Viva transparency!
You might recall the flap this past summer about the amount of money our Chattanooga Convention and Visitors Bureau receives and spends from Hamilton County coffers each year.
It's a staggering amount of money: $7.8 million in 2017, raised from lodging taxes. Next year the amount is projected to be $8.2 million.
The Convention and Visitors Bureau (the CVB for short), uses the millions to wine, dine and lure conventions, trade shows, Ironman races and other forms of high impact tourism to our city. Local officials say that expenditure brings visitors here who drop an estimated $1.1 billion into Chattanooga area cash registers.
That's a nice return - $7.8 million for $1.1 billion.
But what if the return for our money was even better? What if it was more like that of Huntsville, where the CVB with a budget of about $2 million brought in about the same $1 billion?
We'd still be raising roughly the same roughly $7 million in lodging taxes, but maybe instead of the CVB's 25 staffers living so high on the hog with lush expense accounts, perhaps $5 million of those tourist dollars could be helping our children learn math and science a bit better.
Well, those questions played out with a bit of controversy in May and June when Hamilton County Commissioner Tim Boyd raised concerns about CVB spending that was far less than transparent, especially given that the CVB is 80 percent funded by tax dollars.
The CVB, along with publicly funded county auditors, stymied Boyd's and the Chattanooga Times Free Press' request for CVB spending receipts. County officials deemed the receipts and early county audit drafts were "financial working papers" that are protected under state law. CVB President Bob Doak told commissioners and the newspaper that the organization was willing to do anything to show commissioners how transparent it is - except for making its internal financial figures available to the public.
Most of the county commission and the county mayor were OK with that - praising the CVB for the gift horse it is, and turning a blind eye to the gift horse it could be.
At a June County Commission meeting when Boyd sought the passage of a resolution requiring the Chattanooga Convention and Visitors Bureau - and any other nonprofit organization that receives county money amounting to more than 25 percent of its operating budget - to adopt county travel and procurement policies, the mayor and most commissioners had nothing but praise for the CVB.
Still, Boyd's resolution, which would have meant the affected non-profits would have to annually provide copies to the county commission of "all financial documents and records" related to income and expenses, passed - for about a month.
Commissioners approved the transparency measure 6-3, but in July, with the CVB and the Humane Educational Society pushing back, the commission reversed the action on a vote of 7-2. Opposing the reversal were Boyd and Commissioner Randy Fairbanks, an accountant.
But this week, the commission and mayor got an eye-opening reality check when state auditors released what at least one local leader termed some shocking findings:
» Detailed receipts were not kept for 36 percent of the $378,298 in credit card charges made by CVB from July 2015 through June 2016.
» Auditors tallied $48,537 in meals and entertainment for out-of-town clients but also a $14,163 tab for business lunches and dining that involved only Chattanooga area residents. Are the Chattanoogans tourists? If you think this isn't much money, consider that it's about $56 a day over a year's roughly 250 business days - for local folks.
» The CVB lacked detailed policies for when local meals are allowable, for employee retirement gift ranges, or appropriate limits on miscellaneous expenses.
» The CVB failed to make county-required "regular and periodic written reports to the county mayor and commissioners. Though the audit doesn't mention this, it should be noted that the mayor and commission didn't hold the CVB accountable for those missing reports, and in fact just let them slide.
A $100 bill here, a $50 there - pretty soon we have a tab of perhaps as much as a half million in spending that is unexplained. Maybe more. This is county taxpayer money, folks.
"I was kind of shocked by the amount of undocumented receipts, Tennessee state Sen. Todd Gardenhire, R-Chattanooga, told the Times Free Press on Wednesday.
Gardenhire authored and helped pass a bill requiring the state audit of the CVB last year. He says he was inspired to seek the audit after he attended the CVB's annual luncheon, which he described then as "very lavish." Now Gardenhire is advocating that in addition to a new CEO (Doak announced in September that he will retire at the year's end), the CVB could use new board members, too.
County Mayor Jim Coppinger continues to defend the CVB and its board, saying they have his "tremendous" confidence. But he does, at least, acknowledge there has been a problem.
"At the end of the day [the audit's] a good thing," he said. "There's no doubt they've been lax on their internal controls."
But the past is not what's important now. The future is what counts.
The CVB is spending a lot of our money, and hopefully bringing a lot more money back here. But a healthy return on investment doesn't excuse the employees of the CVB from transparency.
And it certainly shouldn't blind our county leaders to their responsibility for demanding accountability.