Tax Mahal

With tax day looming, officials from Washington to Massachusetts are blasting a $92 million “Cadillac”-style renovation of the sprawling IRS center in Andover, calling the use of federal stimulus dollars to collect more taxes a “boondoggle” that won’t even bring long-term jobs to the area.

The project’s key proponent, Rep. Niki Tsongas (D-Lowell), and other top regional Democrats have strongly touted the project, which is aimed at improving “productivity and customer service” at the 50-year-old federal complex.

But foes such as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) and state Sen. Michael Knapik (R-Westfield) are jeering at the use of stimulus money to create a state-of-the-art processing and auditing center when roads, bridges and dams need urgent attention.

David Williams, a spokesman for Citizens Against Government Waste, a Washington-based nonprofit group, said the spending sets a dangerous precedent for channeling stimulus money to projects that won’t create long-term jobs.

“The only thing this has going for it is that it is an infrastructure project,” he said. “It sounds like they put the cart before the horse - and it sounds like a very expensive cart.”

The IRS received $80,469,000 in stimulus funds for “green” upgrades to the 400,000 square-foot complex, more cash than any other federal building in New England, according to documents from the U.S. General Services Administration, the agency that oversees federal buildings. The IRS already had $11.4 million on hand for the work, a GSA spokeswoman said.

The project was the target of a December 2009 report, compiled by senators McCain and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), that ranked 100 projects funded by the Obama administration’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in which stimulus money was “wasted, mismanaged or directed towards silly and shortsighted projects.”

“There was an overzealous desire to minimize the carbon footprint of this building,” Coburn’s spokesman, John Hart, said. “Sometimes the best way to minimize the carbon footprint is to not wear the shoe at all. Renovating a building that should be closing is not a good use of taxpayer funds.”

Tsongas said the project brings construction jobs to the area and the renovations could create new IRS jobs, including more auditors.

The upgrades “make a good argument for expanded use there,” Tsongas told the Herald.

Although the IRS uses more automation now - the reason 1,400 employees were laid off from the Andover site last year - “that doesn’t mean there aren’t other tasks,” Tsongas said. She rejected criticism that spending $92 million on the building is a waste.

“We don’t know the jobs aren’t there,” she said. “I’m not going to second-guess where it would’ve been better spent.” Tsongas, whose district includes the IRS building, offered similar sentiments in an April 1 letter to IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman.

“We write to encourage you in the strongest terms to fully utilize this state-of-the-art resource by expanding the number of employees at the facility and by taking advantage of the strong workforce present in the community,” she wrote in a letter signed by 14 members of the congressional delegation from Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Brown and Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) did not sign.

“The American people expect economic policies that will lead to meaningful, long-term economic growth that will actually create jobs in our state, without adding to our already record national debt,” Brown’s office told the Herald in a statement. Officials from General Services Administration, which channeled the stimulus money to the IRS, did not respond to calls and e-mails seeking response to the criticism of the spending.

The GSA also did not respond to a request seeking a line-item budget detailing how the $92 million would be spent. The IRS rejected a Herald request to tour the facility.

IRS regional spokeswoman Peggy Riley said in an e-mail that “it is premature to speculate on what, if any, new types of jobs might come to Andover.”

Ron Carbonneau, president of the local chapter of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents Andover’s IRS workers, embraced the project even though there aren’t definitive plans for new long-term jobs at the site.

“As far as the ‘Field of Dreams’ mentality,” he said, “there will be no wasted space in Andover.”

Carbonneau said the complex has been in “desperate need of an overhaul.” When planning began four years ago, the architect drew up an “ideal” facility that included “all the bells and whistles,” Carbonneau said. “When the stimulus money hit, it was a perfect storm of circumstances,” Carbonneau said. “Just about everything is going to be completely new for all intents and purposes. It’s going to be a heck of a facility when everything is said and done.”

Williams, of Citizens Against Government Waste, said comments defending top-tier spending underscore the group’s objections to misspent stimulus money.

“You don’t hold back when it comes to spending someone else’s money,” Williams said. “They asked for the neatest and coolest things to put into the building. They had a wish list and then said ‘Oh, look, we got all of it.’ ”

“When they make decisions, they use their own money. They work within a budget,” he said. “With federal stimulus money, that dynamic is gone. Every agency has this problem - they don’t feel close enough to the money.”

Knapik, who sits on the Joint Committee on Federal Stimulus Oversight, echoed that concern.

“They didn’t get the memo that extravagance is out,” he said, adding that $92 million “is a lot of money to waste on a government building.”

Knapik called the project a “boondoggle” and said it reaffirms his constituents’ worries that stimulus money isn’t creating jobs in the private sector.

“The stimulus did not live up to how it was sold,” he said. “It’s been more about what has been done to preserve and retain public sector jobs. I’d rather see $92 million fixing roads and helping businesses.”

Howie Carr column

Dim bulbs at IRS let us eat cake
By Howie Carr | Sunday, April 11, 2010 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Columnists

It will be a temple of taxes, a Tax Mahal, as the headline puts it. What a fitting symbol for a government run amok, and in a perfect setting too - the town of Andover, where last year 626 streetlights were turned off because the town couldn’t afford them anymore.

But now the Feds spend $92 million on the same IRS facility where they just eliminated 1,400 jobs. The Internal Revenue Service - all you need to know about Obamacare is that it will create not one single new physician or health-care provider, but it will require hiring new IRS legbreakers . . . er, make that “agents.”

The only “stimulus” this moonbat administration cares about is Big Government. Billions are sucked out of what remains of the economy’s productive sector to pay ever-more-outrageous salaries and benefits to politically correct layabouts who spend all day e-mailing one other and sharpening pencils, assuming they show up at all - a large assumption indeed.

Think of the most posh, ostentatious building in your community. Perhaps it’s the five-star resort masquerading as a state courthouse in Pemberton Square, or the federal Moakley courthouse on Northern Avenue, with its million-dollar harbor views. In the suburbs it might be one of those new $200-million high schools . . . or the IRS “campus” in Andover.

What all these buildings have in common is that they are public-sector, every one constructed with a public-be-damned attitude. Meanwhile, on Main Street, every week you drive by more empty storefronts, not to mention shuttered factories or car dealerships, and further out of town, dying or abandoned malls.

It’s like late-Medieval Europe, with giant cathedrals towering above the squalid thatched-roof hovels that housed the peasants, who were stuck with the tab for the church’s opulence. Like the bishops of old, the modern mandarins of Obama’s welfare state imperiously command us to do as they say, not as they do.

How appropriate that the overseer of this IRS chateau in Andover is Tim Geithner, the U.S. Treasury secretary, one of the many serial tax cheats in the Obama administration. Think Charles Rangel, Hilda Solis, Tom Daschle.

The private sector can’t shake this deep recession, as our bureaucratic grandees revel in unparalleled boom times. Take the Department of Transportation - please. According to USA Today, when the recession began, one DOT employee was making more than $170,000 a year. Eighteen months later, 1,690 DOT employees were earning more than $170,000. Tell me, what exactly do they do? This is not-so-stealth redistribution of wealth, not to mention reparations.

Of course we must spend $92 million in “stimulus” on an IRS playpen in a town where streetlights are now considered an extravagance. Just ask Congresswoman Niki Tsongas, another prototypical empty-pants-suit Democrat. Represents a district she didn’t even live in before she deigned to represent it in the House, and her only qualification is her last name.

Now the IRS will probably audit me. But they do it every year anyway. My crime is working for a living, and not collecting a handout. What can I say except, come and get me, coppers!
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1246205

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