By RON NIXON
WASHINGTON — Dozens of local and regional construction projects, which the Obama administration did not include in this year’s budget, managed to receive special financing through money set aside by lawmakers, according to a review of documents issued Wednesday by the Army Corps of Engineers.
The documents show that about 168 projects that the administration did not view as a priority received $212 million. Last year, members of Congress created 26 special funds in the corps’ budget — which totals $507 million — to address what they considered deficiencies in the administration’s budget proposal.
The result is a number of projects that were financed in past years through earmarks, the now-banned legislative gimmick that paid for many pet projects, got money. These include a flood control project in Flagstaff, Ariz.; water and sewer projects in North Dakota; and programs to replace sand on beaches in New Jersey, which the conservative Republican Study Committee, a group of 170 Republicans, has called wasteful.
Steve Ellis, a vice president for Taxpayers for Common Sense, a budget watchdog group in Washington, called the spending backdoor earmarking since several of the projects were previously financed through requests inserted into spending bills.
“It appears Congress was able to get the administration to do some of the earmarking dirty work for them,” Mr. Ellis said.
Lawmakers said the funds were not earmarks since they were not requested by individual lawmakers for specific projects in their home districts. The various projects, they say, are needed by local communities for needed construction.
One item listed in the documents is the dredging of the Delaware River, which has long been criticized by earmark opponents as wasteful. The project received nearly $17 million on Wednesday, its largest allocation in a decade. In the past, the project was financed by millions of dollars in earmarks obtained by Democrats and Republicans from Delaware and Pennsylvania. The lawmakers obtained about $5 million for the project in 2010 before the Congressional ban on earmarks took effect.
Local officials argue that the dredging is needed to bring larger ships into the Port of Wilmington in Delaware. An expansion of the Panama Canal is expected to bring more cargo traffic from Asia on larger, heavier ships to the East Coast of the United States in 2014, and several East Coast ports say they would not be able to accommodate larger ships without deeper waters.
A study by the Government Accountability Office in 2010 questioned the economic benefits of deepening the Delaware.
In a statement on Wednesday, Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, praised the decision to finance the project.
“Deepening the Delaware River will bring enormous benefits to our state and has the potential to create tens of thousands of jobs in our region,” Mr. Coons said.
Ian Koski, a spokesman for Mr. Coons, said the financing was not an earmark. “The corps came to this decision on its own,” he said. The funds set up by Congress to pay for the corps’ projects were financed by reducing money for projects in the president’s budget and by adding $375 million to the agency’s budget, documents show.
Lawmakers said that because of the earmark ban, Congress left it up to the corps to determine which projects would be financed based on criteria specified by Congress. Budget watchdog groups said the guidelines steered money to those projects that had received money through earmarks.
Lawmakers Set Aside Money for Construction (New York Times)
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