"You've got to remember that you're
talking to(VOTING for)
a guy
that voted to drill
in the Evergladeswhen I was in the Legislature during the 1970s oil crisis,"
-John Mica
West Deltona
US House Representative
CHAIRMAN OF THE TRANSPORTATION COMMITTEE
WHO BROUGHT US THE INFAMOUS
BRIDGE TO NOWHERE AKA
SHOVE AN UNWANTED $850000 ROAD STUDY DOWN VOLUSIA COUNTY'S THROAT AKA
COCONUT ROAD I-75 INTERCHANGE FUNDING FLAP

A few days after Democratic candidate Diane Benson wrote to committee heads Rep. Doc Hastings, D-Wash., and Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, D-Ohio, urging an investigation; the group Taxpayers for Common Sense made the same request.

And on the eve of a today’s Metropolitan Planning Organization meeting to consider rejecting the earmark, a legal opinion solicited by AgriPartners says the earmark is perfectly legitimate.

Florida legislators have said the Coconut earmark was a generic pledge to improve I-75 when they voted to approve the massive federal transportation bill in 2005. An independent investigation requested by Sanibel vice mayor Carla Johnston, who chairs the Metropolitan Planning Organization, claimed the earmark was altered after it got Congressional approval and before it landed on President George W. Bush’s desk.

The Taxpayers letter, like numerous local and national news accounts, traces activities back to a Southwest Florida fundraiser held a few weeks before the bill’s passage. The event, hosted by the Southwest Florida Transportation Initiative, put $40,000 into Young’s campaign account.

Part-time Naples resident Daniel Aronoff — owner of AgriPartners — was one of many Southwest Florida developers and landowners and SWFTI members who paid $500 to spend time with the man who had chaired the House transportation committee. Attorney Jack Schenendorf is former chief of staff for that committee. In a statement sent to MPO members Thursday he says it’s not unusual for the recording clerk to make changes between the time a bill passes and when it hits the President’s desk.

Schenendorf also said there’s slim chance the bill could be changed to dedicate the $10 million to the interstate instead of the interchange.

“If the funding for the Coconut Road project were to be repealed, Florida would lose $10 million,” Schenendorf wrote. “There have been three separate attempts to pass technical corrections legislation. Each attempt has failed.”

The debate is heating up as MPO members meet today to consider eliminating the Coconut study, again. When former deputy assistant secretary for the labor department Darla Letourneau did an investigation reporting the timing of the earmark change and outlining the technical corrections process on Aug. 17 the MPO voted to eliminate the Coconut study.

The vote came without required public notice and committee consideration, however, so the debate must take place anew this morning.

In a statement made Thursday in conjunction with Schenendorf’s opinion — the first word from Aronoff on the issue — AgriPartners spokeswoman Liz Hirst said the opinion was requested after Letourneau’s non-authoritative report.

“The interchange has been part of a long-term state transportation plan for more than a dozen years,” the statement says.

Aronoff owns 4,000 acres at the potential interchange site, including the 1,200 acres through which an interchange would run.

Mention of a Coconut interchange was actually made well back into the 1980’s, in the state’s original I-75 master plan and various other planning studies. It did not appear in 30-year construction plans, however, before the earmark.

At this morning’s meeting the MPO will first be asked to rescind the Aug. 17 votes to eliminate the Coconut study. They could then choose to immediately take the votes again, since advertising and committee requirements have been met.

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita caused over
9 million gallons of oil
to be spilled into the
Gulf of Mexico in
2005.
The U.S. Coast Guard is the lead government agency for enforcing the Clean Water Act,
and they classify any oil spill over 100,000 gallons as a "major" spill.
Every year,
there are hundreds of oil spills.
DNV's report doesn't mention who?!?!!!
characterized this event as "minor."

Guess Who!!!!!
Oil brokers sex scandal may affect(?!?!?) drilling debate
By H. Josef Hebert
Associated PressPublished: Friday, September 12, 2008 7:11 PM EDT
WASHINGTON
— A scandal involving sex, drugs and —
uh, offshore oil drilling.

  Drill-happy Mica casts oil-spill blame? Not slick
...when asking whether it was really fair to place the blame on the White House
— and not even the oil company involved —
Mica shot back:

"Well, they gave Bush holy hell for Katrina after only four or five days."
Is that was this is really all about?
Trying to turn BP's blowout into Obama's Katrina?

As I said before, I think there's a lot of blame to go around
— from current regulators to BP, neither one of which seems able to clean up their own mess.
But anyone who thinks the
politicians who've been leading the drill-baby-drill cheers aren't at the center of this oil slick
as well needs a reality check.
It runs in the family:

His brother,
David MICA,
is the executive director of the Florida Petroleum Council.
STRANGE that John Mica
claimed on C-SPAN
that he didn't know anything about this report
issued seven years ago!

