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Sunday, October 5, 2014

A two-fer for Tillis: Donors could make millions thanks to privatized toll lanes

North Carolina repugican Thom Tillis has been pushing privatized toll lanes hard, telling residents that the alternative was "no improvements to I-77 for 15 or 20 years." Rather than raise taxes to widen the interstate for everyone, the state House speaker and Senate candidate is all in on creating lanes that drivers have to pay to use. Of course, bringing inequality to the very lanes of the highway is exactly the kind of thing Tillis would do just because that's who he is, but there's a little something extra in it for him: A group of Tillis donors stand to profit from the toll lanes.A Donald Trump-promoted company called ACN owns a plot of land that would be worth a whole lot of money, if only there was a new highway exit to make it accessible. As it happens, the toll lanes come with a new bonus fund that could pay for that new highway exit-and the day after the governor signed the transportation bill creating that bonus fund, Tillis' Senate campaign got $26,000 in contributions from executives of ACN and their wives. That's not all:
But there was a second political contribution from ACN which coincided with state action moving toward a new exit 27.
On September 13, 2013 state Commerce Secretary Sharon Decker toured Augustalee. Cornelius town leaders wanted her help for exit 27.
And Decker told them there was hope. [...]
That was September 13. On September 18, five days later, a company called TC Investors donated $25,000 to the superPAC Grow NC Strong which backs Thom Tillis for the US Senate.
TC Investors is managed by a company run by Robert Stevanovski - founder and chairman of ACN.
Gosh, that's not at all suspicious, is it? Yeah, okay, maybe a little. But that's the repugican way of doing business: reserve your new infrastructure investments for people who can afford to pay, send 50 years of tolls to a private company, possibly use the new revenue to add a highway exit benefiting a company whose executives have given a lot of money to a top repugican.

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