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Legislature Holds First GOED/EB-5 Hearing Friday

Quota, Competition, Scrutiny to Squelch Visa Investment in South Dakota?

Bob Mercer posts the agenda for the Legislature's first real hearing on the Governor's Office of Economic Development and the EB-5 visa investment program. On Friday at 8 a.m., the Joint Government Operations and Audit Committee will meet to discuss those programs, which are under federal investigation. The full Legislature is not in session Friday, so GOED and EB-5 should have the full attention of the empaneled legislators and the Pierre press corps.

The committee will hear summaries of the reviews already publicized on GOED's operations, including the Auditor General's report, released February 12, that found an unacceptable lack of reporting and oversight in GOED and its EB-5 activities. Our legislators will have a chance to ask GOED chief Pat Costello why the taxpayers paid for former GOED chief Richard Benda's fashion and sport magazines.

In new information, Costello will present GOED's summary of its EB-5 activities. Among things to watch for will be Costello's explanation of which EB-5 projects Benda pitched and how many investors he secured during his visits to the Philippines and Vietnam.

The committee has scheduled public testimony for 10:00 a.m. Fellow citizens, if you have information or questions that you think would help the committee decide how to proceed with its hearings on GOED and EB-5, here's you opportunity!

We might hope that one outcome of this program would be for the Legislature to follow the advice of State Rep. Stace Nelson, U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, Michelle Malkin, and Canada and end the corruption-prone practice of selling green cards to rich and inattentive foreign speculators. But it may not take Legislative action to rein in EB-5 excesses in South Dakota. Governor Dennis Daugaard has been signaling since October that EB-5 isn't his baby and that he is steering clear of EB-5 investment. Besides, South Dakota's big advantage in EB-5 came from milking it hard before anyone else did. Now that everybody and their ugly sister are trying to hook up to that cash cow, EB-5 prospects are maxing out the visa quota. The State Department can issue 10,000 EB-5 visas a year, which includes investor family members. The EB-5 lobby of profiteering immigration lawyers is trying to get Congress to increase that quota, but do you think Kristi Noem and the GOP House will vote to hand more of these visas to Chinese investors?

With that relatively low quota, South Dakota now finds itself competing with nearly every other state for a limited pool of investor funds. Facing increased national competition and increased local scrutiny of a program whose masterminds, Richard Benda and Joop Bollen, are now out of the picture, the Governor's Office of Economic Development will likely follow Daugaard's new direction and keep from getting any dirtier in EB-5.

But we shouldn't count on that until we hear GOED chief Costello say that to the Government Operations and Audit Committee on Friday.

5 Comments

  1. Lanny V Stricherz 2014.03.03

    I have only one question. How much white paint and how many brushes will it take to finish this investigation?

  2. Roger Cornelius 2014.03.03

    The big news to come out the hearings will likely be what they don't want us to know.

  3. G-Man 2014.03.04

    Yep, it's looming right over on the distant horizon.

  4. grudznick 2014.03.04

    This is where it is bad that Mr. H left the state. It would be better if we could have some people like him in these meetings but it is good that we will have the real media people there. Unless they are not and then it would be better for people with those little dash cameras there to show this to us all. But I think it is mostly over.

  5. G-Man 2014.03.05

    ...maybe it's "mostly over," for now. But, over time these things eventually see the light of day, maybe not this year, but, years down the road. The comforting thought in life is that nothing lasts forever.

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