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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