HARTFORD — A proposal to increase transparency at the UConn Foundation is back at the Capitol this year, but some open-government advocates say the bill doesn’t go far enough, and the foundation would continue to remain exempt from the state’s freedom of information laws.
Changes would require the foundation, the private, nonprofit fundraising arm for the university, to provide information about its spending broken down in certain broad categories. But some of the other information it would have to provide is already available through forms filed with the Internal Revenue Service.
“Sometimes you get it in one fell swoop and sometimes … it literally takes years to get where you want to be,” said James H. Smith, president of the Connecticut Council on Freedom of Information. “This is one of those cases.”
Debate over access to records from the UConn Foundation has been a long-running issue at the legislature. Joshua R. Newton, president and CEO of the UConn Foundation, said he believes those public battles have hurt the foundation and led to fewer individual donors, although total donations have risen.
Sen. Dante Bartolomeo, D-Meriden, and co-chair of the higher education committee, took umbrage with Newton’s statement that the “annual legislative skirmishes over how the foundation operates are counterproductive.”
“I look at that and I say, ‘So this gentleman is trivializing … the public’s right for transparency for an entity that receives $8 million a year of taxpayer funds?'” she said.
Newton said that was not his intention. But the debate “has caused [people] to feel that we’re not transparent,” he said. … “I take issue with that. We’re tremendously transparent and we continue to show how we are more transparent than any of our other counterparts in terms of nonprofits.”
This year’s bill has support from the foundation, unlike past proposals. In addition to the transparency provisions, the law would set a target of 15 percent of new money coming into the foundation going toward student scholarships and fellowships. The other broad categories that would have to be reported include program and research support, equipment and facilities construction and improvements.
UConn officials said reliance on the foundation and philanthropy to fund programs at the university has increased as state funding has decreased. About half of the foundation’s annual operating budget comes from UConn. The foundation raised about $80 million last year.
“If the foundation is receiving any payments from taxpayer money, it should be subject to our FOI laws,” Sen. Michael A. McLachlan, R-Danbury, said in written testimony.
“I clearly have made my position known that I do feel that the foundation is a public entity serving a public organization,” said Rep. Roberta Willis, D-Salisbury, and House chair of the committee. “Some of your comments only reinforce that.”
Mary Schwind of the state Freedom of Information Commission said her group supported the bill but would ultimately like to see the UConn Foundation considered a public agency making it subject to the state’s freedom of information laws. Legislation to do that was introduced at the Capitol last year but was voted down.
In the past, lawmakers have questioned the foundation’s spending, including the 2013 purchase of a three-story, 12-room house on Scarborough Street in Hartford’s West End and its payment of more than $250,000 to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for a speech she gave on the Storrs Campus.
Advocates say the UConn Foundation is the only type of university organization in New England that is not subject to freedom of information laws.