Most business in the governor’s office is withheld from public view
By PATRICIA KILDAY HART, HOUSTON CHRONICLE Updated 06:00 p.m., Sunday, August 28, 2011
When then-Gov. George W. Bush ran for president in 2000, his office released a treasure trove of information relating to his years as Texas' chief executive.
Some 3,125 pages detailing Bush's appointments during 1995-1998 allowed news organizations to remark on the exact number of lobbyists and campaign donors with whom he met. The records showed which state lawmakers Bush conferred with - and on what subject - and detailed how much time he spent reviewing capital punishment cases prior to executions. The records showed when he arrived at the office, when he took time off for the gym and when he went home.
In short, the documents provided a portrait of the leadership style of a candidate for president of the United States.
Now, as Gov. Rick Perry embarks on a presidential campaign, it is unlikely the public will access records that provide many revealing details about his decade-long tenure as governor. While Perry extols open government - most recently challenging Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to "open the books" of the nation's central bank - he has adopted policies that shroud his own office in a purposeful opaqueness that confounds prying reporters - or any member of the public questioning his policies.
He has been governor longer than anyone in Texas history, but there is a lot the public does not know about Rick Perry. Where does he go each day, and with whom does he talk? What is discussed when he meets with top state agency executives? How does he evaluate a clemency request from a death row inmate? Or an application for a grant from his Emerging Technology Fund? What opinions are expressed to him through email and how does he respond?
Missed legal deadlines
Those are just some of the questions left largely unanswered by Perry's decisions to bar the public from viewing details of his travel, his daily schedule and most of his emails.
Over the past decade, the Perry administration has withheld information in response to some 100 open-records requests, instead seeking review by the Texas Attorney General's Office. In two cases in the past year, Perry's office acknowledged it failed to meet legal deadlines for responding to the requests, or otherwise delayed in violation of well-established procedures outlined in the Texas Public Information Act.
Most of the withheld documents involved contracts, bidding and oversight of programs in which state money flows to entrepreneurs, privately held companies and universities from Perry's two economic development funds, the Emerging Technology Fund and the Texas Enterprise Fund. In some cases, the requests involve entities headed by Perry campaign donors and political appointees. Perry also chose to withhold information when third parties complained they would release proprietary information or violate trade secrets.
Among the information withheld from public view were communications between Amazon and the governor and his staff concerning the company's recent dispute with the state of Texas over a $269 million sales tax bill.
He has declined to release staff notes and emails relating to the Emerging Technology Fund and records relating to appointments to the advisory committee that oversees its grant applications. He also withheld emails and telephone logs relating to a $4.5 million Emerging Technology Fund grant awarded to Convergen Life Sciences, a company owned by campaign contributor David G. Nance.
The Houston Chronicle has a lawsuit pending regarding Perry's decision on a clemency request in 2004 by Cameron Todd Willingham, whose capital murder conviction stirred debate over the science of arson investigations. Perry refused the newspaper's request to release his staff's analysis or comments about Willingham's request for clemency, which raised new evidence. Willingham was executed Feb. 17, 2004.
Automated email purges
Previous Texas governors released their reviews of execution cases. Perry's office has maintained that any documents showing his views or staff discussion are not public record. He has presided over more than 200 executions as governor.
"The governor follows all disclosure requirements as required by the state and has led the charge to increasing transparency in state government," said spokeswoman Catherine Frazier. "He has led by example, putting the check register for the governor's office online so that citizens can clearly and easily see how their tax dollars are being spent. State agencies, at the governor's request have followed suit."
Some of his decisions in favor of secrecy, however, have generated considerable controversy over the years.
Houston attorney Joe Larsen, who represents the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, said he believes Perry's office is violating state law by automatically purging all staff members' computers of emails older than seven days. Perry's office has said it prints and saves documents subject to open-records laws and government document retention schedules. Larsen said he believes vital records are lost by the automatic purge policy and notes that state law requires records be saved in an electronic, searchable form.
"There is a huge cache of information regarding Perry's time as governor of Texas that is gone or virtually inaccessible - information in which the citizens of the entire country now have vital interest given his candidacy for president," Larsen said. "For those who believe limited government is a basic conservative value, this pattern of shielding his office from public scrutiny should give pause."
In May, 2008, Larsen filed a complaint with the Texas Attorney General's Office on behalf of a Wisconsin blogger and open government advocate seeking Perry emails. The AG declined to intervene on the grounds that the governor's office said it followed the state's document retention schedule by printing and filing protected emails.
Larsen finds that implausible.
"It is unlikely, logistically almost impossible, that Perry's office actually kept a hard copy of all emails that would have fallen within the records retention schedule," he said. "It's just not going to happen in a busy office."
During last year's gubernatorial campaign, Democratic challenger Bill White accused Perry of hardly working, noting that his official schedule for one six-month period provided evidence he worked an average of seven hours a week, and included 38 weekdays with "no state scheduled events." Perry responded, "Just because it is written down doesn't mean I'm not out there working for the people of Texas."
In contrast to Bush's extensive appointments records, Perry has left the country without it being reflected on his public schedule. Reporters learned that he took a 2004 trip to the Bahamas with San Antonio businessman James Leininger, a Perry campaign donor, and anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist after being spotted scuba-diving by a tourist. The trip did not appear on his schedule released under the state Public Information Act. At the time, press secretary Kathy Walt acknowledged that Perry had begun releasing a far less complete report of his time after hiring a new scheduler. She also noted that "the Open Meetings Act and the Public Information Act have certain exemptions."
