Probed for bilking taxpayers, suspect checks in from Ghana

A professed aerospace manufacturing expert, whom the attorney general is investigating for doing nothing tangible with $2.5 million in grants he received in 2020 and 2021, says he’s in Ghana.

And as long as Attorney General Dana Nessel is around, he’s not coming back to Michigan.

Gavin Brown, the executive director of the Michigan Aerospace Manufacturers Association, told MIRS News that he believes the review of how his organization spent the taxpayer money it received is politically motivated and that he no longer feels safe in Michigan.

It could also be that he doesn’t want to get arrested and plastered on the front pages, like David Coker Jr., the former legislative staffer, who allegedly spent part of a $25 million no-bid grant he somehow received on silver bullets and expense cars.

Or Fay Beydoun, the well-connected Democratic operative who received state grants that The Detroit News reported went toward elaborate travel and the most expensive coffee maker you’ll ever find.

Brown took advantage of legislators with their eyes in the stars in 2018 and 2019. He convinced them to set aside $2 million to develop a low-orbit launch site in Michigan for space travel and $500,000 to build a maintenance garage to fix rockets.

Instead, the $2.5 million went toward a $325,000 study that concluded building a launch site in Michigan doesn’t work. The rest bailed out a terribly in-debt organization and then kept it afloat for a few years until 2022 when it was back in the hole.

Brown’s kept getting his $150,000-a-year salary. He had someone else working for him as well. They expensed meals, travel and all the rest. More than $1 million went to unspecified “administrative” expenses, according to IRS filings.

But no rocket ships are blasting out of Michigan, nor could there be.  Mike Dudzik, whose firm, IQM in Ann Arbor, Brown hired to conduct his study, explained why.

For one, Elon Musk’s Space X basically had cornered the market. For anyone who needed a satellite shot into space, SpaceX was able to do it at a lower cost due to its volume of work. According to The Motley Fool, SpaceX accounted for 72% of the rocket launches in 2022.

The other issue is logistics. The only potential Michigan location to launch rockets without worrying about debris falling on people from space is the northern Michigan coast overlooking Lake Superior, but even that comes with concerns. Unlike the ocean, Lake Superior is a freshwater lake that roughly 40 million people drink from. Allowing rocket fuel or debris to fall into that water source isn’t exactly eco-friendly.

Also, if the rocket separated from the booster late in the launch, the booster could fall in Canada, which the Canadians weren’t thrilled about, regardless of whether it fell on inhabited ground or not.

Now, if you’re saying to yourself, “I could have told state legislators that, and I would have done it for less than $325,000,” you wouldn’t be the first one.

In fact, Dudzik never got the full amount. Brown didn’t pay him the final $35,000 because he felt Dudzik hadn’t properly sourced some of this information, which Dudzik said was “absurd.”

Meanwhile, Dudzik has written off the chances he’ll get that last check. Brown said his association had suspended its operations since Nessel’s “whisper campaign” against him chased all of his members away.

He thinks Nessel has it out for him because his attorney is a big fan of President Donald Trump.

The good news in all of this is that the House and the Senate have vowed not to enact these ridiculous middle-of-the-night budgets. All of these so-called “earmarks” (such as the grants mentioned above) must undergo a transparency process before a legislator can return them to the budget-making process.

Speaker Matt Hall has threatened not to include any of this wasteful pork in the state budget this year. Maybe, maybe not. We’ll see.

I do know this. The chances of real reform (as hard as it is to believe) blasting off and falling into the Legislature’s orbit are better than a real rocket ship launching on Michigan’s soil.

(Kyle Melinn is the editor of the Capitol news service MIRS. You can email him at melinnky@gmail.com.)