Blunt Revenue Dept. Broke Sunshine Law for Contract to Client of Andy Blunt's Partner

Earlier this month we highlighted press coverage of legislators angry over proposed changes to driving record fees by the Department of Revenue and demonstrated that the fee increases were attributable to a contract awarded by the state to a client of Andy Blunt's lobbying firm.  

Coverage of the issue continues today in a strong story by the AP's David Lieb which points out that the Blunt administration went even further than we knew in pushing a fee increase that benefited a client of the first-brother's firm, actually disregarding state records law in order to complete the deal:

A sharp fee increase for state vehicle and driver's license records appears to have been set to pay for the cost of a new computer system — a justification not allowed under Missouri's open-records law....

Missouri's open-records law limits fees for computerized public records to the costs of the copies and the staff time needed to retrieve and duplicate them.

But documents provided to The Associated Press suggest the Department of Revenue picked the $7 fee to cover the cost of a new computer database for the records.

So, at this point we know that:

a) BearingPoint wanted a contract to build a multi-million dollar online portal for the state by which it could provide access to Department of Revenue records;

b) BearingPoint recommended to the state that it could afford this portal if it jacked the price charged for driving records up some 300,000%;

c) as we see in Lieb's story, state law on records provision prohibits the state from charging record requesters for costs associated with equipment like the web portal, as proposed by BearingPoint;

d) BearingPoint hired Andy Blunt partner Jay Reichard to lobby the Blunt Department of Revenue for the contract;

e) a compliant Blunt administration went ahead with the BearingPoint plan and awarded the contract, even in the face of the fact that the financing scheme was illegitimate;

f) legislators went nuts over the huge fee increase and killed the hike in the waning days of the legislative session.

By heavily supported inference, we also know that Matt Blunt and his administration aren't too big on enforcing or living by the terms of state record retention law when it's personally, politically or professionally inconvenient.