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JANESVILLE — A proposed ban on non-disclosure agreements was voted down by a Rock County committee on Thursday.
The proposal, drafted by County Board Supervisor Philip Gorman of Beloit, would have banned county staff from entering into NDAs. All four members of the county’s planning and development committee in attendance — County Board Supervisors Erica Boehlke, Chris Cullen RJ Sutterlin and Bill Wilson — voted against the resolution.
County Board Supervisor Yuri Rashkin, the fifth member of committee, was excused from the meeting.
Concerns about stifling economic development outweighed concerns of shielding information from the public in NDAs.
Gorman brought the resolution out of concerns over the preliminary town of Beloit Meta data center in which Rock County Economic Development Manager James Otterstein has been under public scrutiny for entering into an NDA with Cambrin LLC/Project Cornmaze in February 2025.
Information about the project started filtering out to the public in recent weeks.
“If you go right to a vote and vote this down, it will really, really look like” the county is “fine with secret data center projects being talked about between public staff and local communities. This is just not a good look,” Gorman said.
Gorman has said throughout the week that it was his intent to start the discussion and then scale back as necessary.
“I understand there was an incongruity with the resolution and what I was proposing. I understand why people might have thought that this may have been heavy-handed,” Gorman said after the meeting.
Cullen said the resolution was “fixing something that isn’t broke.”
Philip Gorman
He said he didn’t feel as though anything went wrong with NDAs that the county has signed and that it “wasn’t a coincidence” that guardrails were desired when a data center was in the works. He said he “signed a bunch of NDAs” in his career and saw others sign them, with the results always being “positive.”
Cullen referred to the resolution as a possible hurdle to business coming to the county.
“Everyone talks about transparency. That’s B.S. Transparency is overrated,” Cullen said. “The hard discussions, the logical discussions, the arguing take place in private, and you have to look at the results.”
“I think we’re getting a carrot in front of the cart here in front of the horse and we’re going down a path that we don’t need to go down,” Cullen continued. “Show me something in the past that the county signed an NDA and it turned out badly. It just doesn’t make sense to me. You get what you pay for.”
Gorman said he believes in economic tools, especially tax-increment finance districts and tax-incremental districts, and is concerned about an inadvertent adverse effect on the public perception on those tools from NDAs.
“I’m worried about people associating these secrecies with economic policies,” Gorman said after the meeting.
The resolution has also been referred to the staff committee so it still has some life. The next staff committee meeting is April 6 at 4:30 p.m. No agenda for that meeting has been posted yet, but Gorman said he anticipates his resolution will come up at that meeting. He also anticipates amendments being made to the resolution at that meeting.
State ban
A bill which proposes a similar ban on NDAs statewide in cities, villages, towns and counties is making its way through the state legislature. Senate Bill 969, authored by state Sen. Andre Jacque (R-New Franken) seeks that ban across the state. Jacque told The 69 this week he anticipates it will make it to the Assembly in January.
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