|
|
|
Woody Hunt’s construction company is the nation’s largest builder of housing for U.S. military personnel. Two weeks after then-Governor George W. Bush appointed Hunt as a University of Texas System regent in 1999, Hunt Building paid $8.8 million to settle a federal lawsuit. Citing shoddy workmanship on 828 housing units at Ellsworth Air Force Base, the U.S. Justice Department said 50 percent of the units were uninhabitable and that the buildings could not withstand South Dakotan winds. “Pipes were simply inserted into the ground to make it look like mandatory sewer clean-outs had been installed,” said the lawsuit, which complained that some units were plagued by improperly vented sewer gases. “No contractor should be able to get away with such shabby construction at taxpayer expense,” said U.S. Attorney Karen Schreiber. Nonetheless, Hunt Building still received $98 million in federal contracts in fiscal year 2002 alone, led by military contracts. The Austin American-Statesman, which editorialized against Hunt’s confirmation as a regent, also reported that residents of apartments that Hunt Building owned in minority Austin neighborhoods repeatedly complained about being left without basic utility services. The 2000 Bush campaign reimbursed Hunt Building $71,642 for flights that Bush took on its corporate jets. Water is the latest get-rich scheme of Hunt and Philip Anschutz, the billionaire ex-chair of Qwest Communications, which admitted in 2002 that it overstated revenues by $950 million (see Sol Trujillo). Hunt and Anschutz have bought huge land tracts around Dell City 65 miles East of El Paso, thereby attaining valuable rights to an underlying aquifer of brinish water. Hunt circulated a sketchy plan in 2003 that envisions investing $500 million on more land, a pipeline and a desalination plant to sell the water to parched El Paso for a fortune. While the controversial scheme does not say who would pay for most of this, it does call for the Texas General Land Office to spend $125 million on land--while Hunt and Anschutz pocket a four-percent commission on any water sold. As a regent, Hunt has served on the quasi-public University of Texas Investment Management Co., which awarded lucrative contracts to invest university endowment funds to firms close to then-Governor George W. Bush (see Lee Bass, Robert Grady, Tom Hicks and Charles Wyly).
|
|
|
|
|
|
Membership
|
|
|
Of Special Interest
|
|
|
| Profile last updated
Dec 5, 2003
|
