Paducah-Area Congressman to Resign Tuesday
Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.), the U.S. congressman whose district includes the Energy Department’s Paducah site, said Monday he will resign effective Sept. 6, cutting short his final term in Congress following his decision not to seek re-election in the wake of an ethics investigation last year.
Whitfield’s office announced the move Wednesday, though the lawmaker officially notified Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) in a letter dated Aug. 29.
Whitfield was first elected to Congress in 1995 and has represented Kentucky’s 1st District for 21 years. The remaining two months of his 11th term in office will be filled by the winner of a special election scheduled for Nov. 8 in parallel with the general election that day, in which the full next term will also be contested, according to a Wednesday statement from Bevin’s office.
Whitfield decided in 2015 to resign from Congress amid a House-led ethics probe brought against him after he “failed to prohibit lobbying contacts between his staff and his wife, improperly used his official position for the beneficial interest of himself or his wife, and dispensed special favors or privileges,” according to an official statement about the investigation posted online by the House Ethics Committee last year.
On Wednesday, Whitfield’s office said the soon-to-be-former congressman “would announce his future plans within the next 30 days.”
Whitfield’s career in the U.S. House of Representatives roughly coincided with the commercialization and later deactivation of the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, where from 1993 to 2013 the quasi-governmental United States Enrichment Corp. produced uranium for commercial power plants.
U.S. Enrichment Corp. went bankrupt and emerged in 2014 from Chapter 11 reorganization as the publicly traded Centrus Corp., which that year turned the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant back over to the Department of Energy for cleanup. This year, on July 21, DOE released a solicitation for a 10-year contract to demolish the plant. In its solicitation, DOE pegged the value of the contract at $600 million to $1 billion.
Fluor Federal Services has been on the job at Paducah since Centrus pulled out, cleaning up the former gaseous diffusion plant under a three-year, $465-million contract that expires on July 21, 2017.
