SUVs for Gulf cleanup? States run up questionable bills with BP recovery money AP: States have used much of the recovery cash on items that have little to do with the spill
NEW ORLEANS — Tasers. Brand-new SUVs. A top-of-the-line iPad. A fully loaded laptop. In the year since the Gulf oil spill, officials along the coast have gone on a spending spree with BP money, dropping tens of millions of dollars on gadgets and other gear — much of which had little to do with the cleanup, an Associated Press investigation shows.
The oil giant opened its checkbook while the crisis was still unfolding last spring and poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Gulf Coast communities with few strings attached.
In sleepy Ocean Springs, Miss., reserve police officers got Tasers. The sewer department in nearby Gulfport bought a $300,000 vacuum truck that never sucked up a drop of oil. Biloxi, Miss., bought a dozen SUVS. A parish president in Louisiana got herself a deluxe iPad, her spokesman a $3,100 laptop. And a county in Florida spent $560,000 on rock concerts to promote its oil-free beaches.
Florida's tourism agency sent chunks of a $32 million BP grant as far away as Miami-Dade and Broward counties on the state's east coast, which never saw oil from the disaster.
Some officials also lavished lucrative contracts on campaign donors and others. A Florida county commissioner's girlfriend, for instance, opened up a public relations firm a few weeks after the spill and soon landed more than $14,000 of the tiny county's $236,000 cut of BP cash for a month's work.
See, you can't trust goverment with money. They go and build monuments like the Taj Mahal in JeffCo. Like they did with the tobacco settlement and continue to do with confiscated drug monies.
Thomas Sowell: There are no solutions, just trade-offs.
See, you can't trust goverment with money. They go and build monuments like the Taj Mahal in JeffCo. Like they did with the tobacco settlement and continue to do with confiscated drug monies.
