Backroom Deals in Our Backyards: How Government Secrecy Harms Our Communities and the Local Heroes Fighting Back

By Miranda S. Spivack

Winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize

Shortlisted, 2025 Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice

A groundbreaking look at how ordinary people are fighting back against their local and state governments to keep their communities safe, by an award-winning journalist

Most Americans are likely to encounter the effects of government malfeasance or neglect close to home—from their governors, mayors, town councils, school boards, police, and prosecutors. In fact, deals shrouded in darkness are regularly made at the state and local levels, often the result of closed-door discussions between governments and industry without any scrutiny whatsoever from the public. Too often, as this groundbreaking new work of investigative reporting reveals, residents are intentionally kept on the outside, struggling to get information about significant issues affecting their communities—from car crashes and dirty drinking water, to failing safety gear—until the backroom deals are done and it’s too late to challenge them.

A work of riveting narrative nonfiction based on years of original reporting, Backroom Deals in Our Backyards tells the story of five “accidental activists”—people from across the United States who started questioning why their local and state governments didn’t protect them from issues facing their communities and why there was a frightening lack of transparency surrounding the way these issues were resolved. The secret deals, lies, and corruption they uncover shake their faith in government but move them to action.

For readers of Chain of Title and Superman’s Not Coming, Spivack’s revealing take on a hidden dimension of American politics will outrage and educate anyone who cares about the forces shaping their own communities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The New Press
• Release date: May 6, 2025
• ISBN: 9781620979341

Miranda S. Spivack

Miranda S. Spivack is a veteran reporter and editor who specializes in stories about government accountability and secrecy. She spent twenty years as an award-winning editor and reporter for the Washington Post. A former Fulbright Scholar and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Journalism at DePauw University and the author of Backroom Deals in Our Backyards (The New Press), she lives in Maryland.

Book preview

Cover: The background is an aerial view of a suburban neighborhood with houses and green lawns. The title is in black text on a white jagged-edged overlay.

BACKROOM DEALS IN OUR BACKYARDS

HOW GOVERNMENT SECRECY HARMS OUR COMMUNITIES AND THE LOCAL HEROES FIGHTING BACK

Miranda S. Spivack

Logo: 4 overlapping arched lines in white on a black background over serif text; The New Press.

To Steve, Ariel, Maya, Adam, Aaron, and Dahlia

Contents

Introduction: Hiding in Plain Sight

1. Small Town, Big Secrets

2. Public Roads, Hidden Dangers

3. The Safety Gear Detective

4. Toxic Brew, Concealed Deals

5. Chipping Away at the New Blue Wall

6. Playbook for Accidental Activists

Conclusion: We Can Overcome the Threat to Democracy That Secrecy Poses

Appendix: Resources for Accidental Activists

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Introduction

Hiding in Plain Sight

ANDREW CUOMO WAS OOZING EMPATHY AND REASSURANCE AS HE showed Covid-19 charts during his daily televised press conferences as the pandemic began in 2020. His appearances earned him a big fan base around the country,¹ with women in particular gushing on social media about the New York governor’s appeal, and many political observers speculating about a Cuomo presidential run.² Cuomo seemed transparent about the spread of the disease and the state’s efforts to contain it. But the aura of openness did not last long. Public and media pressure forced disclosure of information that showed Cuomo had been hiding crucial information about the spread of Covid-19 in nursing homes, and that the state’s reports had minimized the dangers.³ Other states also hid the severity of the pandemic. In Alabama, Florida, Idaho, and Indiana, governors and other officials hid troubling Covid data, often acting at the urging of private employers who ran factories, hospitals and schools. The lack of information put workers, students, and visitors at high risk.⁴ Many died unnecessarily from this secretive handling of data.

In Flint, Michigan, in 2014 many residents confronted a daily mystery.⁵ What would the water look like when they turned on the tap? Would it be cloudy? Blue? Or have some other tint? Would it have that weird odor? Hundreds of people began complaining about the tap water flowing into their homes. But state and local government officials made light of their concerns. The officials also did little to acknowledge that a state-appointed government manager had made a little-publicized decision to connect Flint’s drinking water to a new source to save money. Some residents developed rashes and their hair fell out in clumps.⁶ But government officials kept insisting that the water was safe—until one day when they did a 180-degree turn and urged residents to boil water before using it.

As the Flint saga wore on, residents learned to file records requests, government workers leaked tips, and academic researchers unearthed information, all revealing that state and local officials had been warned repeatedly that the switch could have disastrous consequences.⁷ But these officials had not bothered to share these concerns with the public.

