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Rosemary Ewing was thrilled and honored to be appointed by Gov. Bobby Jindal to the State Museum Board. She had served on it in the past as well as on other state and local boards. She received no pay for any of them, nor did she file to be reimbursed for valid travel expenses to meetings. “It was just part of the service,” she said.

What was different with this appointment was a briefing given by a Board of Ethics lawyer to explain the impact of the state’s new ethics laws. Ewing was surprised and disturbed to learn that as a volunteer board member she was subject to the same financial disclosure requirements as legislators, high-ranking state officials and many full- and part-time local elected officials.

She and her husband, former Senate President Randy Ewing, would be required to disclose sources of income and amounts within ranges, and also debts, assets, investments—even large retail transactions. This information would be available to the public via the Internet.

That was it. She quit.

She has nothing to hide, she said, but the disclosure rules covered business associates and competitive information. She explained, “I thought it was an invasion of privacy and onerous.”

She downplays the museum board’s loss, saying, “I’m sure they are just lying awake at night worrying about it.”

Somebody ought to be, not just about Ewing but also about hundreds of members of dozens of varied state boards and commissions that oversee budgets of $1 million or more, whether paid or volunteer. Many have refused appointments or intend to do so. Some boards have signaled their intention of resigning en masse if the Legislature does not address the situation in this session.

These are not the major power and patronage boards whose seats are sought after, like Commerce & Industry or the Tax Commission or the LSU Board of Supervisors. These are mostly volunteer panels dealing with professional, trade and cultural functions. While it’s an honor to be appointed, members often have to be recruited to serve. With the new laws, it will be a struggle to keep those already appointed.

A member of a port commission writes, “Why in the world would any competent, successful person serve on a board with such onerous conditions, unless they were on the take?”

This is not one of the famous unintended consequences of the complex ethics special session. Rather, the Legislature seemed intent on roping in as many other groups of public servants as feasible, perhaps as a means of sharing the pain. “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” were the trite but common watchwords of the ethics session.

Except that volunteer board members and compensated legislators are apples and oranges, not geese and gander. All make sacrifices, but most boards have no authority to hire and fire or to enter into contracts, far from legislators’ powers to tax and spend.

Legislators are working on remedies, but others continue to press on in the wrong direction. The House has passed a bill, sponsored by the leadership, to extend those same disclosure requirements to levee boards and many local government commissions.

The law already prohibits board members from engaging in any transactions that create conflicts of interest. The sane approach is in a bill by Sen. Danny Martiny, R-Kenner, to require less far-reaching and specific disclosures of less powerful boards than of others.

The trick will be to determine which bodies should follow which rules.

This is part of a broader legislative tweaking effort to make new ethics laws that sounded good when they passed also workable in real life. For instance, a provision was needed in a new bill to allow any state official’s child to buy a T-shirt in a university souvenir shop, which a strict reading of current law prohibits.

It doesn’t make it any easier when legislators are nervous that corrective legislation, however sensible, will be labeled as backsliding on ethics. Yet this is an important question to get right—compared to some of what passes for debate—in order that, in cases like Rosemary Ewing’s, we keep the public in public service.