I see........its bad when the Dems. spend on money on social programs but its okay when the GOP throws money away on bridges that go no where. Its no wonder the deficit as a percent of GDP goes up under GOP presidents.
ted
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Built With Steel, Perhaps, but Greased With Pork
Associated Press for The New York Times
Tiny Ketchikan, in foreground, would be linked by a bridge to a mountainous island a mile away.
By TIMOTHY EGAN
Published: April 10, 2004
KETCHIKAN, Alaska, April 8 — Even by the standards of Alaska, the land where schemes and dreams come for new life, two bridges approved under the national highway bill passed by the House last week are monuments to the imagination.
One, here in Ketchikan, would be among the biggest in the United States: a mile long, with a top clearance of 200 feet from the water — 80 feet higher than the Brooklyn Bridge and just 20 feet short of the Golden Gate Bridge. It would connect this economically depressed, rain-soaked town of 7,845 people to an island that has about 50 residents and the area's airport, which offers six flights a day (a few more in summer). It could cost about $200 million.
The other bridge would span an inlet for nearly two miles to tie Anchorage to a port that has a single regular tenant and almost no homes or businesses. It would cost up to $2 billion.
These "bridges to nowhere," as critics have dubbed the two costliest of the high-priority projects in the six-year, $275 billion House bill, are one reason Republicans are fighting among themselves in shaping the nation's transportation spending.
President Bush has threatened to use his first veto against any measure that emerges from a House-Senate conference with a cost of more than $256 billion. (The Senate version, passed in February, calls for $318 billion and includes neither of the projects, though their champion on Capitol Hill voices certainty that they will be added in conference.) Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, has described the legislation as so laden with pork as to betray the party's principles.
But if this is pork, the Republican behind the House bill says bring it on, with extra fat. Representative Don Young, Alaska's lone member of the House, where he is chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, is already known as Mr. Concrete but would like to wear another title as well.
"I'd like to be a little oinker, myself," Mr. Young told a Republican lunch crowd here, taking mock offense at the suggestion that Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican who is chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, directs more pork to their state than he does. "If he's the chief porker, I'm upset."
When asked why a town with one main road, a dwindling population and virtually nowhere to drive to needs a bridge to rival the world's great spans, people here inevitably respond with two words: Don Young. Mr. Young, mindful that the highway bill comes up for renewal only once every six years or so, and that the House Republican Conference imposes three-term limits on committee chairmanships, says the opportunity to pour so many federal dollars into his home state comes once in a lifetime, and should be seized.
"If you don't do it now, when are you going to do it?" he said at the luncheon. "This is the time to take advantage of the position I'm in, along with Senator Stevens."
He said he would support an increase in the federal tax on gasoline — a "user fee," he called it — to pay for even more projects than were included in the newly passed bill.
People here in Ketchikan, in far southeastern Alaska off the coast of British Columbia, are grateful for Mr. Young's efforts, and they can certainly use the 600 or so jobs that a vast government works project would bring. A veneer mill, supported by $17 million in federal aid, lies empty and rusting, in search of an owner. The town's biggest job provider, a pulp mill, shut down in 1997.
But as a transportation solution, the Ketchikan bridge is seen as something of a joke. It would replace a five-minute ferry crossing.
"Everyone knows it's just a boondoggle that we're getting because we have a powerful congressman," said Mike Sallee, 57, whose mother homesteaded here and who now runs a small timber operation. "That ferry of ours has been pretty darn reliable."
In public hearings on the bridge plan, officials heard few complaints about the ferry service. The ferry crosses every half-hour in winter and every 15 minutes in summer, when there are two boats available and a third on call. The crossing one day this week, from the time a visitor picked up his bags at the airport to his reaching town, took less than 10 minutes — and that included a wait for the ferry to arrive and dock at the island.
The Gravina Island Access Bridge, as the project is called, has been given a Golden Fleece award by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a budget watchdog based in Washington.
nytimes.com |
