It seems that the Bush administration just can't avoid rewarding its big corporate friends and campaign contributors with sweetheart deals, all on the back of us taxpayers. According to this article found on
Bloomberg News, the Bush administration is implicated in overpaying a prominent family in Florida for rights on the Everglades. Estimates of the land value were tripled from earlier assessments. The Interior Department report will be made available to the Finance Committee today and some of the key players will be testifying today.
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The report says that Ann Klee, a Bush administration political appointee, led the effort to reach an agreement with the Collier family shortly after she was named in January 2001 to administer the transition at the Interior Department between presidential administrations.
Klee and two Interior Department lawyers, Barry Roth and Peter Schaumberg, relied on a private sector estimate that recommended the $120 million payment after soliciting several appraisals, all of which were lower, Devaney's report says. It also says at least one career Interior Department official contested the high estimate.
"This is a sweetheart deal for one of the richest landowners in America" that would have been financed by taxpayers, said Keith Ashdown, who has tracked the case for three years as vice president of tax policy at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington-based advocacy group that opposes government waste.
Moreover, it appears that Congress gave the initial deal a thumbs down.
Funding for the transaction, which requires the approval of Congress, was removed from an appropriations measure in 2003 after lawmakers such as Montana Senator Max Baucus, the senior Democrat on the Finance Committee, said they feared it gave `abusive' tax deductions to the family. Baucus asked the inspector general to investigate the agreement on Dec. 16, 2003.
Not surprisingly, the Collier's contributed to the campaign of Jeb Bush and other Republicans.
Two weeks later, Republican Governor Jeb Bush, the president's brother, said he would run for re-election, leading critics to suggest he was seeking to burnish his environmental credentials through the Collier land transaction. ``They wanted to score some points for looking green before the election,''Ashdown said.
Members of the Collier family contributed more than $121,000 to Republican candidates in the last election cycle, including at least $5,000 to Jeb Bush, according to the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign donations.
According to the article, the Colliers' have been dealing with the government for over twenty years. But, it appears that there has been a favorable change in dealings under the current administration.
Under the Reagan administration, the Colliers traded swampland in Florida for property in Phoenix. In the mid-1990s, the family attempted to exchange mineral rights for closed military bases in California and Texas. A deal to swap mineral rights for a closed base in Homestead, Florida, failed in 2000 because career officials in President Bill Clinton's Interior department concluded the surplus base was worth more than the mineral rights.
The cash- and tax-break agreement announced by Bush in May 2002 is more generous than any of those earlier arrangements, Devaney's investigation found, according to the people who have read the 51-page report, which is accompanied by about 500 pages of supporting documents.
When Bush took office in January 2001, Klee, Roth and Schaumberg began reviewing Clinton-era appraisals of the Everglades rights, which ranged from a 1996 estimate of $154 million by the Minerals Management Service to $68 million by the same agency in 2000, the report says. The Colliers own about two- thirds of the mineral rights in the Everglades.
And the appraisals are estimated upward, despite evidence that the value should be much less.
The officials ordered a new appraisal in 2001 from the Minerals Management Service, which again valued the cumulative rights at $68 million. They then turned to the National Parks Service, which asked the U.S. Geological Survey for an estimate. The Geological Survey said the rights were worth between $5 million and $20 million.
Klee, Roth and Schaumberg finally hired Earth Science Associates, Inc., a Long Beach, California consultant to the oil and gas industry, to analyze the other estimates. The company's president, John Grace, concluded the rights were worth between $31 million and $140 million, according to the report.
The Interior Department used Grace's range of values to come up with the $120 million appraisal, according to Devaney's report. Klee, now the general counsel at the Environmental Protection Agency, didn't return a call seeking comment.