The Lowndes County Economic Development Commission is the body recruiting Project Red Clay on this county’s behalf. Its Vice Chairman is the chairman of the County Commission that would vote on any tax abatement. Its Chairman sits on the board of the water authority named as a water source. Those facts have been on this site for months, published by the LCEDC itself.
What we did not have was the charter. The LCEDC’s own federal return states that it makes its governing documents available to the public upon request. We requested them, and we have now read the Articles of Incorporation, the Bylaws, and the Form 1024 it filed with the IRS.
Article 4 of the Articles reads, in the organization’s own words, that the Board "shall consist of one representative of each funding business, organization, governmental or quasi-governmental agency that contributes at least $2,500 to the Commission during its fiscal year, and each such Director shall be a voting member."
The next sentence is the one to sit with. If they do not choose to contribute, the County Commission, any industrial development authority in the county, and each incorporated municipality "shall appoint a member who shall be non-voting ex-officio members."
The LCEDC told the IRS the same thing when it applied for its exemption: to be voting members, "must contribute at least $2,500 annually."
So a private company and the Lowndes County Commission qualify for a vote on the same terms, at the same price. A public body that declines to pay keeps a seat and loses the vote, on the board recruiting industry to the county it governs.
There is a second tier. The Bylaws seat every "investor" contributing at least $5,000 a year on an Executive Committee that "shall have and exercise the authority of the Board of Directors between meetings of the Board." That committee does not advise between meetings. It acts. On a project moving to a deadline, between meetings is when things happen.
The Bylaws go further than we expected in three more places. A quorum is "a majority of the voting class of Directors," so an appointee who has not contributed cannot help make a quorum or deny one. Officers must be elected from the voting classification, so a non-contributing County Commission appointee cannot be Chairman, Vice-Chairman, or Treasurer. And the custodian of the LCEDC’s records is its Executive Director, a role the organization fills from outside: its Form 990 reports no paid employees at all. The body now facing an open-records request keeps its records through a contractor.
One more thing, and it is the cleanest of them. The LCEDC’s Form 990 answers no to whether it has a written conflict-of-interest policy. Seven lines later, in Schedule O of the same return, it states that it makes its conflict-of-interest policy available to the public upon request. Both sentences are in one federal document signed under penalty of perjury.
We are not calling that a false statement, and no one has adjudicated any of this. We are saying that the return promises a policy on request, so the policy can be requested, and that a promise made to the IRS is a reasonable thing for a neighbor to hold an organization to.
None of this is our research in the sense that matters. Every quotation above is the LCEDC describing itself, in documents it wrote, filed, and agreed to hand over on request.
What we do not know is who has paid. The charter establishes the tiers. It names no contributors, and no donor list accompanies it. Whether any party with a stake in Project Red Clay holds a seat it paid for is the single question these documents raise and cannot answer.
So that is the ask. Publish the contributor list, by contributor and by year. Publish the conflict-of-interest policy the return promises, or correct the return. Publish one current, complete board roster. Three documents. All three already exist, or the filings say they do.1234567