The decision by this newspaper to pursue a complaint against the Grant County Economic Growth Council with the Indiana Public Access Counselor comes down to an obvious matter of doing our job.
In May, we met with the executive committee of the Growth Council and expressed our concern that the organization receives so much tax money, almost $300,000 annually, while no one from the State Board of Accounts down to the Grant County Council keeps tabs on how that money is spent.
In 2009, Grant County Council set aside .03 percent of the Economic Development Income Tax to the Growth Council
The Growth Council said no to our request to attend its meetings. We also attempted to work out an agreement to increase our coverage, which was met by a proposal to have the Growth Council meet with the newspaper monthly where topics of the Growth Council’s choice would be discussed. We would have also had to agree not to print certain things about the Growth Council. It was less access to the Growth Council than we have traditionally had.
The Growth Council defends its practice of making all its decisions behind closed doors by saying that it is the way potential employers want things done. And also that they were formed as a private nonprofit — which they maintain they still are.
We think, however, once an organization manages to have a piece of your income tax rate dedicated to it, it gives up the right to keep taxpayers out of their meetings and record books unless there are specific reasons under law to exclude the public.
That’s just how tax money is supposed to be treated. The Growth Council needs to be accountable to its members and to the public that now funds it directly. To say it is OK that they are not accountable is to say that we as a community have installed a class of people who may simply do as they please, when they please, with other people’s precious resources.
We know that this situation is not right, and we suspect that it is not legal under Indiana law.
To those who ask if we think there has been abuse of funds at the Growth Council, we can say that we have no reason to think so. But we also must say that there is currently no way to objectively determine if the spending is proper or not. Such is not acceptable and should have been a concern of the county council and those who set up the EDIT tax three years ago.
The State Board of Accounts last audited the Growth Council in 2007 — before it began receiving EDIT money directly. The Growth Council files an annual document called an E-1 form showing the percentages of public versus private money disbursed by the Growth Council. The E-1s consistently show that public money disbursements amount to less that half of the total yearly disbursements — in which case the state does no audit.
Growth Council Executive Director Tim Eckerle says both private and public monies are kept in “one pot,” however, and there is no separate tracking of public and private funding. We don’t know how the Growth Council could report such percentages of private versus public spending to the state when the money is not kept separate.
Sen. Jim Banks, R-Columbia City, says he is considering legislation to make local economic development agencies more transparent. We wish him good fortune in that effort.
We also wish good fortune to the Growth Council, of which this newspaper is a member. We might not always agree with its leadership on the best way to build our community, but at heart we have the same goals for Marion and Grant County.