Ascension Parish President Clint Cointment told his parish council at an Aug. 20 meeting that his administration has nothing to hide about the Hyundai Steel deal — that every record is public and can be easily obtained through public records requests.
"There's no NDAs that exist today. There's nothing that's being withheld from the public," Cointment said at the meeting. "Happy to do any kind of public information request that you want. It's all public. Everything I do, everything is public. And so any information that's in an email or whatever, just ask for it.”
But that’s not what his own administration has told residents, advocacy groups, the courts or the Gulf States Newsroom in response to public records requests related to the nearly $6 billion steel mill project.
"That is not accurate," Ashley Gaignard, a local resident and organizer with Rural Roots Louisiana, said of Cointment's statement.
"To be honest, from the day that Trump went on TV and announced Hyundai, those records became public that day," she said, arguing the public's right to the records predates even the group's own request.
Anne Rolfes, with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, said she dropped what she was doing to watch the video the morning it circulated on social media.
"It was in such contrast to actually the truth," Rolfes said, noting her organization has been asking for the same records since September 2025. "It shows you how little he is listening to regular people anymore," she said.
Cointment's parish is a defendant in an ongoing lawsuit over these records and has refused, twice, to turn them over.
Documents ‘still haven’t been produced’
Rural Roots Louisiana and the Louisiana Bucket Brigade filed a public records request in December seeking NDAs, meeting minutes, bond records and grant applications related to the deal.
The parish denied it in February, citing a tax confidentiality statute, a 2024 economic development exemption and deliberative process privilege.
The two advocacy groups sued. In May, the 23rd Judicial District Court ruled in their favor, ordering the records released. Ascension Parish appealed, and that appeal is what's keeping the records out of public view.
It’s still pending, as Cointment tells constituents nothing is being withheld.
Pam Spees, a senior attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents Rural Roots Louisiana in the litigation, said the timeline undercuts Cointment's claim.
"The litigation itself is the best evidence that it is not accurate," Spees said of Cointment's statement. "They've requested these documents going back to last September, had to go to court to try to get a court ruling that the documents should be produced, got the court ruling, and then the documents still haven't been produced."
When the Gulf States Newsroom filed a similar records request, the parish denied that one, too, citing the same law. In response to the denial, the Gulf States Newsroom requested a copy of the “Declaration of Confidentiality” required by state law to exempt certain records related to industrial development.
The parish provided the Declaration, dated Jan. 8, 2026 — more than a year after Cointment signed an NDA related to the Hyundai deal, and more than nine months after the project was publicly announced by President Donald Trump and Gov. Jeff Landry at the White House. Trump thanked Cointment at the announcement.
Spees said that timing matters.
"The court specifically said you cannot retroactively apply those procedures in the public records law that allow for certain documents relating to economic development negotiations to be withheld for a limited period of time," she said. "That's exactly what they came back and tried to do after we sued them.”
Transparency concerns extend beyond the records fight. At a Sept. 1 public hearing on the plant's air permit, hundreds of residents pressed Hyundai-POSCO for firm, written commitments on local hiring and emissions days before the project's scheduled groundbreaking Friday (Sept. 4).
The air permit — more than 2,100 pages and still open for public comment through Sept. 15 — has not been approved yet.
Gov. Jeff Landry spoke at the groundbreaking event. Gulf States Newsroom investigations found dozens of elected officials signed NDAs under Landry, concealing negotiations behind large industrial developments, including the Hyundai Steel mill.
“The reason that this is happening in Louisiana is because we collectively made a decision of the kind of state we wanted to have,” Landry said at the groundbreaking, “the kind of state we wanted to be.”
At least 24 elected officials signed NDAs to keep details of the Hyundai negotiations secret before the project became public. Records show officials believed that signing the NDAs would allow them to circumvent public records laws.
‘Massive transfer of public money’
Emails obtained by the Gulf States Newsroom show that in a November 13, 2024 message, Hyundai Steel official Hyo Joon Park asked Jacob Ellis, Louisiana Economic Development’s (LED) director of business development, whether corresponding through his official government email could create "issues" under public records law and whether Park should "continue sending correspondence" to Ellis' private email. Records show Ellis had earlier been corresponding with the company through his personal Hotmail address.
Ellis responded that there were "no issues" using his LED email because an NDA was in place. He wrote that the agreement meant all project information would be redacted if it was ever captured in a public records request, and that LED was not obligated to share information related to an ongoing negotiation.
Another email exchange between Ellis and Bong Jun Yoon, a manager on Hyundai’s Green Steel planning team, reveals the state offered more than $2.6 billion in total incentives, far more than the $100 million performance-based grant for infrastructure that LED previously announced and amounting to nearly half the cost of the plant itself.
“It is way better for the Governor and our CEO to be aware of the same number no matter what,” Yoon wrote in the email memorializing discussions held behind closed doors.
All of it was negotiated, calculated and committed before anyone outside the circle of NDA signers knew the plant was coming.
Rolfes said that figure is the reason the fight over the records matters.
"People are very captured by the idea, and rightly so, of these non-disclosure agreements. And we in the public have been thinking about them and aware of them now really for months, in large part due to [the Gulf States Newsroom’s] reporting,” Rolfes said. “But we've all got to take the next step and understand why they matter."
The NDAs are used, Rolfes said, to shield a “massive transfer of public money” to private companies.
“They hide behind these NDAs and keep secret the fact that they're pocketing our money," she said.
Cointment framed the secrecy as standard competitive practice — necessary, he said, to keep Louisiana from tipping its hand to Georgia or Texas while it competed for the Hyundai Steel mill.
"In order to land these transformational projects, there has to be in those negotiations some ability to keep information from our other competitors," he told the council.
But the lawsuit isn't about the negotiating period. It's about records from a deal that's been public for a year and a half — and that a district court has already ordered the parish to disclose.
Gaignard said the drawn-out records fight has taken a toll beyond the legal question.
"It's disrespectful," she said. "Why is it the governor and the parish president feel they're spending this money like it's coming out of their personal wallet?"
The parish's briefing schedule for the appeal at the Louisiana First Circuit Court of Appeal has been set, with filings due this month and in October.
This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.
