Lawmakers say secret budget meetings business as usual
“I’ve been on budget sub seven of my nine terms, and we always meet (in private),” said Rep. Joe Armstrong, a Knoxville Democrat on the House budget subcommittee.
Members of the House Finance Committee met privately over the weekend with officials from the governor’s administration in what one lawmaker called a “planning session” on the state budget.
That follows earlier reports that the Senate Finance Committee held secret meetings Sunday and Monday to prepare for a vote on the state’s $25 billion budget.
“We want to try to finish out this week,” Rep. Johnny Shaw, secretary of the House Finance Committee, said Tuesday. “So we took the opportunity to have a little planning session on how we want to approach some issues concerning budgetary matters.”
Gov. Phil Bredesen said his first reaction to the meeting was to ask if it was legal. After being assured it was, he agreed to provide experts from his staff to answer technical questions on the budget.
“I guess this has been the tradition in state government since back in the very darkest of dark ages a long time ago,” he said.
The Sunshine Law, which requires government meetings in Tennessee to be open to the public, does not apply to the Legislature.
The state constitution says, “The doors of each House and of committees of the whole shall be kept open, unless when the business shall be such that ought to be kept secret.”
But Frank Gibson, executive director of the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government, said the public ought to know when lawmakers meet to talk about spending public money.
“Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do,” he said.
Secret meetings aren’t new for Tennessee lawmakers. The Senate Finance Committee met in secret as recently as 2003 to discuss a proposal giving the governor new power for balancing the budget. In 1998 a select group of lawmakers met in secret and crafted a budget agreement with more than $15 million for pork barrel projects.
Shaw, D-Bolivar, said the House committee’s other two Democratic officers — Chairman Craig Fitzhugh and Vice Chairman Harry Tindell — and some officials from the Bredesen administration attended the private, unannounced meeting Sunday.
State Finance Commissioner Dave Goetz was the only person Shaw named. There wasn’t a quorum and no vote was taken on the budget, he said.
The House and the Senate finance committees both met at the Ellington Agricultural Center, which is about 10 miles south of the Capitol.
When asked about the secret meeting, House Minority Leader Tre Hargett of Bartlett said, “No comment.”
Members of the Senate have said there are no contentious issues regarding the budget.
Armstrong said his main concern at the meeting “was what’s going into the safety net,” which is part of the governor’s plan to help the 323,000 people who will be cut from the state’s expanded Medicaid program.
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On the Net:
See SB2316/HB2332 at: http://www.legislature.state.tn.us/