Politics - Texas Style -- Bush, Perot Sons Use Public Money For Private Gain

DALLAS - Each is the spitting image of his father. Each carries his father's name.

George W. Bush, 45, and Ross Perot Jr., 33, are both up-and-coming players in the Dallas business community. Both men - friends, in fact - have been trying to emerge from the shadows cast by their famous fathers.

But the two sons also find themselves under the spotlight of the presidential campaign with questions raised about their use of public money for private gain.

The stakes include a few things held very dear in these parts of Texas: land, money, political power and baseball.

Ross Perot Jr., a real-estate developer, is building a huge industrial park and airport on land his family owns in Fort Worth. George W. Bush, part owner of the Texas Rangers, is the most public figure behind a $160 million stadium proposed for nearby Arlington, Texas.

Both projects are getting generous helpings of taxpayer money, a situation that has prompted critics of both to raise the cry of pork barrel.

AIRPORT QUESTIONED

Rather abruptly last month, after Perot's billionaire father began angling for a presidential run, the Federal Aviation Administration shut off the spigot for Alliance Airport: It began questioning the need for a $120 million grant to lengthen the runway that had seemed certain for approval.

Now, Fort Worth officials smell a political rat.

"The suspicion is that it has something to do with Mr. Perot running for president," says Judson Bailiff, Fort Worth's fiscal director.

There also is reason to suspect that young George Bush had a hand in yanking Alliance Airport's grant.

The younger Bush - the most politically connected to his father of the five Bush children - reportedly told Fort Worth Mayor Kay Granger during a recent luncheon at the posh Petroleum Club that the re-election team considered Perot a serious threat and that "there will be attention on Alliance."

For his part, Perot Jr. says he is hesitant to point fingers.

"It would be poor form to do that," says Perot Jr., a gracious young man with little of his father's feisty abrasiveness. He describes the younger Bush as a friend, who toured the airport last fall and seemed supportive of the project.

"The Perot family and the Bush family are friends. We're both Texas families. . . . I wouldn't want to lose a friendship over this. This will be over in November. A campaign is a temporary thing and friendships are lasting," says Perot Jr.

George W. Bush did not return telephone calls. The FAA denies any political motive in holding up the grant.

The potential loss of the $120 million grant represents quite a fall from grace for Alliance Airport - a project that the president once described as a "model for collaboration between government and private enterprise."

Alliance Airport is a futuristic-looking endeavor, incongruously situated in the rural environs of Fort Worth, where the Perots own nearly 16,000 acres. It is surrounded by manicured lawns and grazing cattle.

While the airport itself is owned by the city of Fort Worth, almost anyone who wants to locate there must purchase land from the Perots. Among the buyers: the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which is to break ground this month on a home for 91 surveillance planes.

Alliance and its environs have received a smorgasbord of public money. The FAA provided $46 million in 1987. The city and state have committed about $130 million. A Fort Worth municipal agency issued $476 million in tax-exempt revenue bonds - the largest bond issue in the city's history - for American Airlines to buy land from the Perots and to build a maintenance facility there.

Republican critics now question the funding for the entire project.

"I was just wondering if this was another example of Mr. Perot making billions off of government money," remarked Rep. Tom DeLay, a Houston Republican, at a recent hearing.

Perot Jr. says such criticisms are unfair because of jobs and tax revenues that will be created by the Alliance project.

"To say this is pork barrel is completely inaccurate. . . . Probably if more government money was spent on this kind of development, you wouldn't have a federal deficit," he says.

THE `WELFARE' BUSH?

David Chappell, a Fort Worth council member, says he sees an irony in GOP complaints about the Perot airport when "you've got little George (Bush) taking public money from the city of Arlington for a stadium."

In Arlington, a city situated in the snarl of highways between Dallas and Fort Worth and best known as the home of the Texas Rangers baseball team, quite a few Bush critics agree.

"You have got two favorite-son projects going on. It's just that one has the stroke to pull the plug on the other one's money," says Tyler Pierson, the owner of a dry-cleaning business in Arlington.

"Many of us in Arlington look at this (stadium) as a pork-barrel project for the president's son."

George W. Bush is the managing general partner of a group that bought the Rangers in 1989. Soon after the sale, the partners said the team might leave town if it didn't get a new stadium.

Early last year, Arlington voters approved a referendum to pay for a new $160 million stadium almost entirely with revenues raised from a half-cent increase in sales taxes.

Despite the success of the referendum, the deal is controversial. The partners are not putting up any of their own money, raising their $25 million share of the construction cost by selling luxury sky boxes.

"It was one of the most amazing deals I've ever seen," says Mark Rosentraub, a professor of public administration at Indiana University who is a noted authority on stadium financing. "They are not putting up any cash. The folks who sit in the bleachers are going to pay an extra $1 to subsidize the box seats. And they are going to finance it with a sales tax, which is the most regressive kind of tax around."

The stadium, which includes a river walk and restaurants, will be the most expensive in the country, costing 50 percent more than the newly opened home for the Baltimore Orioles.

Another objection is that the development will take place on hundreds of acres of land that will eventually be owned by the Rangers, greatly enhancing the value of the team should Bush choose to sell his interest.

Jim Runzheimer, an Arlington lawyer who describes himself as a conservative Republican, complains that the Rangers used the Bush connection to woo city officials eager to ingratiate themselves with the president.

"Anything the Rangers have wanted, they've gotten," says Runzheimer. "This is corporate welfare."

Arlington officials deny that political considerations have anything to do with the stadium's financing. Or for that matter with a recent incident in which police were called to the stadium.

During the Rangers' opening game last month, a group of Perot supporters set up shop outside the stadium to collect signatures on a petition to place Perot on the ballot.

They were politely asked to leave.