The Democrat Illinois Attorney General is investigating a $100,000 earmark grant Barack Obama awarded to a former campaign volunteer for a botanical garden that never got built.
[S]tate records obtained by the [Chicago] Sun-Times show $65,000 of the grant money went to the wife of Kenny B. Smith, the Obama 2000 congressional campaign volunteer who heads the Chicago Better Housing Association, which was in charge of the project for the blighted South Side neighborhood.
Smith wrote another $20,000 in grant-related checks to K.D. Contractors, a construction company that his wife, Karen D. Smith, created five months after work on the garden was supposed to have begun, records show. K.D. is no longer in business.
[...]
[T]oday the garden site is a mess of weeds, chunks of concrete and garbage. The only noticeable improvement is a gazebo.
In a previous interview, Smith said the state grant money was legitimately spent, mostly on underground site preparation.
But no one ever took out construction permits required for such work, city records show. And a contractor who Smith said did most of the work told a reporter all he did was cut down trees and grade the site with a Bobcat.
Doesn’t sound like that community was organized too effectively with the money Obama got granted to a former campaign volunteer. Funny-money politics in the Chicago political machine? Say it isn’t so!
Neither Smith nor his wife has been accused of any wrongdoing. Smith and his lawyer did not return repeated calls seeking comment.
In an interview in July, Smith said he was never able to raise the money needed for the garden. But the state grant awarded by Obama was spent properly, he said, on the underground work, with most of the work done by a contractor whose name Smith got wrong.
The Sun-Times tracked down the contractor, Rodolfo Marin, in Austin, Texas, where he now lives.
“What I was hired for was: Clean up the area and cut the trees — that’s all,” Marin said. He said he rented a Bobcat — a sort of small bulldozer — for the project.
And how much did Smith pay him? “If he spent about $3,000 with me, that was too much.”
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