Attorney General Jay Nixon is calling it a "secretly proposed bailout" of a developer who’s been criticized by the governor and state treasurer for using undocumented workers on a housing project. He wants the chairman of the Missouri Housing Development Commission, Richard Baalman, Sr., to keep the commission staff from issuing four million dollars in additional tax credits to Gundaker Commercial Group which is developing a project in O’Fallon that has used undocumented workers.
Nixon says the commission has never approved the four-million dollars in additional tax breaks. Nixon’s representative on the commission, former state senator and former circuit judge Jeff Schaeperkoetter, does not know who came up with the plan. But he says he has information that the staff was involved in development of the plan, although it was not going to issue the tax credits without permission from then-chairman Sarah Steelman, the state treasurer. Schaeperkoetter says a top aide of Governor Blunt’s–Rob Monsees–also knew about it.
He knows some people will dismiss the situation as just more political wrangling between Nixon and Blunt. But he says it’s more than that, calling the plan "a serious commission of state resources to a project that has been one of the worst in the use of undocumented workers that..we’ve ever seen."
Neither Steelman nor Baalman was available to answer questions about the matter.
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