Hood: Legislature can't keep contracts secret
Attorney General Jim Hood, in a letter to legislative leaders, said the Legislature by law cannot keep its contracts secret from the public — despite a committee's vote to do so.
Legislative leaders on Monday said that over the last few days their lawyers had concluded the same thing.
The House Management Committee last week passed a policy making clear that all contracts for the Legislature are secret. Lawmakers can look at them, but they cannot copy them or show them to the public, the adopted rule said. The Senate Rules Committee was expected to adopt a mirror rule this week. The move came after media and lawmakers had requested copies of a contract with EdBuild to draft an overhaul of the state's education equity funding formula. The formula decides how more than $2 billion in state K-12 funding is divvied among school districts each year.
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The Legislature's move for secrecy drew media and public criticism. It comes after lawmakers have demanded more "transparency" and scrutiny of contracts and spending by other state agencies on the heels of major corruption scandals. This includes a federal bribery and kickback case involving hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crooked state corrections contracts.
House and Senate leaders had said the move for secrecy simply upholds longstanding legislative procedure about its own contracts and was done to clarify that lawmakers have a right to look at the contracts — just not the public.
The Legislature exempted itself from the state Public Records Act, which requires other agencies to make contracts and other records open to the public.
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But Hood said the 2008 Mississippi Accountability and Transparency Act passed by the Legislature "requires the EdBuild contract to be placed on the Transparency website within 14 days of execution." This act created the state Transparency website, which posts contracts and spending information for state agencies for public view. Gov. Phil Bryant, who was then lieutenant governor, championed the Transparency Act at the time.
The Accountability and Transparency Act — a law — trumps any House or Senate rules, Hood said.
"Therefore, the EdBuild Contract should already have been published on the Transparency website," Hood wrote in a letter to Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, House Speaker Philip Gunn and the chairmen of the House Management Committee and Senate Rules Committee.
Hood said the state Public Records Act states that "the Legislature shall be subject to provisions of ... the Mississippi Accountability and Transparency Act."
House Speaker Pro Tem Greg Snowden, R-Meridian, and Senate President Pro Tem Terry Burton, R-Newton, chairmen of the Management and Rules committees, respectively, issued a joint statement on Monday in response to Hood's letter.
"Over the last four days as House and Senate leadership continued to study the issue, Legislative legal staff concluded the contract should be posted to the Transparency Mississippi website. The contract has been released to the Department of Finance and Administration to be posted on (the website)."
The Accountability and Transparency Act says: "The Legislature finds that the public should be able to easily access the details on how the state is spending tax dollars and other state funds and what performance results are achieved for the expenditures." It directed the Department of Finance and Administration to create the Transparency website and set rules and procedures for agencies to report their contract and other spending information. The law said that, "At the latest, each agency shall provide access to all required data within 14 days after the data becomes available to the agency."
The law also defined that, "the term agency includes all elective offices in the executive, legislative and judicial branches of state government."
