Tennessee

Lowest overall score, with poor disclosure of lobbyists’ activities, no integrated lobbyist-client list available on its site, and reports filed just twice a year.

The Koch Companies operate one of the largest networks of gas pipelines in the country and have been one of the biggest funders of climate denialism. Through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Koch has also funded and promoted efforts to defund public education, defeat mass transit projects, strip governments of their ability to regulate corporate behavior, and limit the ability of governments to regulate guns.

The Koch Companies’ agenda is extraordinarily harmful to communities of color and environmental justice communities. And yet in Tennessee, the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Hotel shares the Stone River Group with Koch Government Affairs. The firm also represents the Campaign for Great Public Schools, which stands in stark contrast to Koch’s campaigns to strip funding from public schools. This video from April 2024 shows a lobbyist for the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity threatening a lawmaker in an attempt to get them to vote for a bill that would funnel money to non-public schools.

Here are issues that the Stone River Group’s Stephen Susano disclosed lobbying on for Koch as of Dec. 2023: business & commerce, corporations & associations, economic & industrial development, Elections, environment/public lands, fees & other non-tax revenue, Labor, occupational regulation, oil & gas, property interests, safety, state agencies, boards, & commissions, state finances, taxation, tort reform, transportation, utilities/common carriers, water, workers’ compensation.

What exactly was the firm doing in each of these areas, and what effect did its advocacy have on civil rights in Tennessee? The state does not make public a list of lobbyists with all of their clients. It does not require lobbyists to report positions or bill numbers; and compensation is only reported in ranges, not exact amounts.

Best feature: ability to search for all entities lobbying on a particular subject, such as Environment.

Worst feature: lobbyist compensation is only disclosed in ranges, such as “less than $10,000” or “$50,000 to $100,000.” This blurs any distinction between a lobbyist who may have only worked for a few hours vs. a lobbyist who may have worked for hundreds of hours.

Additional Findings

Tennessee’s lobbyist search function is easy to find with links on the front page of the Tennessee Bureau of Ethics and Campaign Finance website. The actual website and search tool are very outdated, and the search tool is confusingly split into three different tools. The three different tools can search for employers expenditure reports, lobbyists, and government lobbyists, making the same distinction between public and private that other states have made. There’s no way to search for both at the same time. The full lobbyist list also isn’t integrated, and there’s no way to get an integrated list on their website. F Minus contacted their office to obtain an integrated list and they were able to send it over – and did so promptly – but this is a real limitation of their online tool. It’s possible to filter seasrches by name, subject matter, and year. Returns show up in a spreadsheet-like format online, and individual names can be clicked on to show registrations by year. Lobbying firm data doesn’t appear to be at all available.

Overall, Tennessee’s lobbyist reporting system is lacking, with rigid ways of searching, confusing search options and categorizations, a lack of some important data like lobbying firms, and no integrated list.