No tax-supported entity should get secrecy in spending

By |2017-04-24T17:28:29-05:00April 21, 2017|Categories: Tennessee Coalition for Open Government|Tags: , , , , , , |0 Comments

A shadowy situation has emerged in Chattanooga with an organization that manages millions of taxpayer dollars with no transparency and such a surprising disregard for accountability that one wonders what it would take to wake up elected officials who are supposedly in charge. Welcome to the Chattanooga Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, whose lawyer threatened to sue the county after a commissioner dared to shed a little sunlight on how it spends tax dollars. The Chattanooga CVB is on track to get $7.8 million in hotel/motel tax this year via a pass-through arrangement with the Hamilton County government. The Chattanooga CVB gets almost all of its funds from [...]