When the federal government closed Castle Air Force Base in Merced County in the 1990s, the dilapidated buildings and vast expanse of aging tarmac left behind seemed more like a liability than an opportunity.

But by 2018, the old runways that once carried B-52 bombers had found a new and unexpected customer: Google, which was testing its experimental self-driving vehicles there, far from the prying eyes of Silicon Valley.

At the urging of then-state Assemblyman Adam Gray, California gave Merced County $6.5 million that year to expand the self-driving testing program at the old base.

A few years later, Gray invested there, too.

In 2022, a company in which Gray is a minority owner bought four apartment buildings on the former base from Merced County, according to a Times review of business filings, property records and Gray’s financial disclosures. Gray’s link to the real estate deal has not been previously reported.

The sale closed for $600,000 in August 2022, records show, and the property is now valued at more than $2.5 million. Gray’s representatives said that the investment shows his interest in providing affordable housing, and that renovations have been so costly that he has yet to make money.

Nonetheless, the real estate deal in rural Atwater, Calif., has come under scrutiny as Gray, a Democrat, fights to unseat first-term Rep. John Duarte (R-Modesto). The race in California’s 13th Congressional District is a bitter rematch of 2022, when Duarte beat Gray by the second-closest margin in the nation: 564 votes.

The race is among the handful of contests across the U.S. that are seen as pivotal in determining which party controls Congress after the November election.

Republicans have questioned the timing of Gray’s purchase, which closed four months before he left the Legislature and less than a year before California officials awarded nearly $50 million in new funding for the site. The 2023 grant from the California State Transportation Agency helped Merced County build out a rail hub on the base site to handle cargo loaded onto trains from the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.

“Gray’s self-serving scheme reveals his true colors as a Sacramento politician who lines his own pockets at the expense of Valley families’ trust and hard-earned dollars,” said Ben Petersen, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, which works to elect Republicans to the House of Representatives.

Petersen accused Gray of “mixing taxpayer money with personal profit” and said the apartment deal should be investigated.

Far from Gray lining his pockets, his campaign and company said, the old Castle Air Force Base apartments have required so much renovation that Gray has actually lost money.

Ben Rodriguez, Gray’s campaign manager, said the allegations were false and “intended to distract voters from John Duarte’s disastrous record.”

“While Adam Gray has brought back real help for families across this district, Duarte is making things worse for families every day he spends in Congress,” Rodriguez said.

Gray is a minority owner in Gemenii LLC, the company that owns the apartment complex at the base. Gemenii is a subsidiary of a family-owned residential and commercial construction company of which Gray is also a member, the firm said.

Gray learned about the Castle Air Force Base apartments about six months before the sale, when “partners that own other properties at Castle” approached him with the idea of renovating the 80-unit complex to provide affordable housing, the company said.

The four spartan buildings, once barracks for airmen, were in disrepair, and three were vacant. Merced County had classified the property as surplus and assessed the buildings and the 5.3 acres of land beneath them at $400,000 to $600,000, the company said.

When the county received “no other competitive offers,” the firm said, Merced County sold the buildings for $600,000.

The firm has since spent millions on renovations, “exactly as intended by Merced County when the property was sold in an open and public sale process,” company attorney Richard Marchini said in a written statement.

Gray was still representing the Modesto area in the state Assembly when the sale closed.

Gray has a 30% stake in the firm that owns the apartments, the company said. His name does not appear in the company’s state business filings.

Gray first disclosed his investment in his 2022 Form 700, the financial disclosure that California lawmakers are required to file annually with state ethics officials.

Government experts said it did not appear that Gray’s real estate deal broke the law.

But, they said, elected officials who invest in real estate must be aware of the appearance of conflicts of interest, particularly when investing in their districts.

Dan Schnur, the former head of the California Fair Political Practices Commission, said that Gray’s real estate investment at the site being bookended by the award of taxpayer funds seemed “suspicious.”

“Everyone deserves the benefit of the doubt, but the best way to receive the benefit of the doubt is to earn it,” Schnur said. “A public servant ought to be aware of how these things might be perceived.”

After Gray lost his run for Congress in 2022, he filed a federal financial disclosure with the House in which he did not disclose the real estate investment or his stake in the LLC that owns the buildings.

His campaign said that Gray did not mention the apartment complex investment because there was no revenue to report, but that he disclosed his position in the parent company.

In a new filing made public this month, for Gray’s second run for Congress, he said he received between $100,000 and $1 million from the LLC that owns the apartments in 2023, and between $50,000 and $100,000 in the first half of 2024.

Those figures represent the company’s total revenue, rather than Gray’s, and were listed “out of an abundance of caution,” the campaign said.

