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panader0

(25,816 posts)
Mon Feb 5, 2018, 12:03 PM Feb 2018

Question about "the wall"---

In my opinion the wall will never get built. If monies are authorized, where will
the wall start? The vast majority of border land in Texas is privately owned.
The lawsuits would be endless. In the Federally owned land in the Big Bend area,
the wall would have no legal challenges, but would be up to two miles from the
Rio Grande, basically ceding the land to Mexico. There will be environmental lawsuits as
well.
So my question is--If monies are appropriated, and the wall does not proceed, what will
become of the money?
Also, I predict sabotage if construction begins.

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Question about "the wall"--- (Original Post) panader0 Feb 2018 OP
New Details Alleged in Scheme to Make Millions Off First Border Wall in Texas dalton99a Feb 2018 #1
The graft in this project would be astronomical. panader0 Feb 2018 #2
Yep. It's inevitable. dalton99a Feb 2018 #3
Trump thinks of the wall as a monument to him world wide wally Feb 2018 #4

dalton99a

(81,529 posts)
1. New Details Alleged in Scheme to Make Millions Off First Border Wall in Texas
Mon Feb 5, 2018, 12:07 PM
Feb 2018
https://www.propublica.org/article/godfrey-garza-jr-dannenbaum-engineering-texas-border-wall-kickback
New Details Alleged in Scheme to Make Millions Off First Border Wall in Texas
The latest lawsuit filing in Hidalgo County talks of kickback deals worked out over drinks and steak dinners.
by Kiah Collier, The Texas Tribune, and T. Christian Miller, ProPublica Jan. 30, 1:01 a.m. EST

The kickback scheme was allegedly hashed out over weeknight drinks at a steakhouse in a border county in south Texas. Amid surf and turf and expensive scotch, a Hidalgo County official said he would meet with contractors in the clubby confines of the restaurant in a strip mall in McAllen.

There, Godfrey Garza Jr., director of the county’s drainage district, cajoled company executives to hire a firm owned by his family in exchange for a cut of lucrative construction contracts, according to new documents filed in state district court in Hidalgo County. The target of the plan: a $232 million project funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the county to build a border fence and rehabilitate aging dirt levees along the Rio Grande.

The previously unreported details of Garza’s alleged scheme emerged last week in an ongoing lawsuit in which the county has sued companies owned by Garza, his wife and their two sons for fraud during the construction of the combined levee-fence. The new filings also implicate one of Texas’ most powerful engineering firms, Dannenbaum Engineering, as a participant in the scheme.

“[T]he deeper we look into this case the more troubling facts we discover,” said Michael J. Blanchard, the county’s lawyer. “As evidence develops, it is increasingly clear that the wrongdoing in this case rose beyond the level of simple fraud.”
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