The public won’t be able to inspect the Megasite Authority of West Tennessee’s contracts until they’re finalized, prompting criticism among transparency advocates that the Authority will be able to spend millions of tax dollars with little oversight.

The legislation approved Wednesday, Oct. 20, by the General Assembly exempts the Authority — which will handle contracts, land purchases and utilities at the Memphis Regional Megasite — from certain aspects of open records law.

“The authority adopts as its official policy the principle of open records,” the law states, but it includes two big exemptions.

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The Megasite Authority’s contracts won’t be public until they are “entered into or signed,” according to the law.

And, if the state attorney general allows it, some documents will be confidential for five years if the record is of a “sensitive nature” that would hurt the Authority’s ability to do business.

“Normally, when a governing body has to approve a contract, the details of such a contract are public before the vote,” Deborah Fisher, executive director of the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government, wrote Monday. “That would not be the case here.”

She wrote, regarding the provision that records can be concealed for five years: “That’s a whole lot of time to hide stuff you don’t want the public to know about.”

The board of directors of the Megasite’s governing body will have to abide by the open meetings law, which requires leaders spending taxpayer money to discuss and make decisions in public, and to provide advance notice of their meetings.

But, Fisher wrote, the law “creates a situation in which its members could be voting ‘yes’ on deals that the public can’t see.”

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Lang Wiseman, deputy and chief counsel to Gov. Bill Lee, said there are adequate checks and balances to ensure the Megasite CEO and board of directors don’t abuse their power. According to The Tennessean newspaper of Nashville, Wiseman noted the public can challenge the definition of “proprietary information.”

”I would think it’s implicit that the materials ... presented and being voted upon would be subject to review by the public,” Wiseman said, according to The Tennessean. “It’s not just a situation where somebody can deem it to be, and it is.”

House Speaker Cameron Sexton (R-Crossville) told reporters it’s common practice at the Department of Economic and Community Development to withhold certain records in order to preserve proprietary information and competitive advantages.

Fisher testified to a state House of Representatives committee Tuesday, but lawmakers did not heed her advice in the amendments they approved.

“While bringing Ford Motor Co. to Tennessee may be a game-changer for economic stimulus in the western part of our state,” she wrote, “we don’t need it to be a game-changer for transparency in government. We don’t need a whole new branch of government that can operate without public scrutiny.”