Texas Tribune: “To celebrate Gov. Greg Abbott’s reelection last year, his inaugural committee paid a whopping $1.7 million to hire country crooner George Strait and his band. A coterie of top political aides and staff got more than $1 million, some of it paid out in six-figure bonuses. And a handful of lucky charities received $800,000 in unspent money. Left out of that tally: the $116,000 taxpayers spent to keep all those inaugural expenditures secret. Abbott and the 2019 Texas Inaugural Committee spent months fighting the disclosure of documents detailing how they spent a record-setting $5.3 million that event organizers raised mostly from corporations and wealthy donors.”
“But The Texas Tribune sued the committee under the Texas Public Information Act and earlier this year successfully obtained the bank statements and spending ledger in an out-of-court settlement. The result is the most detailed and complete account of inaugural spending in decades. Austin attorney Bill Aleshire, who represented the Tribune in the lawsuit, said the legal fight he had to wage to get the records highlights the need for better transparency in state inaugurations, which suck up gobs of corporate money but face little regulation over how it gets spent. ‘We just don’t have that level of transparency written into the law,’ Aleshire said.”