In 2021, near Erie, Colorado, some residents began to hear low-grade humming that kept them up at night.⁸ Neighbors reported asthma attacks, coughs, migraines, and what some referred to as brain fog. Close by, Occidental Petroleum was conducting hydraulic fracking to extract oil and gas. The residents’ symptoms were typical of people exposed to chemicals used in fracking. But anyone who wanted to get a list of those chemicals would bump into the trade-secrets exemption in public records laws.⁹ This exemption, which most state open-records laws have, allows companies to claim that revealing certain information would tip off competitors or in other ways put their businesses at risk. The residents also found that when companies label something a trade secret—concealing information and risks—government officials usually rely on companies’ claims instead of determining on their own if withholding information is appropriate.

Secrecy around Covid data, refusal by a local government to be transparent about possible poisons in public drinking water, and allowing private companies to hide the list of chemicals they use in fracking are emblematic of challenges communities across the United States face—and can face down.

Companies have a multitude of ways to pressure governments to keep secrets, from insisting that information the public wants is a trade secret, to requiring government officials to sign nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) to hiding behind limited liability companies (LLCs) to ensure that real estate deals remain secret even after they are finalized. (In many states there is no requirement that LLCs and similar corporate entities buying property disclose to the public or state regulators who the real owners are.)¹⁰

This system of secrecy—information blockades and backroom deals—largely benefits state and local governments and private companies, who, by operating behind closed doors, make it difficult for communities to object because they have been kept in the dark.

Residents are left without crucial information as the deals unfold, and after the deals are done. The terms of secret arrangements are devised, or aided and abetted—or all three—by the governments that are supposed to serve and protect the people who pay their salaries. These state and local governments are spending public money without oversight by members of the public, who lack information that would allow them to question payouts, settlements, tax breaks, reduced-price real estate, and other benefits. These secret agreements inhibit government transparency. Without basic information, the public cannot track how public funds are used and is otherwise unable to monitor the work of their governments.

The federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA),¹¹ the federal Government in the Sunshine Act,¹² and every state and territory’s open-government laws give people a general right to information and a right to attend, in person or online, meetings of governing bodies, such as city councils or advisory panels. But it has become almost routine for state and local governments to ignore key requirements of these laws; to engage in secretive talks with businesses, developers and even the federal government; and to exploit loopholes that allow the governments to shield themselves and private companies from divulging information to the public. This tendency to keep basic information secret is not an isolated trait. It is, instead, a symptom of something much bigger that is plaguing communities across the United States: an endemic secretive culture in state and local government that can be so pervasive that residents may believe it is the norm and acceptable. Many people do not realize that such a response is actually often illegal—and anti-democratic.

Government transparency is crucial if our democracy is to function. Lack of transparency erodes the public’s trust in government and allows officials to hide incompetence, malfeasance, and fraud.

It can leave governments firmly in control of all kinds of information, able to regulate its ebb and flow based on the government’s agenda. That form of control is a major means used by authoritarian leaders to build and retain unchecked government power. In the worst-case scenarios, the information blockade effectively keeps the public unaware of illegal acts, civil rights violations, misuse of public money, and more.

There are many different reasons why secrecy is employed by governments. It can be inconvenient to be transparent. Governments often outsource their work, which leaves key data in the control of an outside contractor. Government employees sometimes suffer from a form of corporate capture, the phenomenon where private industry uses its political influence to take control of the decision-making apparatus of the state, such as regulatory agencies, law enforcement agencies and legislatures. Governments hesitate to offend businesses, who often are big supporters of local charities, community nonprofits, and politicians’ campaign war chests—and that helps them wield substantial political influence across their states and in the communities where they have their operations. Private companies and state and local governments, and in some instances public employee unions—are often aligned behind the scenes, meeting in private and becoming silent partners in land use, contracting, and other agreements, all without notifying the public. Local media watchdogs have disappeared at an alarming rate, so there are fewer people looking over the governments’ shoulders and alerting the public. Courts often side with the private companies who want to keep information from the public.

Across the country, information blockades often occur because government officials aren’t eager to have members of the public scrutinizing their work. Such openness can be tedious and slow government work down, which can feel like a nuisance. But government officials also hold back information for far more disturbing reasons. Officials are often so beholden to the private companies they hire with public funds, or that provide local jobs, that they will essentially do whatever the company demands when it comes to keeping secrets.

These private enterprises are often being paid to do work that the government has either decided it can no longer do or actually lacks the skills to do. And then when the companies hold a government contract, they can claim that letting the public in on such basic information as how much the company is being paid, or how much the company is paying subcontractors, can risk revealing company secrets that can put them at a disadvantage with their business competitors. This is the trade-secret exemption, and nearly every state allows it to be claimed by a private company with little to no pushback by the government. While the companies often seek protection from disclosure because of worries about their position in the marketplace, some also may have less honorable reasons for withholding information the public is seeking.