Gray has not received any income from the business in 2023 or 2024, the campaign said, and the investment has not made a profit.

The former air base, now called Castle Commerce Center, covers about 3 square miles. It’s home to miles of empty roads, as well as dozens of private and government tenants, including a federal prison, a post office, Merced’s commercial airport and Waymo, Google’s autonomous vehicle company.

After Gray helped secure the $6.5-million grant for the self-driving car testing site in 2018, Merced County converted vast stretches of unused tarmac at the base into a testing hub. There are now full intersections with traffic lights and signage and a 2.2-mile test freeway with on- and off-ramps where vehicles can practice driving in urban environments.

The site, operated by an Ohio-based company, has hosted two dozen companies from Silicon Valley and major automotive firms.

In the midst of that boom, Merced County’s supervisors continued selling portions of the base as surplus land. That included the 5.3-acre site and the 80-unit apartment complex, which the board sold on a 4-0 vote in May 2022 to Gemenii.

At the time of the sale, the land was valued at $465,000, and the structures were valued at $135,000, according to tax records provided by the company.

The company took out an $885,000, 30-year mortgage at the end of 2022, and a $3-million, 15-year mortgage in June of this year, to finance renovations at the building, the company said.

Two buildings have been gutted and renovated so far, a process that included asbestos removal and replacing windows and appliances, the company said.

The renovated buildings are now valued at more than $2 million, while the underlying land value has risen by $9,300, according to tax bills provided by the company.

The increase in value is “directly connected to the material financial efforts of Gemenii to revitalize the property,” the firm said. Any developments at the air base site, the company said, “have had no impact on the property’s value.”

When giving a farewell speech at the Democratic National Convention on Monday, President Joe Biden referenced Vice President Kamala Harris’s role in the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.

“Guess who cast the tie-breaking vote? Vice President soon-to-be President Kamala Harris, and now it’s the law of the land,” Biden said of the $739 billion spending bill that passed the Senate by 51-50 thanks to the Harris vote in August 2022.

However, since Harris – now the Democratic presidential nominee – cast the tie-breaking vote as president of the Senate, the cost of rent has climbed 13%. In comparison, the cost of new mortgages climbed 36% in those two years, according to estimates assembled by Americans for Tax Reform.

Further, the cost of baby food shot up by 13%, while frozen vegetables increased by 14%. The ATR, a conservative-leaning group, crunched numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve. The cost of transportation, butter, bread, flour, and breakfast cereal all increased by single digits since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.  

HARRIS’ ECONOMIC PLAN PROPOSES TO FIX ‘PRICE GOUGING’ AND GO AFTER ‘EXCESSIVE PROFITS,’ BUT WHAT DEFINES THIS?

Over the last two years, some prices such as gas, transportation, energy, chicken, and milk declined, according to the ATR’s numbers.

However, since Biden and Harris took office in January 2021, prices for every sector measured by ATR’s stats leaped by at least double digits. New mortgage rates since Biden-Harris came into office skyrocketed by 156% and rent shot up by 22%.

Gas has gone up by 35%, energy has gone up by 33%, and transportation increased by 28%.

The cost of eggs has increased by 53%, baby food has gone up by 30%, frozen vegetables are up 28%, bread is up by 24% and the cost of milk is up by 17%.

Shortly after becoming vice president in March 2021, Harris also cast the tie-breaking vote on the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which also led to printing more money amid rising inflation.

CONNECTICUT FAMILY FORCED TO LIVE IN A HOTEL DUE TO SURGING HOUSING COSTS

Both gasoline and energy prices have gone up significantly since January 2021. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

“Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote on the two biggest legislative drivers of inflation: the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act. She also supported the Biden-Harris regulatory regime which imposed additional costs on households,” Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, told Fox News Digital.

“And now she vows to make matters worse by imposing a long list of tax increases,” Norquist continued. “She has endorsed a carbon tax, a 44.6% capital gains tax, and a 28% federal corporate tax rate, higher than China’s 25% and the EU [European Union] average of 21%. Americans will have even less take-home pay.”

The Harris campaign didn’t respond to inquiries for this story, but the Democratic National Committee responded by pointing to former President Donald Trump’s economic record during his last year in office during the COVID-19 pandemic.

DNC spokesperson Alex Floyd said Trump would give a tax cut to billionaires if elected, and said he “left office with the worst jobs record since Herbert Hoover.”

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Floyd referred to a statement in June by 16 Nobel economists that endorsed then candidate Biden’s economic plan, and argued Trump’s proposals would lead to inflation.

