Nashville Mayor John Cooper, who promised transparency during his successful campaign, is falling short of an open-records benchmark set by Republican Gov. Bill Lee.
Cooper’s staff has declined multiple requests to review job applications submitted to his post-election transition team, leaving murky the process by which he built the team now running the city.
“The requested records do not meet the definition of public records as contained in T.C.A. Section 10-7-503(a)(1)(A), but more importantly, we are taking measures to strike a balance between government transparency and the privacy of our citizens,” Cooper spokesman Chris Song wrote. “They submitted applications to a non-governmental entity and expected due privacy, rather than their potential employer disclosing that information to a public forum and, possibly, their current employers.”
That explanation contradicts that given by the office of new Gov. Bill Lee, who allowed the Associated Press to rummage through the exact same transition records earlier this year. Though few of Lee’s top hires even bothered submitting job applications, the AP was able to review more than 1,400 applications.
One perhaps-determinative distinction between the two transitions: Lee's, which lasted more than two months, used public money via a grant to a separate nonprofit entity, while mayoral transitions, which last just a few weeks, typically do not. It was public business nonetheless.
Metro Human Resources reported that the mayor’s office received no job applications during the transition or in the weeks after, so all of Cooper’s hires were either off-book or handled through an application link on his campaign website. (Lee’s campaign website was also the depository for transition job applications.)
