Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) has become the poster child for everything that is wrong with the earmarking process. (Read a prior blog post on the Murtha Airport.) He uses his seniority and position on the Appropriations Committee to secure earmarks which he then passes on to companies he has personal relationships with.
The latest case involves a firm called Mountaintop Technologies, the Washington Post reports:
Over the past five years, a local defense contractor with close ties to Rep. John P. Murtha, a Democrat who has represented southwestern Pennsylvania for three decades, has selected several small police departments in the region to receive $10 million in Justice Department grants.
The company, Mountaintop Technologies, was selected by the lawmaker in a series of earmarks to hand out and monitor the grants. As it distributed the money to the departments, the firm would explain each time that it was arriving through the largess of Murtha -- often just before fall elections.
Once she learned from the investigators that Monongahela's police department was getting money outside of normal channels, City Clerk Carole Foglia was disturbed.
"I wasn't happy with the situation at all," Foglia said. "I didn't want to be involved in anything that was done improperly, because that's not the way I work in my office. And this was improper. No question about it."
The tale of how a defense company ended up getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to distribute federal police grants is a chapter in a larger story of Mountaintop Technologies, its far-flung operations and its dependence on Murtha. The Johnstown firm has received at least $36 million in the past eight years in earmarks and military contracts, without competition and with the backing of Murtha, the powerful chairman of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee. It also hired the lobbying firm where Murtha's brother worked.
The Justice Department is probing the police grants and sources told the Post "the earmarked grants drew attention because the company was a registered defense firm with little experience in law enforcement."
Why is Rep. Murtha entrusting a contractor that lacks the expertise to do the job? Maybe because of his personal connections to the firm. Mountaintop Technologies is headquartered just one floor below a Murtha district office. Other ties include:
[Mountaintop Technologies founder David H.] Fyock became close with Murtha while the two worked together to bring industry to Johnstown, when Fyock was a lobbyist and economic development director for the local electric company in the 1980s. ...
The congressman's brother, Kit Murtha, and three former Murtha aides have worked as registered lobbyists for Mountaintop, and the company has paid $725,000 for lobbyists since 1999. In the same period, Fyock and a handful of Mountaintop executives have donated $40,200 to Murtha campaigns, which represented less than 2 percent of the congressman's fundraising at the time.
In making the case that the company is becoming more competitive, Mr. Fyock admits that their federal earmarks were not won based on merit:
Fyock told Jack Schultz, a rural economic development blogger, in 2007 that he was proud of how much the company was weaning itself from earmarks: "While earmarks helped us to get these programs started, today over 50 percent of our business is built upon continuous contracts that we win on our own merit."
Over the past eight years, according to the White House budget office, the company has faced open competition in only 11 percent of its federal contracts, which make up most of its business.
"We are working very hard to increase the proportion of our business that is competitive," Fyock said. "We certainly aren't there yet. We expect to be able to improve that over the next couple of years."
In other words, taxpayers are subsidizing Rep. Murtha's friend's business through earmarks, because it still can't survive and compete on its own in the free market, even though it was founded in 1993. That's a sweet deal they have going on over there, how many of us would like to run a profitable company without having to worry about competition for over 15 years? All it takes is a relationship with Rep. Murtha and you're on the earmark gravy train.