Report adds to doubts about key oil rig safety equipment

Les Blumenthal | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: May 06, 2010 07:54:08 PM

WASHINGTON — As offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere boomed,
a 2003 report warned that the industry wasn't taking time to find and fix the problems that commonly plagued blowout preventers —
the supposedly failsafe mechanisms designed to stop oil spills such as the one now threatening the gulf coast.

The report,
delivered at an industry conference
seven years ago
and uncovered by the office of Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.,
was co-authored by the then-director of technology development for Transocean,
the company that owned the Deepwater Horizon rig that caught fire on April 20 and sank two days later.

orlandosentinel.com/news/politics/os-beaven-mica-oil-20100528,0,6078822.story

OrlandoSentinel.com

Beaven hopes oil spill will tar Mica

By Mark K. Matthews, Orlando Sentinel Washington Bureau

7:41 PM EDT, May 28, 2010

WASHINGTON — The Gulf of Mexico oil spill may be ultimately disastrous for Florida beaches, but the oil-well blowout could be a boon for long-shot congressional candidate Heather Beaven, a Democrat taking on nine-term U.S. Rep. John Mica, R- Winter Park.

Since the spill, Beaven repeatedly has slammed Mica for his longstanding support of offshore oil rigs and said it was "outrageous" that a powerful legislator with ties to the oil industry could refer to the mess, as he did during a recent congressional hearing, as the " Obama oil spill."

The attacks have drawn needed attention to Beaven, a political rookie from Flagler County with little name recognition and campaign cash on hand of just $36,000 — a rounding error compared with the $1 million that Mica has socked away to protect his Central Florida seat.

"I've been getting a lot of positive feedback," said Beaven, who said that people are "in shock" about the spill and share her anger with Washington officials.

Mica remains heavily favored — the nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates the race as "solid Republican" — but Beaven could gain traction as the April 20 explosion continues to spew as many as 19,000 barrels of oil daily into the Gulf. Though no oil has yet blackened Florida, officials have warned that Panhandle beaches are at risk — and that loop currents could eventually carry oil to the fragile Florida Keys and the state's east coast.

A Mason-Dixon poll from early May showed 55 percent of Floridians opposed offshore drilling, while 35 percent supported it. A year earlier, those numbers were reversed.

"I think the polling is showing a seismic shift among Floridians," said Mark Ferrulo, executive director of Progress Florida and a longtime drilling opponent. "The potential economic disaster we are looking at in Florida is really going to change the politics of the issue."

For years, Mica has backed offshore drilling — even when the rest of the state's congressional delegation opposed it. "You've got to remember that you're talking to a guy that voted to drill in the Everglades when I was in the Legislature during the 1970s oil crisis," said Mica.

It runs in the family: His brother, David, is the executive director of the Florida Petroleum Council.

Mica says he supported drilling long before David Mica joined the group — and that the current spill proves his position that "politically based" buffer zones don't work.

"Limits offshore in Florida, we've seen now, are meaningless. You can do [drilling] 100, 75 or 200 [miles from Florida]. This incident was 45 miles off Louisiana," said Mica, who in 2006 voted to lift a 25-year-old ban on offshore drilling on both coasts.

Mica said it's more important to focus on "sound science, safe technology and checking depths and currents" when assessing where to drill.

Mica said the cozy relationship between the oil industry and federal overseers has led to lax oversight of oil rigs by the Minerals Management Service — something he said has been a problem for both the Bush and Obama administrations.

"You have to have the highest separation between the people that are doing the drilling and the people who are granting the permits," Mica said. But beyond his joining in a September 2006 hearing that looked at "management irresponsibility and lack of accountability" at the Interior Department, there is little evidence he has made this an issue in the past.

Meanwhile, the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics reports that Mica has received more than $100,000 from the oil and gas industry through the years — a point Beaven hammers.

"He's speaking out of both sides of his mouth," she said.

She said that type of double-speak is what drove her into the race.

"I don't think we have enough diversity of perspective in Washington … They see the world the same, no matter the party," said Beaven, 41, a former Navy cryptologist and mother of two who runs a nonprofit company that helps keep at-risk teenagers in school. She wears her lack of political experience as a badge of honor.

Inexperience has its drawbacks, however. Early in the race, her campaign blasted an e-mail to supporters that used a three-letter acronym (that starts with "what" and ends in an obscenity) to show shock at new job figures that found Flagler County had the highest unemployment rate in the state.

Beaven quickly apologized for the blue streak, but not the sentiment. "As for the occasional passionate outburst … well, at least you'll know we are still alive," she wrote on her campaign blog afterward.

Now, Beaven wants to use that energy to keep the spill issue alive. She said she plans to report to Louisiana for coastline "clean-up duty" this weekend.

Mark K. Matthews can be reached at mmatthews@orlandosentinel.com or 202-824-8222.

Former speaker gets pricey perks
By JAKE SHERMAN & JOHN BRESNAHAN | 12/21/09 3:53 AM EST
U.S. taxpayers are spending more than $40,000 per month on office space, staff, cell phones and a leased SUV for former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, even as he works as a lobbyist for private corporations and foreign governments.

