Straus Partners With Craddick, Perry on $50M Texas A&M Grant -- How?

by: Phillip Martin, Progress Texas

Fri Mar 27, 2009 at 04:46 PM CDT

An interesting wrinkle in the ongoing saga of the awarding of a $50 million grant to Texas A&M from the Emergeing Technology Fund today: it turns out that the Texas A&M Chancellor went to Speaker Joe Straus first to get sign-off on the grant, but since Straus was not yet speaker, he turned to Craddick.

According to a KUT report:

A&M chancellor says he had Craddick sign off on grant ONLY after talking to Straus. Says Straus told him to go to Craddick for signature.

But the timing of that doesn't make any sense, whatsoever. Let's do a timeline:

• Jason Embry reported that the grant was signed off by Craddick, Perry, and Dewhurst on January 2. (Source)
  
  
• The "Gang of 11" chose Straus on January 2. The dominoes didn't even fall in his favor until a couple days later. (Source)
  

Why could the A&M chancellor go to Joe Straus before Tom Craddick if Craddick was still Speaker?

There is still something fishy with this whole story...