From the NY Times:Government agencies in the New York region, wary about potential fraud and abuse in the $787 billion federal stimulus program, have said they are taking extraordinary measures to ensure that contracts for projects ranging from subway tunnels to summer jobs programs do not go to companies with questionable histories.
But despite such efforts, records show that one federal agency has awarded $6 million in stimulus funds to a huge international construction management company that has been the focus of two criminal investigations in the last two years and was suspended in June from bidding on and performing work at New York City schools.
The company, Bovis Lend Lease LMB, avoided manslaughter charges late last year in the deaths of two firefighters at the former Deutsche Bank building in 2007, admitting failures and agreeing to safety reforms in an agreement with prosecutors.
The company’s legal troubles have continued this year with a separate investigation by the F.B.I., federal prosecutors in Brooklyn and the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which also investigated the Deutsche Bank fire. It centers on accusations of overbilling, bribery of union officials and other alleged improprieties on several large New York projects, including the new Mets baseball stadium, Citi Field, and the Sept. 11 memorial.
Several stimulus-financed federal contracts were awarded to Bovis by the federal General Services Administration, the government’s building management agency, from May through August, according to federal procurement records. The four contracts involve the supervision of construction projects, including two, according to an agency news release, that are part of $62 million set aside to pay for renovations at two federal buildings in Downtown Brooklyn. Those buildings are the old Federal District Courthouse and the United States Post Office, across Tillary Street, the latter of which houses the federal prosecutors now overseeing the inquiry into Bovis.
3 comments:
Look boys n girls, here is the skinny.
Despite all the rosy talk Blumberg and Thompson are scared shitless that the whole house of cards on real estate is about to come crashing down.
In classic bait and switch
("you want to add a porch the zoning should permit you" - and a developer uses the language to put a 9 story building on a 3 atory block,
or "you need affordable housing so ok six 50 story towers - and affordable housing for $150,000 a year folks gets built on a brownfield 3 miles away)
stimulus money went into banks trying to erase 2 decades of greed and stupid choices - instead of going to the comsumer staggering under higher taxes and more debt.
Believing the American consumer will somehow arise yet again, China bought the debt.
Now they are trying to stave off the inevitable - with tax breaks, stimulus money, your first born. The problem here is that China does not benefit from Ratner or Bloomberg getting rich.
This shit will hit the fan - right after election.
Filling the buildings up with sancutary people and sticking the social cost of doing so will not add up.
A final note of good cheer. All that shit Mediterrian stucco they are putting up should start peeling off in big chunks within 5 years or so.
Missing, it seems (if you ever get a spell check) your words have a note of cold truth to it.
Blumturd will leave a hollow city in his wake - fat midwestern tourists plopped down in the middle of Broadway where edgy NYers once roamed, a dead politically correct cultural scene that is a page out of North Korea, rich NY and 3rd world OuterBs, self indulgent yuppies wizzing by closed hospitals and the "Media Capital of the World" with as much flava as your mother's Oldsmobile.
Bovis built Wilpon's "City Field"!
Did some of that stimulus package get bounced back to Fred?
Prez Obama is surely f-----g up if he doesn't ask for the money back!
Good luck on a second term in the White House.
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