The payments are perfectly legal under a federal law that provides five years of benefits for former speakers — but only if Hastert never makes use of his government-funded perks in the course of his lobbying work. Ethics experts say that sort of separation is hard to maintain.

Hastert “has to be meticulous in his schedule to make sure there is no bleed from his publicly subsidized office into his private practice,” said Kenneth Gross, a former Federal Election Commission general counsel and congressional ethics authority. Steve Ellis, vice president of the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, called the arrangement “really concerning.”

“It is specifically prohibited — federal dollars can’t be spent on lobbying operations,” Ellis said. “We are paying for his staff [and] for a car, and we need to be very sure that he isn’t spending a dime of that money on lobbying operations. “That all needs to be above board, in the clear and transparent. And it’s not.”

Hastert declined to discuss the situation with POLITICO.

But his spokesman, Brad Hahn, said the former 11-term congressman is in full compliance with rules covering how the federal funds are spent. Hahn said Hastert’s lobbying work “is completely separate [from the office of the former speaker], and he keeps them completely separate.”

The federal government pays $6,300 per month to rent an office for Hastert and his staff in Yorkville, Ill. Hahn conceded that Hastert has no other office set aside for lobbying work in Illinois but said that the former speaker travels to Washington frequently for work.

In addition to the office, the government pays the salaries of three of Hastert’s assistants in his Illinois office — each more than $100,000 in 2008. Bryan Hardin, Hastert’s administrative assistant (the title often used by a chief of staff in a congressional office) earned $138,000.

“The office of the former speaker has specific functions that are tied to Denny being the former speaker, but he does not receive any compensation and is not an employee,” Hahn said. “There are three staffers that carry out the functions — archiving, correspondence, speaking engagements — and working with the Hastert Center” at Wheaton College.

House disbursement records show that the office is spending an additional $2,000 per month in taxpayer money on a consulting firm, Burnham Strategies, that is run by several of Hastert’s former staffers, including Hahn. Altogether, the firm was paid $30,000 through Sept. 30 of this year, records show.

Taxpayers also make the lease payments on a 2008 GMC Yukon and pay for a satellite TV subscription, cell phones, laptops and other expenses.

Since Hastert opened the Illinois office in early 2008, records show, the government has paid for five computer monitors at a total cost of $1,125, spent almost $1,300 for desks and shelled out an additional $4,460 for Hewlett-Packard laptops. Other expenditures include $745 for a printer and about $620 to transport a clock.
Hastert, who served in the House for almost 21 years, signed on with Dickstein Shapiro in 2008. He is now a registered foreign agent, representing in Washington the interests of the governments of Turkey and Luxembourg. He also lobbies on behalf of three U.S. corporations.

Democrats enacted new lobbying restrictions in 2007 in a bid to curb the influence of registered lobbyists after Hastert’s Republican colleagues were entangled in a slew of ethical and legal scandals. These restrictions curbed gifts from lobbyists to lawmakers and lawmaker travel paid for by federally registered lobbyists, and they instituted a period during which former members could not lobby Congress. But those measures do not prohibit what Hastert is doing now.

Under a federal statute enacted in 1974, former House speakers are entitled to an allowance to set up and run an office, a payment that includes salaries for several aides. In 1995, then newly empowered Republicans — who had seized control of the House for the first time in four decades — put a five-year deadline on this allowance, a move aimed at former Speaker Tom Foley (D-Wash.), who had lost his reelection bid the previous November.

The formula for calculating the allowance given to former speakers is based on that used by current lawmakers. Former speakers are prohibited from taking the funds only if they take some other “appointive or elected office or position” in the federal or D.C. government, according to a 2007 Congressional Research Service report.

Hahn said Hastert is authorized to spend as much as $840,000 annually to run his office but has not used all the money made available to him by Congress. “He’s worked on a nonpaid basis, but as a former speaker, [Hastert] helped out with the Chicago Olympic bid, Advance Illinois [an education program] and Illinois Works,” a jobs program, Hahn added. “These are nonlobbying and nonpaid. These are duties he was asked to help [on as] official causes — because he was a former speaker and to add his expertise.”

Hastert is not the first former speaker to become a lobbyist. Foley worked as a lobbyist for Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld after serving as U.S. ambassador to Japan, representing clients such as AT&T, Walt Disney Co., CSX Corp. and the State University of New York. Jim Wright, a Texas Democrat who was speaker from 1987 to 1989, was a consultant for Arch Petroleum Co., although it is unclear if he was ever a registered lobbyist, said the Office of the Historian of the House. Other former speakers, including Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich, never registered as lobbyists.

When he retired from Congress two years ago, Hastert told an Illinois newspaper he would go back home and unwind from nearly three decades in public office. Hastert predicted, “I don’t really see myself as a lobbyist and would probably not do that at all.”