Provides relative to the position of police chief for the city of Baton Rouge

House Bill 832 enacts a new provision of Louisiana Revised Statutes Section 33:2481.8 that establishes an evaluation and tenure structure for the police chief of the city of Baton Rouge. The statute requires the mayor-president of Baton Rouge to conduct an initial evaluation of the police chief three years from the date of the chief's appointment, with annual evaluations to follow in each subsequent year. Following each evaluation, the mayor-president may either reconfirm the police chief for an additional one-year period or demote the chief to the former class of position held prior to becoming police chief. The statute explicitly provides that any such demotion does not constitute corrective or disciplinary action and removes any appeal rights that would ordinarily be available to a classified civil service employee challenging an adverse personnel action.

The practical effect of this legislation is to fundamentally alter the employment security and governance structure for Baton Rouge's police chief. The mayor-president gains explicit authority to remove or demote the sitting police chief on an annual basis without adherence to the typical disciplinary procedures and appeal processes that protect classified civil service employees under the fire and police civil service system. This creates a form of at-will employment for the police chief position after the initial three-year period, whereby the chief serves at the pleasure of the mayor-president. The police chief remains part of the classified service and retains the ability to return to the former rank following demotion, but loses the procedural protections otherwise afforded to classified employees.

This legislation operates within the framework of Louisiana's constitutional and statutory fire and police civil service system established by Article XIV, Section 15.1 of the 1921 Constitution and codified in present law for municipalities over 13,000 in population. The statute uses explicit language stating that its provisions apply notwithstanding any other provision of law, which establishes a specific exception to the general civil service rules that would otherwise govern the police chief position in Baton Rouge. The classified service system normally requires that removal actions be subject to appeal and that certain procedural protections be afforded to employees, but this statute carves out the police chief position from those protections by characterizing the demotion as a non-disciplinary action.