In the wake of the GEAR UP tragedy, no one has ever come forward with an honest, accurate number of deserving Native American kids who actually went to college. This is despite our state government blowing through about $60 million of our state and federal tax dollars. High-placed bureaucrats claimed preposterous conflicts of interest were “business as usual.†Auditors failed their professional and ethical obligations. Politicians suddenly came down with amnesia. Consultants laughed all the way to the bank with their ill-gotten millions. While thousands of our young people got cheated out of a chance for a better future, no one ever spent a single night in jail. It was convenient to blame it all on the dead guy and move on. Will our state’s Native American children and our taxpayers suffer again from such scandals? Yes they will, unless we find ways to prevent such abuses of public trust from happening again. If you have suggestions for meaningful changes—in rules, laws, or oversight procedures—please consider sharing them with us before November 10. If you wish, we will keep your identity confidential. We will not attribute your comments to you in any way. We will present our findings and proposals to legislators and other public officials for their review and action in the 2020 legislative session.
Frank Kloucek
Email: fkloucek@hotmail.com • 29966 423rd Avenue • Scotland, SD 57059 • 605-660-0254
Jack Billion
Email: jackbillion@sio.midco.net • 400 E. 21st Street • Sioux Falls, SD 57105 • 605-212-2084
With all due respect to Frank and Jack, I still say the real scandal was EB5. Hell, the bureaucrat who reinvigorated the federal EB5 program and was called the “EB5 Czar” by the national press in the last decade, and who wrote and interpreted its regulations (and was mentioned in the 911 report, too, which is a story for another day, but I think linked to the EB mess), left DC after Dubya left the White House, and then came to South Dakota to help the South Dakota crowd run their questionable EB5 programs. How handy it must have been to have a co-worker, who wrote the rules and probably still had pull in DC before Senator Grassley and the Chinese began to ask some questions about the EB5 program, huh?
But most of you never heard about this, have you? That’s because the state media spent way too much time regurgitating the same scandalous talking points about the circumstances concerning Benda’s death, a meat processing plant or two, and a miss appropriation of $500,000.
One of the true scandals of the EB5 scandal was the malpractice committed by the state media in their failure to own and understand the true mechanisms of the EB5 program and how they were the true money to be followed…. And guess who wrote the true regulations for that money? 😉
I wrote an eight page double-spaced letter to all legislators in December 2018 offering my ideas on state government reform to reduce the likelihood of another SD GEAR UP. I believe Mr. Kloucek saw a copy of the letter because I believe we discussed it in a telephone call just before Christmas.