The stink of pigs emanating from congress

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."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/10/national/10ALAS.html?pagewanted=2&th

Something stinks in congress. Not only do unneeded projects get funded [pork] but congress people openly admit it is pork and gloat over how much of it they can capture for their constituency.

It is long past time for a revamping of the commitee system which in many instances is the driving force in capturing the pork. Possibly a revolving chairmanship.