Other forms of secrecy abound. In many states, residents can no longer learn who has gun permits in their neighborhood, information that most states have decided to make off-limits to the public even as they use public money to issue permits. Police videos and the inner workings of software systems used by law enforcement are often kept out of the public’s hands in the name of privacy or because the software is labeled proprietary—a trade secret. Sometimes, local and state government officials withhold information because they simply are uncertain whether they are allowed to release it. It’s less risky to say no and let the person seeking the information challenge that denial. Or governments deny requests for information because they can’t find the documents. When the government plans to use public money to buy private property and turn it into a senior center or a homeless shelter, the information is not disclosed early in the process because it involves a real estate transaction. Those deals, under many state public records laws, do not have to be disclosed before or during the purchase process, ostensibly to avoid bidding wars or price escalation, but also because governments often want to avoid giving the community time to organize to oppose the deals.

Some state and local governments evade open-meetings laws that require elected bodies to publish agendas in advance, meet in public, have most discussions in public, and take votes in public. Instead, they create small subcommittees that they claim are exempt from the open-meetings law because the groups aren’t officially a quorum of the entire council or commission. Some officials use disappearing message apps and don’t record what was discussed at these small meetings. This tendency toward secrecy can be costly and discourage civic engagement. It can conceal expensive mistakes that outsiders might discover if they were given a chance to learn details about a government project. And it can put residents at a disadvantage should they believe they have a reason to question what their state and local governments are doing. For without information about what the government and their private corporate collaborators are doing, how can residents decide if there is some wrong they need to right? They are behind before they start.

The use and overuse of secrecy by the federal government has been well documented. But too little attention has been paid to the widespread use of secrecy at the state and local levels and the way it can protect government agencies, their employees, and private companies at the expense of ordinary people. Yet it is closest to home where most Americans are likely to encounter the effects of government incompetence, malfeasance, or fraud—from their governors, mayors, city and town councils, school boards, police departments, and local prosecutors. The secretive government culture that pervades many of these institutions makes it extremely difficult for people outside these institutions to investigate suspicions that they are receiving unfair or unjust treatment. They are unable to collect information—information that their taxes paid for—to help them find out if a private company is getting a good deal at their expense or their community’s expense, or if the government is concealing costly missteps of its own.

Secrecy has many purposes. In today’s sharply divided United States, it is also being used to unravel democracy. Some state and local public officials already are hiding plans to curtail voting rights, ban abortion, and limit other civil liberties, sometimes even after bills become law. And when the public can’t even get a basic understanding of what is going on, they don’t know about threats in the making and are unprepared to fight back.

Secrecy in state and local government agencies has been on the rise for several years—in contracting, in land-use decisions, in public universities and charter schools, in law enforcement—just about anywhere you look.

There are no definitive national studies on the scope of state and local secrecy, but the studies, surveys, and anecdotal evidence that do exist strongly suggest state and local government secrecy has increased since early in the twenty-first century.

A report by the National Freedom of Information Coalition, a federation of state-based open-government advocacy organizations, in 2013 found a greater inclination among government officials for gaming the system than complying with existing disclosure and accountability laws.¹³

More than a decade later, it only seems to be getting worse.

It’s been going on for decades, really, but it’s accelerated the past ten years, David Cuillier told the Associated Press in 2023. Cuillier heads a research and advocacy center at the University of Florida that evaluates trends in government transparency and secrecy.

A review by Cuillier of data provided by MuckRock—a nonprofit news site that files and shares public records requests—found that between 2010 and 2021, local governments’ compliance with records requests dropped from 63 percent to 42 percent, the Associated Press reported.¹⁴

Analyses by Victoria Baranetsky, a First Amendment lawyer who examined state and local secrecy in an article in Columbia Journalism Review, found similar trends and said they can be tied to private companies that insist on secrecy from governments with whom they have entered into a contract. The private companies often seek to retain control of the different types of data they collect in the course of their work for the government, not just data about the private company, Baranetsky found. "Over the last few years there has been a rise in corporate secrecy that has stymied access to information important to the public good.

