About 10 years ago, when Transportation Pete was just plain ol’ Mayor Pete, South Bend, Indiana’s 30-year old wunderkind accepted more than $250,000 in gifts from donors who were then awarded with fat, city contracts —$33 million dollars worth of city contracts, to be exact.
This was between 2012 and 2019.
“Buttigieg’s political action committees took money from 23 companies who then got jobs from South Bend’s Board of Public Works whose members he appointed,” documents obtained by DailyMail.com reveal. “On two occasions, the former presidential candidate received donations the same day the companies were awarded contracts.”
The optics on that are pretty bad, Mayor Pete.
Panzica Building Corporation, DLZ Indiana, HRP Construction, Selge Construction, Thurston Howell III —all the biggest players in the Big Bend gave to Pete’s PAC (okay not Thurston, but chances are you probably don’t recognize any of those real companies anyway).
But that doesn’t make it any better. This is almost the very definition of pay to play and raises serious questions about the $210 billion dollars earmarked in the infrastructure bill for Buttigieg to hand out in discretionary grants in his official role as Transportation Pete.
“The pattern of contracts and donations appears to be a huge conflict of interest,” Taxpayers Protection Alliance president David Williams told DailyMail.com. “This really doesn’t bode well for the secretary of transportation when he has access to almost $1.2trillion in infrastructure money. This is alarming, and very concerning, because this is the swamp personified. You don’t have to be a Rhodes Scholar to look at this and think that something’s wrong here.”
A spokesperson for the City of South Bend told the Daily Mail that Buttigieg “was not involved in the awarding of engineering and construction contracts” and that contracts are awarded “through a professional process that is public and transparent.”
Then the best part: “The spokesperson told DailyMail.com any suggestion of corruption in Buttigieg’s US government department was ‘absurd’.”
Well, then —no further questions. We’ll just see ourselves out. But in the immortal words of Columbo, “just one more thing…”
Care to comment on Mayor Pete’s 2019 campaign funding controversy where he failed to disclose 20 big league donors, including power broker Jack Connors Jr., La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz, hedge fund investor John Petry, and former US ambassadors? Was that “absurd” as well?
Mayor-Candidate-Transportation Pete has a pattern of keeping his cash close to the vest —but it looks like he may have to show us his hand to retain his “squeaky clean” image.
