Thursday, September 24, 2009

Iowa Lawmaker Says Legislators Knew of Film Issues Early Summer

As we continue to follow "who knew what, when" in the movie mess, film industry scandal, whatever the headline of the day is...I offer this, for what it's worth. On Tuesday, Governor Chet Culver in Cedar Rapids said at least three times he learned of the tax credit fiasco either "last Tuesday" or "last week". When I asked him to clarify later on during his news conference, he said he had heard about possible problems before then and that's why he said he directed his legal counsel to push for the audit/review/investigation (whatever the proper term would be here) that now-former Iowa Dept of Economic Director Mike Tramontina discussed in a memo last Wednesday.

I talked with State Senator Rich Olive, a Democrat from Story City, Wednesday. He chairs the government oversight committee, which declined to look into the movie mess as its already-scheduled meeting Thursday morning. He said lawmakers had heard of possible issues "last June or July" and pushed D.E.D. to make sure everything was running properly.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

dave - why is tramontina, lentz and wheeler being made the scapegoat. culver praised all these programs through press releases on his igov website (look there and read them) and now he knew nothing. i think he's fired the guys who knew there was a problem but culver ignored them. someone should start asking what culver and culver staff knew and when. come on, one guy (wheeler) was running $32 million worth of tax credits?? Senior people knew and did nothing and now trying to make the guy who brought jobs (wheeler) to iowa! wheeler should be given an award not fired.

Anonymous said...

OH, and by the way, the day after all of this was going down, Culver was in a private box drinking beer at the Iowa football game. this guy doesn't know how to manage anything. he just yells, fires people and takes no responsibility. what a governor!

Jeffrey7500 said...

You actually got to speak with Rich Olive? Boy, you have better luck than I do. I can't believe he actually spoke with you. That's incredible. I didn't know he would talk to anybody. Ask me why, Dave.

Dave Price said...

Anonymous,

How about pointing us in the right direction?