Abbott kept dealings of Texas Enterprise Fund under wraps. Wayne Slater, Dallas Morning News
When The Dallas Morning News requested, under the Texas open-records law, a copy of the application of a company seeking taxpayer subsidies, Abbott said no. He ruled that the applications for money from the $500 million job-creation fund might contain confidential corporate information.
The company was Vought Aircraft, which wanted a $35 million subsidy to expand in the Dallas area.
But as it turns out, there was no application, a state audit released last week found.
Had the attorney general responded to the newspaper’s open-records request in 2004 by disclosing that Vought — and other businesses with their hands out — were getting millions in state money without submitting applications or specific promises to create jobs, it might have been an early signal of problems bedeviling the fund.
What Slater is doing here is a classic case of wishing things were as he wants them to be rather than as they were. In fact, during the audit period, the letter of the law suggested that applications were not required, and that their release could only be obtained under very limited terms.
In short, during the time of the Dallas Morning News' request Abbott's opinion was well within the limits of the law. What the DMN was asking of Abbot, and wishes he had done, was to violate the law so that they could take additional shots at Rick Perry. It's important to note that, no where in the audit, was the judgment of Attorney General Abbott questioned.
These are the things that drive ideological columnists doubling as journalists mad. What Slater is really trying to do here is generate an issue for his "side". True, it was Slater who penned the scathing criticism of the Wendy! autobiography, something that he has since backed away from due to the debilitating start it created for her campaign. I would even argue that this Gubernatorial race is not Slater's main objective. What Slater is really working to de-rail is Rick Perry's speculated bid for the Presidency.
The thing is I think the TEF is going to de-rail Perry's Presidential ambitions without the help of the TLSPM.
When it passed in 2003 there were several misgivings among fiscal conservatives regarding the need or efficacy of such a fund. Never mind that funds of this type are always subject to graft and fraud, the way this was set-up, with almost all power for fund disbursement residing in the Governor's office, there was going to be little that could be done (legally) to prevent fraud until well after the fact.
Fast forward 10 years and what many of us said back then is now coming true. The problem is, most Democrats don't want to eliminate this fund (Wendy! wants to keep it but with her in control while Abbott has suggested it needs to be eliminated) but only have the purse-strings attached to their offices. In other words, keep the corruption and graft but change the name of the beneficiary.
When all is said and done I don't think this moves the needle any in the race for Governor. All of the people who are offended by this are already in the Wendy! camp and Abbott can claim enough plausible deniability to allow his supporters to shrug it off as just another Rick Perry mess that's falling down on the shoulders of good conservatives.
As a matter of fact, I think the only people who will suffer from this are the Texas taxpayers who are now going to have to shell out Millions more dollars to settle the political need for a pound of flesh.
This is just another in a long list of examples where the TLSPM cannot be relied upon to report an issue on the straight and narrow. There are enough damning items in the TEF audit to allow scalp-takings, it's too bad we have to try and alter past reality to try and get additional scalps from those who have no real skin in the TEF game.
