CLEMMONS RENEWS CALL FOR AUDIT OF LEE’S NO-BID CONTRACTS Nashville Representative Seeks Information About Governor’s Spending of Covid Relief Funds
Nashville, TN – Yesterday, State Rep. John Ray Clemmons (District 55) renewed his request for the Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury to conduct a full-scale audit of Gov. Bill Lee and his administration’s receipt and disbursement of COVID-19 Relief Funds from the federal government.
Rep. Clemmons, joined by eleven of his Democratic colleagues, made an initial request for this same information on September 29, 2020. Though Gov. Lee has reportedly spent over $490 million of taxpayer money without following normal state contracting protocols since March 2020, legislators have received no substantive information about these expenditures and who benefited from these no-bid contracts.
"Tennessee families deserve to know what Bill Lee did with their hard-earned tax dollars while they were struggling to make ends meet throughout this pandemic,” said State Rep. John Ray Clemmons. “It appears Governor Lee used his self-declared ‘state of emergency’ as a tool to enrich those with whom he is politically connected, rather than for what it was actually intended – to protect the public health and safety of our fellow Tennesseans.”
“Those of us in the Capitol on both sides of the aisle who take our fiscal duty to Tennesseans very seriously have a real problem with a governor who plays fast and loose with taxpayer money,” added Clemmons. “If Lee is up here lining the pockets of the politically connected with nearly half of a billion dollars, while he is out there preaching fiscal conservatism and personal responsibility to defend cuttingunemployment benefits for workers, denying health coverage to suffering Tennesseans and hoarding TANF funds from kids in need, then Tennesseans deserve to know about it.”
