ABOUT TIME! Course now that Rick Perry is gone, new broom sweeps clean and this, for one, is something I actually AGREE with Greg Abbott about. He also is changing UT at Austin. Have written about the shifty Texas Enteprise Fund before.
One of the biggest shifts under Abbott involves one of Perry’s cherished economic development initiatives, the Emerging Technology Fund. Designed to promote promising high-tech start-ups and foster job creation, the fund has weathered numerous bankruptcies and unflattering news coverage.
An Associated Press investigation in July found that at least 16 of the startups had failed, and others listed “out-of-state employees and short-term hires as being among the jobs they created.”
A week after Abbott took office, he announced that he planned to dismantle the tech fund, transferring half of the money into higher education research and the other half into the Texas Enterprise Fund, another one of Perry’s pet job-creation programs that has become a target for critics and reformers.
A state audit last year found that the Enterprise Fund was riddled with weak oversight procedures and doled out tens of millions of dollars to companies that never formally applied for grants.
Greg Abbott Getting Rid of Rick Perry's Boondoggle Texas Enterprise Fund
