A tiny Nebraska startup won Trump’s first border wall contract – and that’s raising questions
A tiny
Nebraska startup awarded the first border wall construction project under President
Donald Trump is the offshoot of a construction firm that was sued repeatedly for failing to pay subcontractors and accused in a 2016 government audit of shady billing practices
SWF Constructors, which
lists just one employee in its Omaha office, won the $11 million federal contract in November as part of a project to replace a little more than 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) of a current fence with post-style barriers 30 feet (9.1 meters) high in Calexico,
California. The project represents a sliver of the president's plan that was central to his presidential campaign promise for a wall at the border with Mexico.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Fort Worth,
Texas, bid the Calexico wall project, according to federal records.
In 2011, the federal government sued Coastal on behalf of Anderson's client as part of a multimillion-dollar lead cleanup project at an EPA Superfund site in northeast Omaha. The lawsuit accused Coastal of failing to pay the subcontractor, Enviroworks Inc., nearly $400,000 in labor and equipment costs and of reneging on a profit sharing agreement that
cheated the subcontractor out of about $1.7 million.
In 2014, Coastal was again sued by the federal government for failing to pay another subcontractor, SF Marina Systems of Gloucester,
Virginia, more than $175,000 for construction of concrete docks at the U.S. Coast Guard facility at Fire Island, New York.
A year later, an audit by the U.S. Interior Department found $2 million in questionable spending that should have flagged it as a problem company, but did not.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/02/questions-surround-trumps-1st-border-wall-contract.html
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