Auburn won’t divulge financials for institute with Alabama Power ties

Auburn University paying controversial PR firm Matrix more than $1 million a year has raised eyebrows.Photo byLagniappe staff

Auburn University’s McCrary Institute was founded with a grant from Alabama Power, is named for a former Alabama Power CEO, employs and is advised by former Alabama Power executives, and spends roughly $1 million a year on two consulting firms with close ties to Alabama Power, but the university refuses to detail the institute’s ongoing funding sources or whether the state’s largest utility continues supplying money to it through a charitable foundation.

Known formally as the McCrary Institute for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Security, the institute located in a small suite of offices inside Auburn’s Samuel Ginn College of Engineering is rather opaque when it comes to questions of where its money comes from. The university will only speak in generalities regarding McCrary’s day-to-day funding and has denied requests to see its budget.

McCrary’s signing of a $66,700-per-month agreement with the controversial consulting firm Matrix LLC this past October has also raised questions from faculty as to why the institute is paying the firm so much and to what end.

Lagniappe has learned McCrary signed an agreement with another consulting firm with close ties to Alabama Power last October as well.

Auburn’s Executive Director of Public Affairs Jennifer Adams recently confirmed the Alexandria, Virginia-based Hawthorn Group is also now under contract with the university’s McCrary Institute for $10,000 a month plus travel expenses. Between Matrix and Hawthorn, the institute is now shelling out nearly $1 million a year to ostensibly shape its messaging, manage media and plot strategy.

Hawthorn has worked with Auburn for more than a decade, pulling nearly $1 million from the university since 2012, according to public expenditures records, but payments have ramped up considerably in the past two years and the new contract appears to be its first with monthly payments.

Where the money is coming from to fund these two firms’ work and McCrary’s staff, however, is something the taxpayer-supported university has so far refused to divulge in any detail.

Lagniappe requested annual budgets for the McCrary Institute since its creation a decade ago to ascertain its funding structure as well as annual expenditures, but that open records request was denied, with Auburn stating, “We have not been able to locate other responsive records to your open records requests.”

Asked if that means the institute operates without a published budget and if that would be an unusual circumstance, Adams did not respond.

The McCrary Institute was founded in 2014 with a $10 million donation from the Alabama Power Foundation, which IRS 990 filings show came to McCrary through the Auburn University Foundation in successive $2 million payments over five years. The Alabama Power Foundation has continued to donate heavily to the Auburn University Foundation each year since then — giving more than $870,000 in 2022 for instance — but the university will not say whether any of that money continues flowing to McCrary from the state’s largest public utility.

Overall, the Alabama Power Foundation donated more than $15 million to the Auburn University Foundation from 2014 to 2022, the last year for which 990s are available.

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