By Ashley Zavala
Lawmakers leading the California Capitol Annex Project said they will keep controversial non-disclosure agreements in place on the taxpayer-funded construction, which legally force those involved to keep basic and broad information about the project a secret.
This week on California Politics 360, Assemblymember Blanca Pacheco and State Sen. John Laird defended the secrecy agreements, stating they are meant to protect security and sensitive bid information. Pacheco and Laird are the leaders of the Legislature's Joint Rules Committee, which is overseeing the project.
Neither the words "security" nor "bid" are used in the project's NDA. When asked why not refine the NDA to explicitly protect security and bids, Pacheco stated they were drafted by the Legislature's legal counsel.
"I cannot say why legal counsel would draft these in such a manner," Pacheco said. "Sometimes legal counsel prefers to have broad language."
Both Pacheco and Laird have signed the NDA. When asked why the public should trust them, Laird said as elected officials they are "obligated to speak to the higher level of the policy measures that are involved in this."
For the two or so years that Laird and Pacheco have been leading this project, neither would talk about it until this week. (See the full interview in the video above.)
The project has been shrouded in secrecy for years, to the point that several state lawmakers have also been kept in the dark about the project.
With the NDAs in place, the project price tag nearly doubled from 2018 to 2021.
"This cloak of secrecy, this surpasses anything I ever saw in my career," said Dick Cowan, the ex-chairman of the state's Historic State Capitol Commission.
"I think for the legislators themselves to be able to ask themselves, 'Hey, what the heck happened here? How did this project get so big?' They're going to have to invalidate those non-disclosure agreements and go to the separate parties, who have bits and pieces of the information," Cowan said.
Cowan said security information should be kept confidential.
"As for the bidding information, the procurement professionals who work for the state, they know very well what the ethical bits of information are that they can and cannot share of competitive information supplied during a procurement. They're professionals. That's not a risk at all."
Watch the full interview with Dick Cowan in the video player below.
