The Tennessee Valley Authority board is meeting Thursday in Franklin, Tennessee, for its quarterly board meeting to set policy and spending for America’s biggest government-owned utility.
TVA spends tens of thousands of dollars each year in staff time, jet travel and rental fees to bring its board meetings and public advisory boards to different sites across its seven-state region. But the board committee meetings earlier this week where most of the discussion among directors about the agency will occur are not open to the public, even though Tennessee state legislators and the congressman from TVA’s hometown think they should be.
Last month, both houses of the Tennessee General Assembly voted unanimously and Gov. Bill Lee signed a resolution in support of federal legislation to require TVA to conduct all board committee meetings in public. The state House voted 93-0 (with one abstention) and the state Senate voted 30-0 to back a bill to require TVA to conduct more of its board meetings, including its committee, in public with publicly available minutes.
“It is vitally important to the citizens of Tennessee that TVA, as an entity created and protected by Congress, should conduct their business in the open and be as transparent as possible,” the legislative resolution says.
The measure supports a bill that U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett introduced as his first bill in Congress in January, known as the Tennessee Valley Authority Transparency Act of 2019.