Vice President Pence’s Family’s Failed Gas Stations Are Costing Taxpayers Millions Of Dollars

Despite now being one of the individuals in charge of running the government of the United States of America today, Vice President Mike Pence’s family is still costing the very government he is now tasked with co-running millions of dollars in environmental clean-up, due to chemical run-off from his family’s now-defunct massive chain of gas stations.

As reported by the Boston Globe, whenever Pence is questioned about his childhood, he speaks quite fondly and nostalgically for his younger days growing up in a small Indiana town. It was there that Pence’s father founded a gas station empire spanning across the Midwest, growing in size to almost 200 stations at one point. To Pence, this lifestyle was an upbringing on the ”front row of the American dream.” However, years later, that dream has turned into a nightmare for taxpayers.

Kiel Bros Oil Co., what the Pence family business was named, had a widely publicized collapse back in 2004, leaving those two hundred gas stations as well as the company’s other facilities now unused and in disrepair.

The states of Indiana, Kentucky, and Illinois, where most of the mess had been made, are to this day still responsible for the clean up of over 85 contaminated sites across the three states, of which said clean-up is still expected to cost upwards of $20 million to complete.

The former oil company’s underground tanks have been leaking toxic chemicals into the soil since they’ve been shut down and fallen into disrepair, and through this have effectively contaminated the ground, as well as natural streams and private wells.

So far in the massive clean-up, the state government of Indiana has spent over $21 million dollars, or an average of about $500,000 a site to get each location back up to code.

With state governments working as diligently as they can while remaining within their budget to remedy this situation, it appears that even the federal government has to step in to help as well, offering to spearhead the clean-up below a former Kiel Bros station adjacent to the Pence family’s hometown that is reportedly giving off cancer-causing toxins.

Despite all of this, Kiel Bros., the cause of this massive issue, has since 2004 only paid for a small fraction of the total clean-up effort. Court documents reported by the Boston Globe explained that the company cited payment of $8.8 million in ”indemnity and defense costs,” but also noted that $5 million of that amount came from the states.

The Kiel Bros. fiasco is something that Vice President Pence has consistently swept “under the table” and for an individual so critical of excessive government spending he has remained fairly silent in regards to the millions of taxpayer dollars spent so far on cleaning the Kiel mess.

The Vice President’s brother, Greg Pence, who is currently seeking a chair in Congress under the Republican ticket, has also distanced himself from the clean-up costs of Kiel Bros., despite being the company’s acting President at the time of bankruptcy in 2004.