CLAYTON — The law office of former Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon is a walk down memory lane.
There’s a coaster with a piece of a wing from one of the first Boeing 777X’s to come off the assembly line. There’s a basket of pens, like those Nixon once used to sign — or veto — bills.
On his desk is a hand-crafted blue coffee mug, made by a potter in Lesterville. That’s the small town in Reynolds County at the base of Johnson’s Shut-Ins State Park.
Nixon met the mug artist on one of his many visits to the area after the collapse of the Taum Sauk Reservoir in 2005. He was the state’s attorney general then, but he’d soon become governor. And he’d make the preservation and expansion of parks one of his signature accomplishments.
There was a time, before the dam collapse and resulting flood, when Johnson’s Shut-Ins attracted 350,000 people per year. Those visitors spent money at campgrounds in Lesterville, and at restaurants and hotels in Ironton, Pilot Knob, Caledonia and other small towns in the region.
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The time after the Taum Sauk collapse was a complicated one politically. As the attorney general, Nixon, a Democrat, was already laying the groundwork to run for governor in 2008 against Gov. Matt Blunt, a Republican. To respond to the disaster in southeast Missouri, Nixon would need to take on Ameren Missouri, which had been a campaign donor. He’d also have to navigate a recovery effort managed by the Department of Natural Resources, under Blunt’s administration.
In the end, Nixon obtained a $180 million settlement with Ameren, a large portion of which went to rebuilding Johnson’s Shut-Ins. A smaller amount — $7 million — ended up in a new nonprofit created by Nixon called the Taum Sauk Fund. The fund was intended to revive the region.
“Tourism is a significant part of the economy,†Nixon said in a recent interview from his office in Clayton, where he is a partner in the Dowd Bennett law firm. “We were thinking it was a great opportunity to expand the brand.â€
This week, Nixon learned through my series of columns about how the Taum Sauk money has been managed — and how much of it has been drained through a series of questionable disbursements. One organization, the Iron County Economic Partnership (ICEP), has awarded large chunks of money to people tied to its board members or companies owned by those members. Several of the transactions appear to violate Internal Revenue Service rules. Many recipients had questionable links to tourism and development.
The former governor declined to comment on specific transactions, but he’s clearly disappointed with what happened to Iron County’s portion of the fund. He’s not the only one. State Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick, a Republican, is in the midst of a previously planned audit of Iron County. His office said this week the auditor is considering expanding the audit to include ICEP.
From the beginning of the Taum Sauk Fund, the idea was to let the local folks in Iron and Reynolds counties decide how to spend the money.
“I didn’t have an over-arching vision,†Nixon says, “but I knew there was a need.â€
If there’s a lesson in what happened in Iron County, it’s that openness and transparency are absolute necessities when it comes to public money.
Whether it’s government officials or private citizens serving on a quasi-public nonprofit like ICEP, when people in charge of public money know they’re being watched, the incentive to resort to self-dealing is significantly diminished.
Nixon remembers having discussions with his staff about transparency when the Taum Sauk Fund was created. The Missouri Foundation of Health and a couple of other nonprofits started by the attorney general through settlements required the bodies to follow the state’s open-records law and not allow future boards to change that requirement.
“The openness was very important to us because we didn’t have the answers,†Nixon says.
In Iron County, many of the decisions on Taum Sauk money were done in closed meetings. Paper trails can be hard to find. When a whistleblower sought public documents to find out how the money was being spent, he was wrongly denied. It’s an all-too-common case of folks in government — or, in this case, quasi-government — choosing secrecy to cover up questionable deeds.
The documents — some of them, at least — are now out in the open, and they don’t tell a very good story about the stewardship of public money.
Nearly two decades after the Taum Sauk disaster, even after the rebuilding of Johnson’s Shut-Ins State Park, the “brand†of tourism in Iron County can still use a boost. But the money intended for that goal is largely gone.
“Clearly,†Nixon says, “it was a missed opportunity.â€