An empty board room awaiting members of one of the 471 boards, commissions and task forces in Louisiana. Photo by Justin DiCharia.
By Justin DiCharia
BATON ROUGE — In Louisiana, there are hundreds of bureaucratic fiefdoms referred to as boards, commissions or task forces, for nearly everything — marriage and families, strawberry marketing, polygraphs, crawfish promotion, grandparents raising grandchildren, polysomnography (the record of a person’s sleep patterns).
Collectively, they cost the state hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars annually. The precise amount is nearly impossible to calculate. And for a majority of these bodies — some large, some as small as five people, some powerful, some insignificant, some with executive authority, some merely advisory — efficient governmental checks and balances do not exist.
