Group Sues For Access To State Records From Carrier Deal

An Indiana consumer advocacy group is suing over access to public records that could shed light on how the Carrier company reached a deal with the state and President Donald Trump late last year.

The Citizens Action Coalition, or CAC, requested communications in December from the run-up to Trump’s Carrier announcement: that the company would take state tax incentives in exchange for saving about 700 jobs slated for layoffs.

After months of back-and-forth, CAC executive director Kerwin Olson says, the state replied that it couldn’t fulfill the request as written because it wasn’t specific enough.

“We asked for only two weeks’ worth of communications between just a handful of parties, so I’m not sure how we narrow that request any more than we already had,” he says.

The CAC’s request focused on the administration of then-Gov. and Vice President-elect Mike Pence, Trump, Carrier and its parent company, United Technologies.

Details of how they reached their deal in November have never been disclosed.

“Clearly [the records] display something that the state doesn’t want us to see,” Olson says.

The CAC’s lawsuit alleges the state is violating its own public records law.

A spokeswoman for Gov. Eric Holcomb says the state is “aware of the complaint and will review it.”