This elevation of corporate control over information gathered for the government is a threat to the public and to democratic principles, she said. Without access to this information, society becomes at risk of being unable to verify the truth, at the same time that artificial intelligence makes the proliferation of false information easier than ever. . . . More transparency is needed than ever."¹⁵ Baranetsky is general counsel for The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization that published my State Secrets series in 2016 and 2017.¹⁶

The steady increase in the outsourcing of traditional government functions is a major contributor to the growth of secrecy in state and local governments. Outsourcing began in earnest during the 1980s when President Ronald Reagan was attempting to reduce the size of the federal government.¹⁷ State and local governments began to mirror the federal effort and started to do their own outsourcing, stepping up their efforts to farm out various government functions, from trash collection to driving a school bus. The growth in outsourcing intensified the tendency toward secrecy because it removed the government from having direct control over information in the custody of the outside contractor. Now when some state and local government officials provide budget information—often unclear and difficult to understand—they might include a list of government contracts and who won them, but do not explain why the contracts were awarded or provide other details. The unrelenting increase in outsourcing is likely to make matters worse when it comes to government secrets, said Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.¹⁸

The more that you have privatization of traditional government functions, the more . . . it can be used to subvert democratic accountability, he said.

In the Public Interest, a nonprofit that pushes for greater transparency in government expenditures, conducted three studies about the nexus between growing secrecy and government contractors. From 2012 to 2022, the research organization found, the privatization of government functions put formerly public information out of public reach in state and local governments—and created less accountability about tax-funded government spending.¹⁹

While taxpayers might still have access to basic spending information that is held by the state—such as the total dollar value paid to the company—they lose access to public information that is held by the company. Without details about contractors’ expenditures—such as executives’ salaries and the services provided by subcontractors—the public cannot prevent irresponsible spending, In the Public Interest said in its 2015 report.²⁰

The decline of local media has also had a big impact on what kind of information is available to the public. As more and more local news organizations go out of business or scale back their coverage, there are fewer independent watchdogs to keep track of what is happening in state and local governments.²¹ So it often falls to a resident interested in a local issue—development, schools, traffic, crime—to bear the burden and cost of trying to protect the public’s right to know. And if that person is thwarted but wants to keep pushing, they face many hurdles: governments often tell them it will cost thousands of dollars to extract the information, or they will flat out turn down the request for information.²² The only way to challenge such a denial to provide information is to use an often cumbersome and costly appeals process.

In some cases, the same people who turned down the requests for information in the first place are the ones who hear the appeal, which is a clear conflict of interest. In many states without any sort of internal appeal process, the only recourse is to go to court. For many people, the prospect of court marks the end of the battle. Suing the government can be prohibitively expensive. The information blockade is allowed to continue.

Vital decisions affecting our rights, liberties, and policies are made behind closed doors or even through black box processes, said Wizner of the Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. An overwhelming number of records are classified as secret, he said. But the presumption should be the opposite. And there has to be justification for withholding information in a democracy. There can be justification—a threat to community security, for instance, that could be exacerbated by revealing the floor plan of the electric substation—but often information is held back for no apparent legal reason.²³

That was the case in Charleston, West Virginia. When residents wanted to find out whether the local water company was prepared to deal with deadly chemical spills, they hit the information blockade. West Virginia American Water, a private, state-regulated company performing a public function, refused to supply the information to a local activist group, Advocates for a Safe Water System, after a deadly spill in 2014 fouled the water supply in the Elk River. In one document the company eventually handed over, the names of public officials and the public utilities commission’s toll-free 800 number were blacked out and labeled Highly Sensitive Confidential Information.²⁴ Such over-classification of documents and labeling of them as confidential or secret is a fairly common practice. Occasionally, judges have taken notice. William Alsup, a federal judge in California, wrote in a 2019 case that companies frequently cite a need to keep information secret, even information that contain[s] standard fare blather and even publicly available information.²⁵ He could easily have been referring to West Virginia American Water’s decision to withhold the names of public officials and the state public utilities commission’s toll-free number, public information that presumably exists so that people can actually contact the utilities commission and obtain information from this arm of the state government.

The legal system enables secrecy by frequently siding with private companies that want to keep secrets about information that is paid for by the government. The U.S. Supreme Court has led the way, taking several steps to dismantle transparency at the state and local levels. In 2013, the high court said the Virginia government—and thus other states, if they chose to—had to provide public information only to state residents citizens.²⁶ The unanimous opinion said that Virginia was not interfering with interstate commerce, which would be illegal under the Constitution, nor was it violating the Constitution’s privileges and immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. That clause provides for equal treatment of all U.S. citizens in such matters as entering into a contract, suing, being sued, and giving evidence. The Virginia Freedom of Information Act did not meet any of these tests that the high court, in an opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, applied to the case. Thus the justices decided that what Virginia was doing in limiting public information to state citizens was acceptable.

But the