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Appointees of Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov Dan Patrick raised a record-setting $5.3 million for the 2019 inaugural festivities, two days’ worth of VIP events that included a ball with country crooner George Strait and a candlelight dinner with the state’s top elected officials.
They reported spending every dollar of it. But don’t ask for any receipts.
The Texas Tribune tried this summer to obtain expense records from multiple state agencies as well as the inaugural committee, a group of private donors appointed by Abbott and Patrick. They claim no such records exist.
“We have conducted a thorough search,” the group’s former executive director, Kim Snyder, who serves as Abbott’s campaign director, said in an email last month. “The 2019 Texas Inaugural Committee has no responsive records.”
The Tribune filed a lawsuit last month under open records laws, seeking to discover what happened to the $5.3 million raised through ticket sales and donations from top lobbying firms, corporations and banks, wealthy business people and trade groups. No taxpayer dollars were expended on the inaugural celebrations, according to the governor’s office.
Bill Aleshire, the attorney representing the Tribune, said the expenditure of money by governmental entities — whether they get it from taxpayers or deep-pocketed contributors — is one of the “core pieces of information the public is entitled to see.”
“The committee is a governmental body by law and is required to keep records,” Aleshire said. “They are not allowed to keep secret the expenditures by this public entity any more than any other public entity can keep that secret.”
The only accounting the committee, which is created by state law, has given the public came in its “final report” to the Texas Secretary of State's office. In a one-page list of cash receipts and disbursements, the report gives 11 broad categories of expenditures.