Public access blocked
Most of Perry's travel is paid by campaign funds and detailed reports are not required to be disclosed. After the Bahamas trip, newspapers requested and got copies of the expenses paid for Perry's Department of Public Safety security detail - and noted that the state picked up the tab for scuba equipment to accompany the governor. Since then, Perry has blocked public viewing of his security detail's travel expense reports.
The Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News have sued for the records. Two lower court rulings favored the newspapers, but the Texas Supreme Court in June agreed with Perry that his personal safety concerns were grounds for withholding the information.
Before that ruling was announced, proposed legislation keeping the governor's travel security expenses private drew controversy in the Texas Legislature. The bill died in a Senate committee after lawmakers objected that the public should know if a state official misused a travel security detail.
Perry leaned on lawmakers to include language in a school finance bill passed in the Legislature's special session that would keep secret for 18 months the travel vouchers of his security team. Until then, the public would be able to view only summary reports that disclose a trip's destination, but not specific businesses visited or the names of family members accompanying the governor.
Like so many Republican officials of the tea party persuasion, Rick Perry despises the Environmental Protection Agency—a feeling he has expressed repeatedly in speeches, lawsuits, legislation and even a book titled “Fed Up!” Perhaps that is only natural for the governor of Texas, a “dirty energy” state ..
where the protection of air, water and human health rank well below the defense of oil company profits for most politicians.
But Perry has at least one other reason for smacking down those bureaucrats so eagerly. When environmental regulators do their job properly, that can mean serious trouble for Perry’s largest political donors.
The outstanding example is Harold Simmons, a Dallas mega-billionaire industrialist who has donated well over a million dollars to Perry’s campaign committees recently. With Perry’s eager assistance—and despite warnings from Texas environmental officials—Simmons has gotten approval to build an enormous radioactive waste dump on top of a crucial underground water supply.
“We first had to change the law to where a private company can own a license, and we did that,” Simmons boasted in 2006, after the Texas Legislature and the governor rubber-stamped initial legislation and approvals for the project. “Then we got another law passed that said (the state) can only issue one license. Of course, we were the only ones that applied.”
Most Americans have never heard of Simmons, despite his fantastic wealth, because he wisely keeps his head low, generally refusing press interviews and avoiding media coverage. Last year, a local monthly in his hometown published the headline “Dallas’ Evil Genius” [ add: http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/investigations/politicsandgovernment/1209/dallas%27s_evil_genius/ ] over a scathing and fascinating investigative profile that examined not only the peculiar history of litigation between Simmons and his children (who no longer speak to him), but his political machinations, corporate raiding and continuing corporate penchant for pollution.
In D magazine, reporter Laray Polk explained how Simmons and a company he owns—innocuously named Waste Control Systems—manipulated state and federal law to allow him to build a nuclear-waste disposal site in West Texas. But construction has been delayed for years in part because the site appears to overlay the Oglalla Aquifer, an underground water supply that serves 1.9 million people in nine states, raising obvious concerns over radioactive contamination. In the Simmons profile and subsequent posts on the Investigative Fund website last year, Polk explored the controversy over the proposed WCS facility, including strong objections by staff analysts at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality who found evidence that atomic waste might indeed leach into a huge pool of drinking water.
Now reporters for The Los Angeles Times have revived, advanced and updated the WCS story with much additional detail, including interviews with the Texas environmental officials who oversaw the approval process for the facility. For a period last summer, that process appeared to have been slowed down to allow serious consideration of the scientific data collected by the commission’s staff.
In other words, the regulators were trying to do their job, which meant expensive delays and perhaps an eventual ruling against the nuclear waste site. That would have protected the Oglalla Aquifer and cost Simmons hundreds of millions in lost investment and profit. But then Perry’s appointees on the commission voted by two to one to issue licenses for the WCS site.
This year, officials on another Texas commission appointed by Perry—who oversee low-level radioactive waste in the state—voted to allow the WCS site to accept nuclear waste from 34 other states in a highly controversial decision later ratified by the state Legislature and signed by Perry himself. Not long after that, according to The Los Angeles Times’ report, Simmons gave $100,000 to Americans for Rick Perry, an “independent” committee supporting his presidential candidacy. (Back in 2004, Simmons was a major contributor to another “independent” political committee, the notorious Swift Boat Veterans group that distorted Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry’s war record in a series of TV ads.)
Continued from previous page
According to a spokesman for WCS, the Texas governor’s happy and lucrative relationship with Simmons did nothing to help the company except to turn the billionaire into “an easy target. ... It made the state redouble its efforts to be thorough.” But the Texas officials who opposed the approval on principle have since quit their jobs with the state. As one of them told the L.A. Times reporters, “This is a stunningly horrible public policy to grant a license to this company for that site ... . Something had to happen to overcome the quite blatant shortcoming of that application. ... The only thing I know in Texas that has the potential to do that is money in politics.”
As for the Texas official (and Perry appointee) who overruled his own scientists and approved the deal, he left state government, too—to work as a lobbyist for Simmons. He says that no undue influence led to the favorable outcome for his new employer.
Texas must be the only place on earth where anyone would believe that.
Joe Conason is the editor in chief of NationalMemo.com.
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
