Taxpayers don't know what they are getting for their money despite some lawmakers pushing for more accountability and information. Why? A web of exceptions to Tennessee's Public Records laws and lack of meaningful reporting on outcomes prevent transparency in the state's economic development programs.
The Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development has posted online a searchable database of FastTrack grants since 2011, but has left out key information it gathers on job creation. Mike Reicher, a data reporter on The Tennessean's investigative reporting team, writes about the development in some depth here: State releases list of business grants totaling $400 M. There are many things to like about the database from an open government perspective. For one, it replaces what essentially were PDFs of FastTrack grants, and PDFs of other documents associated with the grants, but in a jumble of different styles that made it difficult to make connections or draw any meaning from it. The new database is [...]
Just how transparent is the state of Tennessee with its economic development programs? In the eyes of Tennesseans, not very. A new poll by icitizen and The Beacon Center of Tennessee measured opinions about the state's economic development activities. The Beacon Center favors stemming "corporate handouts" to specific companies in favor of lowering business taxes for everyone. Most of the questions were designed to measure approval or disapproval of incentive programs. While the poll results show mixed opinions about tax breaks for select companies, what's indisputable is that Tennesseans largely think the state is not transparent about them. A whopping 72 percent agreed with the statement: "State government is not transparent with the incentives it [...]
A few months ago, we reported here in a post about public records that the governor's office had denied state Rep. Mike Turner, D-Nashville, access to economic development records, citing two laws as the basis for protecting the information from public disclosure. Last night, those documents, leaked to NewsChannel 5's Phil Williams, became the basis of a story about the Haslam administration's effort to tie incentives to the outcome of work council discussions with Volkswagen over its plant in Chattanooga. The state's offer of about $300 million in incentives "subject to works council discussions between the State of Tennessee and VW being concluded to the satisfaction of the State of Tennessee" [...]
Phil Williams, chief investigative reporter for NewsChannel 5, uncovered confidential state documents that outline an economic development proposal to give Tennessee Tower to the Sears Corporation if it moved its headquarters to Nashville. The state told Williams that the Tennessee Tower "never really got serious consideration and that the governor never delivered those words drafted for him by his economic development team" for a video presentation. But they wouldn't let him see the video Haslam did record. Following is an excerpt from the script obtained by Williams. You can go to the story on NewsChannel5 and read the whole thing: "We're so committed to making your new home in Tennessee [...]