A donor's gift soon followed Clinton's help

WASHINGTON: A developer in New York state donated $100,000 to former President Bill Clinton's foundation in November 2004, around the same time that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton helped secure millions of dollars in federal assistance for the businessman's mall project.

Hillary Clinton helped enact legislation allowing the developer, Robert Congel, to use tax-exempt bonds to help finance the construction of the Destiny USA entertainment and shopping complex, an expansion of the Carousel Center in Syracuse.

She also helped secure a provision in a highway bill that set aside $5 million for Destiny USA roadway construction.

The bill with the tax-free bonds provision became law in October 2004, weeks before the donation, and the highway bill with the set-aside became law in August 2005, about nine months after the donation.

Congel and Philippe Reines, a spokesman for Hillary Clinton, both said there was no connection between his donation and her legislative work on his project's behalf. Reines said the senator had supported the expansion of Carousel mall "purely as part of her unwavering commitment to improving upstate New York's struggling economy, and nothing more."

You scratch my back, I scratch yours. Just a fact of life in America across the board, thanks to the Clintons for the most part.

At least Nixon had the decency to at least wonder whether or not he was a “crook”. Usually real crooks don’t even bother to wonder.

Over two years after construction on the mall extension started, nothing is finished. A large part of the mall parking lot has been closed since construction began, and remaining parking space is limited. The last two Christmases, parking has been a nightmare. I live an hour away, and attempted to access the mall the weekend before Christmas. I should have known better. It was horrible. People were sitting in bumper-to-bumper lines within the lot itself, just trying to move into a parking spot or get out of the lot.

Here's a link to a local report on it:

Carousel Center Gridlock

The article says mall security was out in the lot directing traffic. That's BS. I didn't see one member of security the whole time I was there.

Most people think that the original plans to turn the mall into one as big as Mall of America will never be achieved. No surprise there. This was a fiasco from the beginning.

On top of this, they turned the mall into an all-Green zone, offering preferred parking for Green-only cars, (which are always empty), and banning any smoking outside the mall itself. They've even restricted people from smoking in their own cars parked in the lot. I don't smoke, but even this is going a bit too far. The mall was fine as it was. This expansion fiasco probably devastated the Christmas shopping season even more than the downturn in the economy did.

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