Local officials in Florida decided Friday to send back the surprise $10 million Coconut Road earmark that Alaska U.S. Rep. Don Young slipped into the 2005 highway bill when he was chairman of the House Transportation Committee.
Young had directed that the money be spent to study an interchange on Interstate 75 near Fort Myers, Fla., abutting land owned by a major Young campaign contributor, real estate developer Daniel Aronoff.
The money wasn't sought by local officials. Republican Rep. Connie Mack, the congressman from the district, said he was unaware of the earmark when it surfaced last year.
Transportation planners in Lee County, the Gulf Coast community where the interchange would be located, voted 10-3 Friday to ask Congress to let them use the money instead to widen I-75.
Neither Young, Alaska's 18-term Republican House member, nor his lawyers responded to requests for comment Friday.
But Young has always maintained that he earmarked the money for the Coconut Road interchange because residents told him they wanted it in 2005 when he attended one of their community transportation meetings.
Young was approached by leaders at Florida Gulf Coast University, which wanted the interchange for better access, said Young's chief of staff, Mike Anderson. School officials also wanted it to serve as a demonstration project for a sophisticated transportation hub that could be monitored with cameras in an emergency.
"It's captured in three words: 'Hurricane evacuation route,'" Anderson said.
But if the community doesn't want it, Anderson said, Young believes they're free to give the money back.
"There's nothing nefarious here. If they want to return the money back to DOT, they can do that," Anderson said.
But that's a different position than Young himself took in 2006 -- before he came under scrutiny for his earmarks and before the FBI began investigating his relationship with the Alaska oil-field service company Veco. Veco is at the center of the broad political corruption investigation in Alaska.
In January 2006, Young warned county officials that they had to use the money as he directed, according to an account in the News-Press of Fort Myers. He wrote that the $10 million in federal money could not be used for any other road projects, as Lee County's transportation leaders wanted. Mack wrote a similar letter, telling the officials that if they rejected the money, future funding for other projects in their region could be jeopardized.
Local residents complained that the interchange would increase traffic in their neighborhoods, while environmentalists voiced concern about the effects on ground water if the interchange spawned more development. Lee County Commissioner Ray Judah said at the time that neither Young's nor Mack's threats could convince him to take the money.
He said the urgency for an interchange was a ploy from Agripartners, a development partnership that owns 4 square miles of land east of I-75. An interchange could provide access to the land.
"What we have here is an attempt by a property owner trying to steer public policy to enhance the value of his land," Judah told the News-Press. Instead, he urged that I-75 be widened, the policy adopted Friday by the Lee County Metropolitan Planning Organization.
In the two weeks before and after the earmark was inserted in the spending bill, Young's campaign and political action committee collected contributions from Aronoff, Aronoff's lobbyist, as well as a number of other Florida business executives, many of whom attended a fundraiser in Bonita Springs. The Florida donations, mainly from real estate interests, totaled more than $40,000.
Carla Brooks Johnston, the head of the county planning group, had commissioned a researcher to trace how the appropriation was designated and whether the county could use it for another purpose. The researcher found that Young or one of his aides changed language in the earmark after Congress had already voted on it, adding the words "Coconut Road" as it was being cleaned up to be sent to President Bush, Johnston said.
"At a time when the highway needs are growing enormously and our highway funds are shrinking rapidly, people are bothered by this," she said.
Anderson offered no explanation for the late change in the earmark's language.
Florida Gulf Coast University's Washington lobbyist is listed as Rick Alcalde, a Young campaign donor and the same lobbyist who worked in Washington on behalf of Aronoff's firm, the Landon Companies.
Since coming under scrutiny and hiring the law firm of Akin Gump to represent him, Young has returned more than $2,600 in in-kind contributions from the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Bonita Springs, which hosted the fundraiser.
In 2005, he reimbursed Corporate Flight, a Michigan firm that flew him to the region that February, for $3,422 in flight costs.
The $286.4 billion transportation bill included $24.2 billion for 6,371 special earmarks, said Keith Ashdown of the nonpartisan government watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense. It was "one of the most earmarked bills I've ever seen," Ashdown said. At least $2.5 billion of that money went toward projects in the districts of four top GOP lawmakers at the time, including Young.
This story was reported and written by Erika Bolstad, who reports for the Daily News from McClatchy Newspapers' Washington bureau, Greg Gordon of McClatchy Newspapers and Daily News reporter Richard Mauer.
