http://www.adn.com/news/politics/fbi/young/story/9231529p-9146136c.htmlLocal officials in Florida decided Friday to send back the surprise $10 million Coconut Road earmark that Alaska U.S. Rep. Don Young slipped into the 2005 highway bill when he was chairman of the House Transportation Committee.
Young had directed that the money be spent to study an interchange on Interstate 75 near Fort Myers, Fla., abutting land owned by a major Young campaign contributor, real estate developer Daniel Aronoff.
The money wasn't sought by local officials. Republican Rep. Connie Mack, the congressman from the district, said he was unaware of the earmark when it surfaced last year.
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"There's nothing nefarious here. If they want to return the money back to DOT, they can do that," Anderson said.
But that's a different position than Young himself took in 2006 -- before he came under scrutiny for his earmarks and before the FBI began investigating his relationship with the Alaska oil-field service company Veco. Veco is at the center of the broad political corruption investigation in Alaska. In January 2006, Young warned county officials that they had to use the money as he directed, according to an account in the News-Press of Fort Myers. He wrote that the $10 million in federal money could not be used for any other road projects, as Lee County's transportation leaders wanted. Mack wrote a similar letter, telling the officials that if they rejected the money, future funding for other projects in their region could be jeopardized.
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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 Aronoff, Aronoff's lobbyist, as well as a number of other Florida business executives, many of whom attended a fundraiser in Bonita Springs. The Florida donations, mainly from real estate interests, totaled more than $40,000.
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