FFRF probes Kentucky city’s grant to religious university - Freedom From Religion Foundation

Capt Gregory Prickett - Which is why I believe the predominant issue here is allocation of the funding as per the conditions of the grant. Typically, there's a third party agency that reimburses project expenses from grant funding...a safeguard on most federal, and many state grants that apparently wasn't in place here. The issue is the same whether the grantee was a church, a school, or a zoo; and whether or not the funds were allocated to scholarships, seminary, or sports cars.

rest assured, the FFRF will get to the bottom of it.

1SG (Join to see) - Sounds like an old-fashioned kick back to me.

Capt Gregory Prickett - The school might be private, but like a sports stadium it is a community asset and no doubt one of the larger employers in town. Infrastructure improvements to such a property in terms of access roads or utilities often is a public/ private partnership - sometimes through tax-increment financing, sometimes directly. I have no problem with that, with asterisks. But a direct grant is fairly unusual, and if the school used it for other than it's intended use that deserves a hard look by the taxpayers.
Whenever I see something that resembles this I look hard at who profits from this exchange, because I would wager that is the reason for the accounting issues here. Could be that the school had a financial need (unlikely, given where the money went) and decided it would use this money and reimburse it later.
Could be that the city actually intended to make an endowment or public donation (not uncommon) but to reduce any controversy called it "road construction". That is problematic if members of the City Council were hoodwinked into supporting something that wasn't the case.
Could be that this is a good old-fashioned kickback scheme, where public money is laundered through the school to get to a prominent citizen... which is where I'd put my bet.
In any case, I think it deserves scrutiny.