COUNTY MULLS ‘UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES’ OF TRANSPARENCY
Transparency in Hamilton County just got a little support — albeit perhaps unintended by some of the Hamilton County commissioners who voted on it at Wednesday’s commission meeting.
A resolution introduced recently by Commissioner Tim Boyd and approved this week on a 6-3 vote requires the Chattanooga Convention and Visitors Bureau — along with any other nonprofit organization that receives county money amounting to more than 25 percent of its operating budget — to adopt county travel and procurement policies. The measure also requires those affected nonprofits to annually provide copies to the county commission of “all financial documents and records” related to income and expenses.
The resolution does not specifically name the CVB, but Boyd has repeatedly — and correctly — questioned the agency’s spending. In recent months, he pushed for the CVB to publicly release its financial “working papers,” but CVB officials stymied his request, claiming such documents are protected under state law.
The CVB receives 100 percent of Hamilton County’s hotel-motel tax revenues — $7.8 million in lodging taxes in 2017 and a projected $8.2 million in 2018.
Boyd has criticized the CVB’s less-than-transparent spending as its budget has gone up and up. The CVB’s president, Bob Doak, told commissioners and the newspaper that the organization is willing to do anything to show commissioners how transparent it is — except for making its internal financial figures available to the public.
Doak has not returned Times Free Press calls seeking comment on Wednesday’s vote.
Despite the controversy, even Boyd acknowledges — and we concur — that the bureau does the county a great service. This year, the CVB’s expenditure of $7.8 million is projected to bring in $1.1 billion in tourism.
Without question, that is a great return, but context is important: The CVB’s spends considerably more than similar Southeastern cities and counties — some of which bring in about the same amount of tourism revenue. And when the CVB refuses to make public all of its spending documentation, it raises reasonable questions.
Boyd contends that in a time when the County Commission struggles to fund glaring school needs without raising taxes, perhaps we should make revisions to the way our hotel/motel tax revenues are allocated.
(Read more about our county’s consideration of funding school needs — or not — on this page in Sunday’s paper.)
Similarly, Boyd says he wants to ensure that county taxpayer money — $14 million a year — is well spent in the nonprofits that receive significant county allocations.
In addition to the new transparency policies, the resolution requires that a county commissioner, appointed by the commission chairman, serve on the affected nonprofit boards.
Mayor Jim Coppinger, along with commissioners Joe Graham and Greg Martin, who with Jim Fields voted against the resolution, worried about “unintended consequences.”
Apparently one of those unintended consequences was that discussion of the resolution pointed out the fact that the county doesn’t even know how many nonprofits this measure might impact. When Martin asked for a list, Hamilton County Financial Director Al Kiser said he didn’t know.
“We have not done a study to see much they [the nearly two dozen civic and charitable groups the county funds through general fund appropriations] get compared with their total revenue,” he said.
Viva transparency!