Association of Bay Area Governments Helps Fund Pentagon Program
February 27, 2007
By Richard Brenneman
Berkeley Daily Planet
Why did a state-mandated alliance of Bay Area governments lend $12 million to a secretive military think tank to expand its facilities in San Diego? Berkeley City Councilmember Dona Spring said she’d like to know the answer. “It’s an outrage,” she said. “It’s out of sync with the political sentiment of the Bay Area and it’s very questionable.” On Sept. 15, 2005, the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) arranged for an $11,945,000 tax-exempt bond issue for the Institute of Defense Analyses (IDA) for ”expansion and renovation of existing facilities” in La Jolla. ABAG is a coalition of city and county governments formed under state law to address regional issues. The organization is presently preparing a housing needs assessment that will require Berkeley to make room for several thousand new housing units in the next three decades. … In July 2006, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a non-profit private watchdog group, released a report called “Preying on the Taxpayer: The F-22A Raptor.” That study revealed that IDA President and retired Admiral Dennis C. Blair owned stock in two companies with financial interests in the jet fighter project during the time when IDA had urged the Pentagon to fund it in an analysis which the Defense Department paid for. As a result of the ensuing bad publicity, Blair resigned first from the board of EDO corporation, which manufactures missile-launching gear for the fighter, and then from IDA itself. POGO’s findings were confirmed in December in a report by the Pentagon’s Office of the Inspector General, which concluded that he had violated conflict of interest rules by his involvement in reports on companies in which he had financial interests.
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