UPDATE 5:25 pm: Jerry Strickland, a spokesman for Attorney General’s Office, said the lawmakers appear to be engaged in a partisan effort. He said they have failed to recognize that the attorney general has ruled 40 times in the past decade that documents from the Texas Enterprise Fund must be made public.
“Yet again, the Texas Democratic delegation is more interested in political grandstanding than correctly understanding the law or the facts surrounding an issue,” Strickland said.
Regarding the Vought documents, Strickland pointed out that the attorney general reversed it’s December 2004 decision withholding records, after lawyers for The News pointed out that Vought already had received the contract and funding. The earlier ruling had been based on the Governor’s Office assertion that the contract was still pending and competitive.
The Vought information was ordered released in April 2005.
“The Texas Democratic delegation should spend more time understanding the facts of this issue before asking for investigations into documents that have repeatedly been released to the media and the general public,” Strickland said.
ORIGINAL POST 3:30 pm: Six U.S. representatives are calling on Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate the questionable dealings of the state’s job-closing incentive fund.
Part of the request, made by Texas Democrats, is aimed at Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who is now the Republican frontrunner in the governor’s race.
The Democrats are asking for the Justice Department to look into whether the Texas Enterprise Fund’s failure to follow guidelines in state law might warrant criminal charges.
They also want an examination of Abbott’s decision in 2004 to deny a public information request by The Dallas Morning News that would have shed light on problems, including the fact that some companies were receiving money without even filing an application.
The Texas Enterprise Fund was created in 2003 as a business incentive, largely administered by Gov. Rick Perry, specifically to create jobs and foster capital investments.
But an independent audit released two weeks ago showed that the fund handed out $222 million to a handful of companies and universities that never filed an application and that there was little criteria for winning an award and little state monitoring once a contract was signed.
Vought Aircraft was among seven entities that never filled out an application. It received $35 million, some of which eventually had to be paid back after the company failing to meet job creation benchmarks.
Another recipient that never filed an application was the semiconductor company Sematech, receiving $40 million. Sematech moved to New York shortly after spending the incentive money.
The News asked for the applications submitted by those companies from the governor’s office in 2004. The governor’s office appealed to the attorney general, saying it shouldn’t have to release the information because it included proprietary information from the companies that could help their competitors if made public.
Instead of saying there were no applications, the attorney general issued an opinion saying the information produced by the companies was proprietary and didn’t need to be released.
It’s that action that the congressional members want independently assessed, saying it is, “a serious matter we feel deserves immediate and independent investigation by your office.”
“We also believe that federal intervention is warranted because of the possible unethical and illegal actions by the Texas Enterprise Fund (“TEF”) and the Office of the Attorney General (OAG),” the letter stated.
It did not specify what federal laws might have been violated by the state actions. In addition, federal money was not part of the awards; all of the money provided to the companies came from state taxpayers.
The letter was signed by Marc Veasey of Fort Worth, Sheila Jackson Lee, Al Green and Gene Green of Houston, as well as Ruben Hinojosa of Mercedes and Joaquin Castro of San Antonio.
Ag Eric Holder – Tef Oag Letter (1)