Beef Added to Usual Helping of Pork in ’99 U.S. Budget

WASHINGTON — The 306 residents of Whittier, Alaska, have to walk an extra quarter-mile around the railroad tracks when they want to get to the town port, and they don’t like to do that. “It’s inconvenient,” said Alaska Railroad spokesman Jim Banks.

But not for long.

Thanks to the massive spending bill adopted by Congress in October, Whittier--a town so small that most of its residents live in one building--will be getting a $700,000 pedestrian overpass.

In fact, the Alaska Railroad is getting so much money for so many new construction projects (at a cost to federal taxpayers of $43 million) that some railroad insiders are wondering how, in a state frozen for much of the year, they can spend it all. “I think one of the reactions from a lot of people is, how are we going to get a lot of this work done?” Banks said. “Our construction year is short.”

Congress Ignored Its Own Rules

The federal largess didn’t extend only to Alaska. Washington hasn’t seen a spectacle like this in years. Congress passed the massive $500-billion spending bill after a rush of last-minute secret additions, many of them pet projects pushed by legislators.

Distracted by the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal, facing a potential government shutdown and salivating over a $70-billion surplus, Congress ignored its own rules in the final days of negotiations. Even bills already signed into law were reopened in a pork free-for-all. And until now, little public attention has been paid to the thousands of special projects that got federal money, regardless of overall government priorities.

Trains, planes and streetcars. Research into grasshoppers, manure and blueberries. Museums for first ladies, inventors and musicians. The 1999 budget has it all.

“People have been distracted by the other scandal while the big scandal, pork-barrel, continues,” said David Williams, research director of Citizens Against Government Waste, a Washington group that annually pinpoints questionable government spending.

The 4,000-page bill was so packed with pork that most members of Congress had no idea what was in it when they voted on it--and probably still don’t know.

“Only God knows what is in this conference report,” Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) said on the Senate floor. “I will never again support such a convolution of the legislative process as the one we have seen this year. And I hope that others will agree that this process is just as silly and as sad and as ridiculous and as disgraceful as I think it was.”

Those who remember Byrd’s reputation for bringing home the bacon when he was majority leader may find his comments ironic.

By any standard, the process that led to the creation of the 1999 spending bill was not the norm. “Calling it a process is flattering,” said one disgusted appropriations staff member.

Consider what happened to the Columbia River Fish Mitigation project, a program designed to save salmon in the Pacific Northwest. After it was debated at length by the House energy and water Appropriations subcommittee, the members decided it was a project not worthy of a huge infusion of federal cash. “The committee has previously expressed its deep concerns regarding the vast sums of taxpayer dollars pouring into this project with little apparent effect,” committee members wrote.

But after the Energy and Water Bill had been signed into law, the issue was reopened--and $35 million more was given to the Columbia River project. That decision was made in closed-door negotiations between the administration and key Senate and House leaders.

For those subcommittee and staff members who played by the rules--weighing the merits of individual projects within the limits of the budget--the last-minute add-ons were a slap in the face.

“In this instance, what you had were relatively few people who could get what they wanted because they were there at the end when it counted,” said Rep. Vic Fazio (D-West Sacramento). “Some people got more than they frankly could have imagined.”

Some budget observers said they hadn’t seen so many special projects inserted into a budget since 1990, when the late Democratic Sen. Quentin Burdick got a $500,000 grant to restore Lawrence Welk’s boyhood home in North Dakota, a grant ultimately revoked amid a furor over pork spending.

Welk did not appear in the 1999 spending bill, but Frank Sinatra did. Buried in the budget for the financially strapped District of Columbia is $300,000 for a new Museum of American Music, a project that will house Sinatra’s archives, including the sailor suit he wore in “On the Town.”

This summer, Nancy Sinatra announced that the proposed museum, a project backed by former Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, would be built with private funds. “We were all surprised to learn about” the congressional funding, said Jim Weaver, a Smithsonian Institution curator and project director of the proposed museum.

Pork-barrel projects are usually of local interest, directed to a legislator’s district without regard to national significance. They can be tremendously important to one lawmaker, frivolous to another.

Although Congress has traditionally given money to sporting events, the 1999 budget saw money earmarked for games that are years in the future. Not only did the Special Olympics in 1999 get federal money now, but so did the Special Olympics in 2001 and the Winter Olympics in 2002.

