In the Transportation and Housing & Urban Development appropriations bill, Rep. Jo Bonner joined Sen. Jeff Sessions in securing a $735,000 earmark for the Mobile Downtown Airport for ramp rehabilitation and drain repair.
The Mobile Regional Airport Authority employed Van Scoyoc Associates to lobby Congress; according to page two of their 2007 mid-year report, Van Scoyoc lobbied on the "Transportation, Treasury, Housing & Urban Development..." appropriations, including "airport infrastructure and service issues."
As noted in this post, the employees and the PAC of Van Scoyoc Associates have contributed $18,736 to Bonner's campaigns since 2002.
Continue readingBonner earmark #8
Rep. Jo Bonner joined Sen. Richard Shelby in securing $470,000 in the Commerce, Justice & Science appropriations bill for the Mobile County Commission to acquire interoperable communications systems.
The Mobile County Commission had Washington representation -- the lobbying firm Van Scoyoc Associates. They lobbied on the "Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, FY 2008," according to page 3 of this disclosure report.
Van Scoyoc employees have contributed $16,250 to Rep. Bonner's campaigns between April 2002 and November 2007, according to Open Secrets. Van Scoyoc also has a PAC, which contributed an additional $1,472 in 2006 and ...
Continue readingBonner Earmark #7
In the Labor, Department of Health and Human Services and Education appropriations bill, Rep. Jo Bonner secured a $199,000 earmark for the Fairhope Center for the Arts in Bay Minette, Ala., for arts education programs, including purchase of equipment. The Fairhope Center for the Arts doesn't seem to have hired a federal lobbyist. The organization forms 990 aren't available on Guidestar.org, so I wasn't able to double check the numbers.
I also looked up the city of Bay Minette--they had a lobbyist in 2004 but none more recently.
Sen. Richard Shelby co-sponsored the earmark.
Continue readingBonner Earmark #6
Rep. Jo Bonner attached his name to an earmark originally requested by Sen. Richard Shelby for $1,372,000 for the City of Mobile's Transit System, known as the Wave Transit System.
The City of Mobile employed the firm Miller, Hamilton, Snider & Odom who lobbied on "appropriations issues." Their employees have contributed $6,500 to Bonner between 2002 and 2006. Nothing from 2007, when the earmark was included in the Transportation and Housing & Urban Development bill.
Continue readingBonner Earmark #5
Rep. Jo Bonner earmarked $245,000 in the Transportation, Housing & Urban Development appropriations bill to the "City of Jackson for construction of a building in conjunction with a 240-acre industrial development park."
I came up empty looking for this one -- the City of Jackson employed the Bloom Group (already encountered in this post), but doesn't seem to have hired a lobbyist since then. I wasn't able to find out much about the industrial development park, but through the magic of Nexis found a December 18, 2007 article from the Birmingham (Alabama) News by Mary Orndorff, which noted,
The ...Continue reading
Bonner earmark #4
Rep. Jo Bonner earmarked $245,000 for the Bay Area Food Bank for construction of a commercial-size kitchen. Bay Area Food Bank, which distributes food donated by grocery stores, restaurants and the like to soup kitchens and homeless shelters, doesn't have a federal lobbyist, according to the Senate Office of Public Records. To double check, I looked the organization up in Guidestar, a great resource for finding out about nonprofits--their forms 990 show no payments for lobbying. I also ran the names of the organization's executives and board members through OpenSecrets.org looking for campaign contributions, and found ...
Continue readingAnother Bonner Earmark, another lobbying link
Going for the low hanging fruit first (earmarks in EarmarkWatch.org). So let's look at the $141,000 that the Alabama School of Math and Science in Mobile, Ala., got in the Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Appropriations Act.
The school--a public, residential school for sophomores through seniors who are gifted in science and math--employed Capitol Link, a lobbying firm, from 2004 through 2007. During that time, there was no six-month period in which the school paid the firm more than $10,000, so it's impossible to tell from the disclosures how much the school spent ...
Continue readingAderholt’s bio: record levels, responsibility
I'm still looking mostly at the earmarks that Rep. Jo Bonner, R-Ala., has sponsored, but while I was looking at them, I came across the official biography that Rep. Robert B. Aderholt, another Alabama Republican, has on his Web site. The language is instructive:
Congressman Aderholt serves on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, as a member of the Homeland Security Subcommittee, the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Subcommittee and the Commerce Justice, Science and Related Agencies Subcommittee....Congressman Aderholt has continued to work toward bringing record levels of funding to Alabama for transportation projects. Congressman Aderholt campaigned on a ...
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Following Bonner’s earmarks
Let's start with this earmark, because it's already in EarmarkWatch.org, and hence easy to research. A few interesting notes...
Providence Hospital is the beneficiary of the earmark (the final amount of the Earmark was $1.2 million, not the $1.5 million that EarmarkWatch, which draws on older data, shows). One of their two lobbying firms is Cassidy & Associates. In the midyear 2007 lobbying disclosure filing, the firm disclosed that the specific issue on which they lobbied was "National Defense Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2008-healthcare." (See page two of the form).
I hopped over to OpenSecrets ...
Continue readingInspector General launches probe of Traffic.com contracts
Transportation's Inspector General has launched an investigation of the Transportation Technology Innovation and Demonstration program--at the request of a pair of members of Congress, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y.--to determine whether the program, as administered by the Federal Highway Administration, fulfilled the goals set for it by Congress and whether FHWA met competitive procurement requirements that "intended to expand the number of firms providing surveillance services."
A brief announcement is here and the full release is here.
Congress launched TTID (the original alphabet soup name for the program was ITIP -- the Intelligent Transportation ...
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