He had one day on the job, but about 10 hours later, Bobby Bodin was not only out of the parish’s chief administrative officer’s job he thought he had, but he is also out of his previous job as an agent for AFLAC, a company he quit two days before.

The council Wednesday night did not vote, as planned, whether to hire Bodin, instead voting 11-3 to remove the item from the agenda because Bodin had not satisfied all the contingencies regarding Louisiana Ethics Board rules. Council members Naray Hulin, Lloyd Brown and Maggie Daniels voted against removing the agenda item.

At vote’s end, Bodin quietly walked out of council chambers with his lawyer, Mike Lopresto, and sister, Dot Bodin Landry.

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“I do know this,” a red-eyed Bodin said as he composed himself outside council chambers, “I’m not coming back.”

Bodin, 59, the embattled former New Iberia mayor who had legal run-ins both in office from 1989 to 1992 and after he left, believed he had satisfied all the council’s concerns from a month ago. But he had not addressed the issue that he would still keep his commissions from customers outside the parish, a contingency he didn’t know he had to address.

He had sold policies to parish employees, and to avoid a conflict he retired from his job at AFLAC and said he wouldn’t take the future commissions from 51 parish employees.

However, council lawyer and Assistant District Attorney Eric Duplantis said the Louisiana Ethics Board would not allow him to take money from those outside the parish.

Lopresto and Bodin argued that they didn’t know that was part of the contingency.

Duplantis said this morning that the Ethics Board offers a provision that a public employee cannot receive anything of economic value from a company that does business with the parish, and therefore it “doesn’t make any difference” where the residuals originate.

‘He quit his job’

There was some confusion about the vote itself on Feb. 14, when council members voted 8-5 to hire Bodin contingent upon receipt of a written opinion by the Louisiana Ethics Board regarding his previous employment as an AFLAC agent who sold insurance policies to parish employees. Members also wanted to clear up Bodin’s wife’s employment with IberiaBank, which is the parish’s current fiscal agent.

The Ethics Board said that if Bodin didn’t interfere with IberiaBank’s business with parish government and if he quit his job with AFLAC, there should be no conflicts of interest.

Wednesday morning, as he went to work at the courthouse, Bodin offered paperwork that he said should clear up any issues the council would have. He has retired from AFLAC as of March 12. Bodin also wrote to AFLAC in Columbus, Ga., that he would start a new job Wednesday, has retired his AFLAC number and “may no longer be compensated for contracts previously written in payroll account OJE04 Iberia Parish Government.”

Without being asked, Bodin also resigned from the Spanish Lake Commission. He did that Tuesday night to avoid breaking the dual officeholding law in the state.

Lopresto told council members the bottom line is “you can’t undo the appointment” and “the discussion was very clear” that Bodin satisfied all that was required of him.

Parish President Will Langlinais agreed.

“I employed him this morning,” Langlinais told the full, 14-member council present. “He quit his job.”

But Councilman George Gros — who said it was “quite frankly, wrong” for Bodin to take an office before the council met — clarified that what he meant to say on Feb. 14 and what came out were different items. He wanted to receive all contingencies before the meeting, and only then would they hire Bodin. But the council members did not receive all the contingencies in writing by meeting time.

Langlinais and Bodin thought the Feb. 14 vote was to hire Bodin if he met the contingencies. They said tapes from the meeting prove Bodin’s employment began March 14. The minutes have it as March 15.

“Mr. Bodin is not an employee,” Duplantis advised council members.

Langlinais, who felt the vote was more about him than Bodin, is still without a CAO. Simone Champagne quit in January to run for state representative. Bodin’s time in the parish spotlight, while brief, was fraught with public and private negative comments that follow him to this day.

Bodin said he’s been “ridiculed” and “called everything under the sun,” even though his 12 1/2 years in government — 8 1/2 as New Iberia Councilman, four of that as mayor pro-tem, and four years as mayor from 1989 to 1992 — made him a prime candidate for the CAO job.

He said he can’t return to his job at AFLAC, for which he worked 13 years, and would not return to work for the Iberia Parish Council under any circumstances, one reason being he did not want to give up commissions not associated with parish government. Bodin would have been making $51,247 annually as CAO.

“They railroaded you, Bobby,” his sister said.