California Conservative

Believe it or not, Jim Oberstar is pointing the finger of blame at MnDOT for not using the federal highway funds properly. That’s one of the most bizarre accusations I’ve ever heard. Here’s what he said in 1987:

“Our national bridge program is in serious trouble,” he testified then. “The safety of millions of Americans has been jeopardized by inept federal stewardship over our bridge inspection and rebuilding effort. States have misspent millions of federal aid bridge dollars.”

Here’s what the Strib reported Saturday:

Oberstar is still largely inclined to blame state transportation authorities, including the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT), for failing to make effective use of federal bridge dollars. Too frequently, he argues, they are converted into all-purpose transportation funds, to be used for everything from new streetlights to wider roads.

Oberstar whining about MnDOT misusing federal bridge funds is laughable, especially considering how he’s forced Minnesota to spend millions of dollars on bike trails. As King posted here, there’s a “hidden cost” to earmarks:

The dirty little secret of earmarks is that they’re not the true cost of the projects. In many, many cases it only partially funds a project. In most cases, and I certainly experienced this as a state administrator, we had to take more money out of the rest of our programs to supplement the earmark in order to build that project because the earmark was rarely, if ever, the total cost of the project.

What that did was usurp the other priorities, the priorities that were set by state departments of transportation and local governments that went out in the public process and established priorities based on trying to take care of the systems they had. And, instead, that whole process begins to get usurped by these earmarks. I would hazard to guess that maybe earmarks, at most, would give you about a third of the project costs, and that’s on the high side. The fact is that the cost of earmarks is really understated in terms of what it really takes out of the program.

Rep. Oberstar often touted the fact that he had ‘brought home the bacon’ in the form of transportation earmarks. What he didn’t say, though, was that those earmarks, sometimes for building bike trails, took money away from high priority items like bridges and road repairs.

I’m not opposed to bike trails until federal highway trust fund monies are used to build them. Then I’m vehemently opposed to bike trails.

But Oberstar’s critics say that he and his colleagues on the Transportation Committee have much to answer for themselves: His committee is widely seen as a one-stop shopping center for House members’ pet projects, from Alaska’s “Bridge to Nowhere” to Oberstar’s vaunted bike paths.

Let’s be clear about this: Democrats and Republicans alike abuse the earmark system. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s admit that legislators’ lust for earmarks is wasting tons of federal money and tons of state money. At a time when Oberstar wants to increase the federal gas tax and the DFL wants to jack up the Minnesota state gas tax, taxpayers should repeatedly tell legislators that their voting for tax increases before they corral their wasteful spending habits is all the justification taxpayers will need to boot them out of office.

Some analysts say that White House opposition to a gas-tax increase in 2005 ensured a smaller national bridge and highway budget than many federal officials and members of Congress were calling for.

But Jeff Davis, editor and publisher of Transportation Weekly, points out that federal spending for core transportation projects nationwide, including bridges, was “significantly cut back” in 2005 to make room for a record 6,371 congressional earmarks, double the number in the last major road funding bill in 1998.

An analysis by Citizens Against Government Waste, a Washington watchdog group, found that the 2005 transportation funding bill pared down money for bridge reconstruction by as much as $1 billion a year over the five-year life of the law in order to make room for $24 billion in special pork-barrel projects.

Any way you slice it, that’s alot of money wasted. That level of waste shouldn’t be tolerated for any reason. Any congressman that tries rationalizing away this type of wasteful spending isn’t the taxpayers’ friend. That’s all the justification I’d need to vote against them.

Technorati Tags: Earmarks, Jim Oberstar, Bridge to Nowhere, MnDOT, Bike Trails, CAGW, Transportation Weekly, Election 2008

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 2nd, 2007 at 3:17 am and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Election 2008, Special Interests, Washington, DC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.