By Peter Galuszka
Dominion Resources, the powerful, Richmond-based utility with $13 billion in revenues, has strangely been getting $30 million public funds to bring a natural gas pipeline to a new generating plant in Brunswick County.
Odder still (or maybe not so) the public funds are coming from the GOP-controlled Virginia Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission which has figured in a wave of corruption since it was formed in 1999.
Even more bizarre, the tobacco commission made up of politically-appointed people arranged for Dominion to receive millions more than its own staff recommended, according to an intriguing report by the Associated Press.
The tobacco commission was created to use money from a massive 1996 settlement that 46 states received from four top tobacco companies in health-related lawsuits. Many states used their funds to promote health and anti-smoking campaigns. Virginia did some of that but created a pork barrel commission to dole out $1 billion to projects allegedly aimed at helping residents of Virginia’s Tobacco Road along the state’s southern tier for economic development projects.
In the Dominion case, the utility says it never lobbied for grants, but somehow it got $30 million – or $10 million over three years for a pipeline to its $1.3 billion Brunswick gas plant. The commission’s own staff said $6.5 million should have been sufficient for the first installment.
So, you have a situation where Dominion, which is a huge contributor to political campaigns, says it never really wanted grants, the commission staff recommended one amount and the tobacco commission awarded a much bigger one. And, according to the AP, no one seems to know anything about it.
Well, that’s about par for the course. Here’s something I wrote for The Washington Post in September:
“No one seems to be checking whether commission projects are worth it. A 2011 study by the state’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission found that, of 1,368 projects funded for $756 million, only 11 percent were measured for results. “They are just handing out money,” Del. Ward Armstrong (D-Henry) said in 2011.
John W. Forbes II, a former state secretary of finance and a tobacco commission board member, was convicted in 2010 of defrauding the commission of $4 million. He used the money for “The Literary Foundation of Virginia,” which he created, and set up himself and his wife with six-figure jobs. The rest was siphoned to shell companies.
The commission has awarded $14 million in grants to the Scott County Economic Development Authority, which is headed by John Kilgore Jr., Terry Kilgore’s brother (Terry heads the commission and his brother Jerry is major Republican politician). Meanwhile, their father, John Kilgore Sr., heads the nonprofit Scott County Telephone Cooperative’s board, which has received $7 million in tobacco money to expand broadband access.
The Kilgore family affair isn’t illegal, but it looks bad. The tobacco stench just doesn’t go away. In June, federal agents subpoenaed commission records in their probe of former state senator Phillip P. Puckett. The powerful Democrat from Russell was supposedly discussing a lucrative staff job on the tobacco commission with Terry Kilgore just before a key vote on expanding Medicaid. Puckett resigned in time to throw the vote toward opponents, most of them Republicans.”
The gas pipeline apparently would connect with a major interstate pipeline operated by Transco and runs from the Gulf State gas fields through Virginia to the Northeast. And, Dominion is one of four utilities planning a brand new $5 billion that would take natural gas fracked in West Virginia, over sensitive tops of the Appalachians, southeast to North Carolina. That project includes a spur line to the Dominion Brunswick plant.
One wonders why Dominion needs two pipelines to one plant — especially one built with funds intended directly for public service.
Well, as they say in the giant newsroom in the sky, good stories only get better.