“Economists have called Donald Trump’s plan an inflation bomb that would sell out working families to double down on tax giveaways for the ultra-wealthy,” Floyd told Fox News Digital.

Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more at our Fox News Digital election hub.

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative playbook that would overhaul much of the federal government under a second Trump administration, has sparked fear and concern from voters despite the former president’s attempt to distance his campaign from the plan. But while Project 2025 might seem radical, most of it is not new. Instead, the now-famous document seeks to reanimate many of the worst racial, economic and political instincts of the Reagan Revolution.

Project 2025 begins with its authors (one of whom stepped down last month) boasting of the Heritage Foundation’s 1981 publication “The Mandate for Leadership,” which helped shape the Reagan administration’s policy framework. It hit its mark: Reagan wrote 60% of its recommendations into public policy in his first year in office, according to the Heritage Foundation. Yet the 900-plus-page Project 2025, itself a major component of a new edition of “The Mandate for Leadership,” does not contain any analysis of the economic and social price Americans paid for the revolution the Heritage Foundation and Reagan inspired.

If today’s economic inequality, racial unrest and environmental degradation represent some of our greatest political challenges, we would do well to remember that Reagan and the Heritage Foundation were the preeminent engineers of these catastrophes. Perhaps no day in Reagan’s presidency better embodied his policy transformations or the political ambitions of the Heritage Foundation than Aug. 13, 1981, when Reagan signed his first budget.

This budget dramatically transformed governmental priorities and hollowed out the nation’s 50-year pursuit of government for the common good that began during the New Deal. Once passed, it stripped 400,000 poor working families of their welfare benefits, while removing significant provisions from another 300,000. Radical cuts in education affected 26 million students. The number of poor Americans increased by 2.2 million, and the percentage of Black Americans living in poverty rose to a staggering 34.2%.

Of course, this was just the beginning of Reagan’s war on the poor, the environment and education. Following a Heritage Foundation plan, the Environmental Protection Agency’s operating budget would fall by 27%, and its science budget decreased by more than 50%. Funding for programs by the Department of Housing and Urban Development that provided housing assistance would be cut by 70%, according to Matthew Desmond’s “Poverty, By America.” Homelessness skyrocketed. And, as Project 2025 proposes, Reagan attempted to eliminate the Department of Education but settled for gutting its funding in a manner that set public education, in the words of author Jonathan Kozol, “back almost 100 years.” As funding for these issues nosedived under Reagan, financial support for the “war on drugs” skyrocketed and the prison population nearly doubled.

All the while, protections provided to the wealthy ballooned. Tax rates on personal income, corporate revenue and capital gains plummeted. For example, the highest income tax rate when Reagan took office was 70%. He would eventually lower it to 33%.

To ensure that wealth would be a long-lived family entitlement, Reagan instituted a 300% increase in inheritance tax protections through estate tax exemptions in his first budget. In 1980, the exemption stood at $161,000. By the time Reagan left office in 1989 it was $600,000. Today it is $13,610,000. This means that today nearly all wealthy children enjoy tax-free access to generational wealth.

And beginning during Reagan’s presidency, the number of millionaires and billionaires multiplied, increasing 225% and 400%, respectively, while the poverty of Americans across racial lines intensified. Even white males were more likely to be poor following Reagan’s presidency. Today poverty is the fourth-leading cause of death in the U.S., even though this is the wealthiest nation in the world.

If we feel like we live in a country that isn’t working for anyone who isn’t wealthy, these are some of the core reasons why. Looking back at the Reagan era and the Heritage Foundation’s original “Mandate for Leadership,” we must remember that our domestic wounds are largely self-inflicted, results of buying into racial, economic and environmental lies that continue to be sold. It is precisely the types of policies that devastated the nation during the Reagan administration that Project 2025 now seeks to resuscitate. Perhaps the only truly new thing Project 2025 suggests is using more authoritarian means to enact its agenda.

History has hinges, moments that change the trajectory of nations. The greatest progress in our country has almost always emerged during turbulent times. It is up to the United States’ most committed believers to close the door on terror and trauma and open one that leads to new democratic possibilities.

Our current moment represents more than an election. It is a turning point that has the potential to transform the United States for generations to come. We don’t need the version of the past that Project 2025 is trying to sell us. It didn’t work for most Americans then, and it won’t work for most of us now. But perhaps Project 2025 is the push the Democratic Party needed. While the Republican Party veers further into authoritarianism, Democrats must be equally determined to develop a truly equitable democracy and bind the wounds of a deeply divided nation.

Joel Edward Goza, a professor of ethics at Simmons College of Kentucky, is the author of the forthcoming book “Rebirth of a Nation: Reparations and Remaking America.”