In 2010, JDC Manufacturing, a real estate company owned and managed by Sen. Kay Hagan’s husband Charles “Chip” Hagan and his brothers John and David, applied for and received a federal stimulus grant administered by the State Energy Office of $250,644 that helped pay for energy upgrades, including a solar energy installation, at a building JDC owns in Reidsville. The energy upgrades benefited the tenant of the building, Plastic Revolutions, another Hagan family-owned company, and the project was designed to save Plastic Revolutions $100,000 a year in lower energy costs.
If you’ve been following this story at Carolina Journal and elsewhere (most recently at WRAL News and the News & Observer), you also are aware that the Hagan camp, through the senator’s campaign and a former Hagan speechwriter and press secretary now working for a Washington, D.C. “crisis management” firm who’s being pitched as a “spokeswoman” for JDC, have insisted at various times that neither the senator, her husband, JDC, nor any other family-related business interest profited from the stimulus grant.
To paraphrase crisis manager/company spokeswoman Caitlyn Legacki, that assertion is false. And ludicrous.
JDC received the $250,644 taxpayer-funded stimulus grant. (A second U.S. Department of Energy grant totaling $50,000 for a second installation at the same building is the focus of other news reports.) As a result of that funding and additional money from JDC, the company completed the energy improvements and solar project, allowing Plastic Revolutions to cut its energy bills by $100,000 a year. JDC could have financed the upgrades privately — from its investors, its savings, its revenues, or debt. It did not. It went, hat in hand, to taxpayers. Twice. And Plastic Revolutions profited from those taxpayer-underwritten investments as its bottom line improved by $100,000 annually, thanks to those taxpayer handouts.
Those are the facts.
It’s also the case that Chip Hagan and son Tilden formed a solar installation company, Solardyne/Green State Power, the same week JDC applied for the grant — and, according to Green State Power’s website and other documents, JDC (one Hagan company) hired Solardyne/Green State Power (another Hagan company) to do the work, even though JDC’s conflict-of-interest policy would seem to preclude such insider operations. (The USDA Rural Development energy program also has a conflict-of-interest provision on page 26 of this document that might raise eyebrows.)
Both WRAL and the N&O have advanced the story with information obtained from documents provided by JDC to the media outlets that appear not to be part of the public records in the JDC file maintained by the State Energy Office. We’re still working on obtaining all the information we can about this story to report it fully.
And rest assured, CJ will be following up on these developments and reporting on other aspects of the story that haven’t been covered.
But if some Hagan ally or paid operative says her family didn’t profit from the stimulus grant, don’t believe it, because it isn’t true.
