Editor’s note: This column was written and published prior the Metro Council’s April 12 meeting, at which the four Democratic members walked out before a vote could be taken to levy the dedicated property tax voters approved in November for the East Baton Rouge Council on Aging. The walkout left the council without a quorum and halted council business, delaying the process to levy the tax for at least 60 days.
The East Baton Rouge Council on Aging has come under intense scrutiny since voters approved a dedicated property tax for the nongovernmental agency last fall. But Business Report Editor Stephanie Riegel says COA supporters who claim the questions raised about the agency and calls for greater transparency are somehow rooted in racism and greed is misleading and disingenuous.
“This is about good government and common sense,” Riegel writes in her latest column.
At a press conference earlier this month, COA board member and state Rep. C. Denise Marcelle, D-Baton Rouge, said the “attacks and microaggressions” against COA Executive Director Tasha Clark-Amar and the agency she has led for the past six years amount to a “money grab” by “certain groups of people in this city” who want “power and control.”
The most recent scandal to envelope the COA stands as a perfect example of why voters in this parish need to get serious about cleaning up the agency, Riegel says, noting the agency provides badly needed services to a growing low-income, elderly population despite its history of financial troubles and sloppy bookkeeping.
“The controversy involves Clark-Amar, who, according to court documents, unduly influenced an elderly woman and COA client named Helen Plummer into drafting a will with a COA board member, Dorothy Jackson,” she writes. “The will named Clark-Amar as executor and also appointed her trustee of the estate, a gig that promised to pay $500 a month for the next 20 years.”
Relatives of Plummer, who died earlier this year, attempted to block Clark-Amar from accessing the elderly woman’s assets, Riegel notes, and Clark-Amar sued.
“Though the whole affair smacked of a conflict of interest—and appeared to be a blatant violation of the COA’s bylaws as well as state governmental ethics laws—Clark-Amar stood poised for a fight, even as two Metro Council members called for her resignation. On April 6, however, she backed down, and asked the court to remove her as overseer of the Plummer estate,” Riegel writes. “Presumably, this latest sordid chapter in the ongoing COA saga is behind us. But the damage is done. Even if Clark-Amar is no longer in a position that presents a conflict of interest, that she put herself there in the first place speaks volumes about the way things roll over at the COA.”
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