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September 20, 2005
A Contrary View: To Pork ot Not to Pork
I originally was going to enter this as a comment to Slublog's earlier pork threads here, here and here, but I'll make it a post in its own right instead. I want to raise the possibility that even what seems to be the most egregious pork may in fact be utterly essential to the recipients.
What can a small town with a big infrastructure problem do? It does not have a large enough tax base to raise the money itself. Muni bonds are an option, but some projects are so big that the interest would be crippling to the budget. Without money from the government, the problem cannot be fixed. My town, for instance, needs a new sewage treatment center to grow any more--you literally are not allowed to build any more houses in town on the north side of the railroad tracks. They've been raising the water rates a lot but that won't be nearly enough; we'll need money from the state and feds to do it. If our legislators manage to get this money for us, we're not going to call it pork, we're going to call it a lifesaver.
Let's use the Greenville airport example, and come up with a scenario where this could be defended as non-pork. Moosehead is a proverbial can't-get-there-from-here place with appealing opportunities for outdoor recreation. Let's suppose that a lot of visitors choose to fly in, on chartered or private planes. To be able to do this, these sorts of people are big-bucks people. I think it would be fair to assume that tourist dollars are a big chunk of that area's economy, hence getting these sorts of people to the area is of prime importance. Now we don't know how bad a shape that runway is in. Maybe it's a grass runway and has drainage problems, or it's an asphalt runway frost-heaved to pieces. If it's in bad enough shape, or dangerous, those big bucks won't come back for a second visit, and advise their big bucks friends to avoid the airport and hence the area. It seems like a lot of money, but civil engineering isn't cheap.
Of course, it might also be that one of these big bucks visitors is a powerful lobbyist down in Portland who wants to fly up to Greenville to go fishing on the weekends without getting mud on his tires, and that if they can get that runway fixed, maybe his organization will endorse the legislator. That's pork: funding local projects to purchase of political favors.
I'm pretty sure that just looking at a list of funding can't tell you whether something is pork or not. Only by knowing the local situation can you tell whether it is a legitimate need or not, and only then can you begin to say whether it is pork or not. Maybe that bridge in Stillwater helps people avoid a busy stretch of highway where there have been several pedestrian accidents in the past few years. You can make some general assumptions about how much of a list of projects might be pork, but you have to go local to single out any particular project. I agree, a lot of them seem ridiculous, and many of them seem to have no value, but living in a town in desperate need of "pork" has opened my eyes to its necessity. This kind of funding is ripe for abuse, but killing it would do more harm than good.
Posted by at September 20, 2005 08:59 AM
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Comments
I agree that sometimes, government assistance is needed to complete infrastructure projects that would otherwise not get done. There were a lot of projects like that on the list that I don't consider pork, like purchasing fire trucks or building bridges across major routes.
But I think more government assistance should come in the form of community block grants or loans. A block grant would be a chunk of cash given to a local community and it would be up to them to figure out where it can best be spent. The drawback to this is fraud/embezzlement but forcing better accounting practices could help that a bit.
Once the block grant money is gone, though, it's gone for that fiscal year, which would give that area an incentive on spending it well and we might see fewer of these:$22,000 to the Portland Stage Company to support the production of a play entitled Yemaya’s Belly by Quiara Alegria Hudes.I mean, $22,000? Ugh.
Also, I did see a lot of money going toward projects like sewage treatment plants and I left those off the list because they are important to a community - vital infrastructure. But in the case of Greenville's airport, I think it's purchasing political favor. Most people in Maine get to Greenville via car. It's a long drive, but the popularity of that site as a tourism/camping area is not diminshed by the difficulty in getting there. For some weirdos, it's enhanced.
But I digress.
Posted by: Slublog at September 20, 2005 09:41 AM
A block loan seems like a good idea, but wouldn't it be even easier to get pork in under the radar this way? If the loan is for a favor, and the town's records ultimately indicate that it wasn't spent wisely, the legislator is completely off the hook.
Posted by: MainiacJoe at September 20, 2005 10:15 AM
I think there's always a danger of that, but local figures are much easier to replace than federal incumbents.
Easier to prosecute, too.
Posted by: Slublog at September 20, 2005 10:40 AM
Local figures are easier to replace? Ha!
Local figures are most often the most entrenched political players you can find. The political machine is geared in one strong direction, and most people vote for this person because they've been there for umpteen years. And even IF by some miracle they're dislodged from office, they're simply replaced by another crony hand-picked by the local political machine.
Easy to replace . . . that's a good one.
Posted by: Hal at September 20, 2005 11:18 AM
Depends on the local figure. Here in Maine, we manage to un-elect our state reps pretty well.
There's really not much of a political machine up here.
Posted by: Slublog at September 20, 2005 11:19 AM
I tihnk by "local" Hal means at the town level, and I agree with him. In a small town, there are only a few people stupid/power-hungry enough to get into politics.
Posted by: MainiacJoe at September 20, 2005 11:24 AM
Ah. Our local politics are boring, but Bangor usually chooses pretty good people to serve.
Brewer, on the other hand...
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