Reply With Quote
We found that companies that had renegotiated their contracts were much more likely to have challenged our public records request, at almost double the rate.
This pattern is consistent with companies using public records laws to hide their non-compliance with their job creation promises.
The finding, even if limited to a single state, is troubling. If companies can not only secretly renegotiate the deals but also make sure that public records laws shield them from revealing that they did, then the contracts are meaningless. And we would argue that politicians are at the very least complicit with these private deals.
In the cases of New York and Virginia – the other state that received a new Amazon location as a part of its “HQ2” bidding process – the agreements they signed requires them to notify the online retailer of any public records requests in order to give it the opportunity to legally challenge them.
More broadly, secrecy pervades the entire process of economic development. For example, during the many months-long compe ion to win HQ2, Wisconsin officials purposely routed their Amazon bid through agencies not subject to public records requests, emails show. And cities like Austin and Los Angeles submitted their bids through non-public en ies like the Chambers of Commerce as a way to shield them from public scrutiny.
