In lieu of a mining industry – which Metrocrat environmentalists from the Twin Cities have been keeping nice and shut down for decades – the DFL substitutes a lot of state money to try to tease some economic activity out of the Iron Range.
Part of that, traditionally, is the cataract of money that has gone through the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board – more commonly called the IRRRB, but more accurately referred to as a “Taxpayer-financed DFL Slush Fund”.
The Strib’s Jennifer Bjorhus will never do lunch in Minneapolis again, having written this generally excellent piece. The IRRRB may not have reinvigorated The Range, but they sure have greased a lot of DFL palms (emphasis added):
For years, prominent Democratic candidates and political groups have used the obscure center tucked among hills and pines to canvass and raise money from small donors. DFL organizations, state and national, have paid the phone bank’s current and former owners about $80 million over the last decade, campaign records show.
The call center relocated to Eveleth in 2006 thanks in part to a $625,000 loan from a unique state agency called the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board (IRRRB). It doles out about $40 million each year, much of it from a tax on taconite, in the name of bolstering and diversifying the Range economy.
In its first incarnation, the call center on the Range failed to meet job targets, but the IRRRB gave the company, Meyer Associates, more time to repay the loan. It shut down anyway last year. The IRRRB let Meyer’s owner walk away and wrote off the $250,000 Meyer owed, records show.
Then a former Meyer executive reopened the phone bank under the name of his new company. The deal allowed him to pay $50,000 for equipment that had been purchased with $500,000 in IRRRB money. The largest political client for the call center remained the same: a group called Dollars for Democrats.
Of course there’s a rational explanation!
Officials at the IRRRB say jobs, not politics, are behind its dealings with the two firms.
“There’s still 100 people working there,” said former state Rep. Tom Rukavina, a DFLer who served on the IRRRB board for years and once hired Meyer to make calls for his own campaign. “That to me is a success story. Any time I went in that office people clapped and thanked me that they had a job.”
So should the taxpayer provide cut-rate financing and pennies-on-the-dollar equipment and infrastructure for the GOP? The NRA? Pro-Life Action? The Tea Party?
If the IRRRB weren’t a DFL slush fund, and an equal opportunity graft machine, you’d see some equal-opportunity gravy-training.
Somehow, there seems to be none…
So the state subsidizes a call center that runs fundraising and get-out-the-vote efforts for the DFL? Nice racket.
And the link:
http://www.startribune.com/politics/statelocal/294520931.html
Boys and girls, can you say “jail time”? I thought you could. Eighty million in revenue and can’t repay a million in loans and such? I think somebody’s got some ‘splainin’ to do.
Send the article to Mr. Mills. It will make great commercials in 2016.
So did Rukavina get a better than market rate for his campaign calls? I mean, obviously the overall operation couldn’t pay the bills, was it because too many of the local board members and powers that be got “discounts”?
I don’t think that it matters if Rukavina got a better than market rate for the call center services, Loren.
Whatever was paid for the calls was less than the cost (or the call center wouldn’t have lost money). Where did the extra value go? Providing work for people Rukavina favors. Even if he paid market rate, he received more than market value for what he paid. A call center in India that provided the same services at the same price would not have provided an opportunity for political patronage.
Great work when you can get it.
Question #2; if you found a company to do calling for Democrats and it goes bankrupt, does your capital count as an illegal campaign contribution? Because that does appear to be what it is.
Scandal? What Scandal? Now Mills’ hair, now THAT is an abomination! Move along you sheeple… Back to your gruel…
Stribpol noted the MNGOP is still in debt. A subsidized call center would be really great.
I would have asked Tommy Boy how many jobs would have been created by Polymet by now if he and his ignorant bottom feeding colleagues hadn’t been caving in to the environazis for the last decade. What a freaking tool!
Bosshoss: Sounds like Bastiat’s Broken Window Fallacy. I wish it was just liberals who engaged this kind of economic fraud, but GOP politicians do it, too.
“Putting this defense plant in my district will create hundreds or thousands of good paying jobs!” The fact that the job-creating magic money is taken away from other districts is never mentioned.
Swiftee, somehow, it seems that the Democrats are learning the hard way that graft is not the cheapest way to get a job done, if you catch my drift.