote it needed, but failed in the House. The vote there was 62-33, eight short of the 70 votes it needed. The state’s voters would have had the last word had the bill passed, but that is sometimes a risky proposition.

Former state legislator Bob Jones of Lake Charles some years ago gave me a copy of “Report to the People,” by the late Gov. Sam Jones, his father, that talked about how civil service that was enacted during his term (1940-44) improved state government. Jones cut the state payroll by 7,500 workers.

Jones said the ninth plank in his platform “called for elimination of dictatorship and return power to the people … We enacted civil service that, with one fell swoop, took away the governor’s control over state employees, and which took away the mayor’s control over the employees of the City of New Orleans.”

Sullivan in his letter to The Advocate said Louisiana’s civil service system of public employment was instituted with the election of Jones in 1940, “in answer to the Louisiana scandals.”

History has recorded that the scandals resulted from a wave of corruption that swept Louisiana after the late Gov. Huey Long was assassinated in 1935. Hundreds of government officials and businessmen were implicated in wrongdoing and millions in state funds were stolen.

Sullivan said the Jones civil service improvements remained in effect until they were abolished by a Legislature controlled by the late-Gov. Earl Long, Huey Long’s brother.

The abuses returned for four years, Sullivan said, until voters elected the late-Gov. Robert Kennon, who ran on a pledge of putting civil service in the constitution, where it could only be changed by the state’s voters.

The civil service system was so unique, Sullivan said, that at the 1973 state constitutional convention it was put in the new constitution with very minor changes from the original civil service law written by Charles Dunbar, a prominent New Orleans attorney.

“This system has worked well for the citizens of our state,” Sullivan said, “who are the actual employers of these public employees. It does not shelter incompetent employees but provides the mechanism for their removal if jobs are not performed as required.”

Wrongful terminations can be appealed to an apolitical Civil Service Commission, he said.

Sullivan said the current civil service system needs to be retained to ensure that the most qualified individuals are hired and protected from political influence, and the incompetent are removed.

“This (Morris) legislation nearly passed in a very close vote, but fortunately did not,” Sullivan said. “To those who voted to retain it, I and the other good government supporters of our state, thank you. To those who did not, I ask them to please consider the above (information) if it is introduced again.”

Some civil service changes were recommended and included in a House Concurrent Resolution at the 2009 legislative session, but it requested that the changes be made by the state Civil Service Commission.

Morris’ legislation would have given the Legislature and the governor more control over civil service changes and that is why Sullivan has sounded the alarm.

Legislators at this year’s regular session gave Gov. Jeff Landry the power to name the chairpersons of many of the state’s boards and commissions. The chairman that Landry picked for the University of Louisiana System board helped the governor use his new authority to hand-pick the new president of Northwestern State University at Natchitoches.

The state Civil Service Commission is working well, and no major changes are needed in its operations. Legislators, like they did in 2009, can suggest changes but Governors Jones and Kennon protected all of us when they kept the commission out of the hands of politicians.

Jim Beam, the retired editor of the American Press, has covered people and politics for more than six decades. Contact him at 337-515-8871 or jim.beam.press@gmail.com.