In California, $500,000 in pork money will go to a Boys and Girls Club in San Juan Capistrano, $250,000 to a city-owned “national soccer center” in Lancaster and $500,000 to a San Bernardino County “shack attack” program.

“Blighted buildings are a nationwide issue,” said Tom Ramirez, an analyst for the economic community development department in San Bernardino County, which will use the money to tear down hundreds of abandoned structures.

“Better California than other parts of the country,” said Dave LesStrang, deputy chief of staff to Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands), who serves on the appropriations panel that gave out the money.

Not surprisingly, much of the largess went to legislators’ favorite projects. Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) helped get $1.1 million for the National Warmwater Aquaculture Center in Stoneville, Miss. The center’s full name: The Thad Cochran National Warmwater Aquaculture Center. In July, Mississippi State University lauded the senator for helping “secure funds for the center,” which researches catfish production.

Cochran is a member of the Appropriations Committee. Typically, that is how special-project money flows to states. The more powerful the legislative delegation, the more likely special projects will get funded. Congress has no system to weed out good and bad projects, no requirement that the federal agency doling out the money even wants it.

The Federal Aviation Administration, for instance, did not ask for $2 million for a volcano monitor in Alaska. But Congress decided to pay for the monitor to make sure air traffic controllers know when ash is in the sky, according to a press release from Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

“We don’t know precisely what the money is used for,” said Mitch Barker, an FAA spokesman in Seattle. “Essentially, we just cut a check for that amount and it’s given to the Alaska Volcano Observatory and they do what they do with it.”

John Eichelberger, the observatory’s coordinating scientist, said potentially hazardous ash clouds form over the Aleutians about four days every year. He said a plane nearly crashed in 1989 because of it.

But no agency asked for the money for the monitoring program, so the observatory turned to Congress for help. “This is something I feel very strongly about,” Eichelberger said.

U.S. Parks Police Chief Robert Langston couldn’t get money for a new helicopter from the Interior Department where he works, so he turned to the District of Columbia appropriations subcommittee.

Although statistics showed that the park police spent little air time in the district, Congress agreed to spend $8.5 million for a helicopter.

A Friendly Face in Congress

Turning to a friendly member of Congress is often the best way to make sure that federal money gets in the right place.

In Louisiana, that person in recent years has been Republican Bob Livingston, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and incoming speaker of the House.

“Livingston constantly brags about beefing up defense spending, but what he really asks for is pork that goes to his district,” said a House Democratic aide.

Livingston is credited with steering a Navy payroll center to the University of New Orleans, a project that will create thousands of jobs in Louisiana.

“What Bob Livingston has done is help us every time get in position to compete effectively,” said UNO Chancellor Gregory O’Brien. Livingston also has been involved in more parochial projects, like making sure that the Jefferson Parish sheriff in his district gets federal money for computer equipment.

And sometimes the power of the federal budget is less about money and more about national recognition. Tucked into the bureaucratese, for instance, is a passage urging the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to see if it can implement on a national level “an innovative program” begun by Jefferson Sheriff Harry Lee, Livingston’s hometown friend. The program: stopping people from running red lights.

Times staff writer Alan C. Miller contributed to this story.

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Federal Pork-Barrel Projects

The 1999 federal budget is packed with special-interest projects, many added at the last minute to the $500-billion spending bill passed by Congress in October. Here are some examples:

1. $43 million to the state-owned Alaska Railroad

2. $15 million to renovate a gravel airstrip at King Cove, Alaska, so it can be used for jets

3. $2 million to the Alaska Volcano Observatory

4. $35 million to increase the number of salmon in the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest

5. $500,000 for the Backbone Trail in the Santa Monica Mountains

6. $500,000 for a Boys and Girls Club in San Juan Capistrano

7. $250,000 to a national soccer center in Lancaster, Calif.

8. $1 million for security at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City

9. $600,000 to 1999 World Alpine Ski Championships at Vail, Colo.

10. $1.1 million to the Thad Cochran National Warmwater Aquaculture Center at Mississippi State University

11. $24 million for streetcars in New Orleans.

12. $1.5 million to restore the Kendall County Courthouse in Yorkville, Ill.

13. $5 million for the National Investors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio

14. $300,000 for the National First Ladies’ Library in Canton, Ohio

15. $300,000 for the proposed National Museum of American Music in Washington, D.C.

16. $8.5 million for a police helicopter in Washington, D.C.

17. $1.275 million for video equipment for New Jersey state police cars to combat drunken drivers

Source: U.S. Government