Young's $10M earmark focus of inquiry

WASHINGTON — A Justice Department corruption task force is investigating whether Alaska Congressman Don Young took campaign cash in return for securing $10 million for construction of a proposed Florida highway ramp that would give a windfall to a local real estate developer, a source familiar with the inquiry said Friday.

The controversial funding, which was to pay for a study of a potential highway interchange abutting environmentally sensitive land, was slipped into a massive 2005 Transportation Department bill, congressional aides say.

Young's action is among a number of congressional "earmarks" for specific pet projects drawing scrutiny from the Justice Department and an FBI team investigating alleged influence peddling on Capitol Hill, said the source, who insisted on anonymity.

As the powerful chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee from 2000-06, Young added earmarks worth tens of millions of dollars to transportation spending bills.

Investigators' interest in the Florida earmark stems in part from its timing. In the two weeks before and after the earmark was inserted in the spending bill, Young's campaign and political-action committee collected contributions from Florida developer Daniel Aronoff, his lobbyist and several other Florida business executives. The donations, mainly from real-estate interests, totaled more than $40,000.

Meanwhile, transportation planners in Lee County, the Gulf Coast community where the interchange would be located, voted Friday to ask Congress to let them use the money instead to widen Interstate 75. They said they never had asked for the interchange money.

Proving members of Congress traded legislative actions for campaign donations long has been a tall order, and it was not clear whether investigators have established such a link in the Florida episode.

Neither Young, an 18-term House member, nor his lawyers responded to requests for comment.

But the veteran congressman always has maintained that he earmarked the money for the Coconut Road interchange near Fort Myers because residents told him they wanted it in 2005 when he attended a community transportation meeting.

If the community doesn't want it, Young thinks they're free to give the money back, said the congressman's chief of staff, Mike Anderson.

"There's nothing nefarious here," Anderson said. "If they want to return the money back to [the Department of Transportation], they can do that."

Local transportation planners voted Friday to do that. They instead want the money to go toward the overall widening of I-75, said Carla Brooks Johnston, who leads Lee County's Metropolitan Planning Organization.

Johnston commissioned a researcher to trace how the appropriation was designated and whether the county could use it for another purpose.

The researcher found Young or one of his aides changed language in the earmark after Congress had voted on it, erasing I-75 and adding the words "Coconut Road," Johnston said.

"At a time when the highway needs are growing enormously and our highway funds are shrinking rapidly, people are bothered by this," she said.

Anderson offered no explanation for the late change in the earmark's language.

Information in this article, originally published August 19, 2007, was corrected August 20, 2007. Because of a computer problem, the first nine words of the story were dropped. The story should have read as follows: "A Justice Department corruption task force is investigating whether Alaska Congressman Don Young took campaign cash in return for securing $10 million for construction of a proposed Florida highway ramp that would give a windfall to a local real estate developer, a source familiar with the inquiry said Friday." Because the first nine words were missing, the story erroneously quoted the source as saying Young had taken the cash. In fact, the task force is trying to determine whether or not that allegation is true.