Obama Gardens

"Obama Gardens"

I like Hot Air's take on this story as well. As a state senator, Obama got a hundred grand from taxpayers to build a botanical garden in his district:

A $100,000 state grant for a botanic garden in Englewood that then-state Sen. Barack Obama awarded in 2001 to a group headed by a onetime campaign volunteer is now under investigation by the Illinois attorney general amid new questions, prompted by Chicago Sun-Times reports, about whether the money might have been misspent.

The garden was never built. And now state records obtained by the Sun-Times show $65,000 of the grant money went to the wife of Kenny B. Smith, the Obama 2000 congressional campaign volunteer who heads the Chicago Better Housing Association, which was in charge of the project for the blighted South Side neighborhood.
Smith wrote another $20,000 in grant-related checks to K.D. Contractors, a construction company that his wife, Karen D. Smith, created five months after work on the garden was supposed to have begun, records show. K.D. is no longer in business.
Eighty-five percent of the funds wound up going no farther than the pockets of Obama’s campaign volunteer. Chris Fusco and Dave McKinney track down the contractor who supposedly got most of this funding to find out what happened. He told the Sun-Times reporters that he only was asked to cut down a few trees and to grade the surface of the park, which would have been overpriced at $3,000. So what happened to the other $82,000? No one knows, and the Smiths don’t have any explanation.
Oops?

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