Sondland's role in the Ukrainian scandal has also brought unwanted scrutiny to the ambassador's renovation of his Brussels residence, for which he's been awarded over half a million dollars in taxpayer funding
on a hotel, to ostensibly serve as an alternate residence to the embassy while the building undergoes renovations for months of September and October of this year.
All told, these expenses—just a snapshot of what the U.S. embassy in Brussels has been awarded by the State Department since Sondland’s confirmation—amount to more than half a million dollars in taxpayer funding. “You don’t get to just renovate the kitchen on taxpayer dollars. It is a lot of money,” the former ambassador quipped.
Indeed, the work being done at the residence seems to stretch beyond necessity into extravagance. Take for instance, the more than $95,000 that was spent on a pergola, typically an outdoor garden or patio feature. According to a State Department outlining the scope of the work for the project, the specifications for the pergola—or “outdoor living pod”—include windows with built-in blinds, tilting aluminum slats, LED lighting, electric heating, and a remote control system.that the U.S. embassy was “nearly unusable for representational purposes,” and noted that the upgrades cost less than moving the embassy to another location, which was proposed and scrapped during theadministration.
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