District Liked Its Earmarks, Then Elected Someone Who Didn’t

In the villages, towns and cities of the 19th Congressional District north of New York City, the signs of federal largess are all over: money for a library in South Salem, road improvements in Peekskill, renovations on an aging bridge in Dover and a communications network for the Police Department in Tuxedo.

The projects have drawn strong support from community activists, business leaders and local politicians of both major parties. But the stream of federal money that has long financed such projects, in this Hudson Valley district and elsewhere in the nation, is about to dry up.

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And some residents of the district may be surprised to learn who one of the main instigators is: Nan Hayworth, the district’s new representative, who was swept into office last fall along with other Tea Party-backed candidates bent on changing Washington’s ways.

Congress, prodded by outspoken newcomers like Ms. Hayworth, this week essentially imposed a temporary ban on earmarks, money for projects that individual lawmakers slip into major Congressional budget bills to cater to local demands. The criticism that she and her colleagues level at earmarking is not new: that some of the projects are silly and the process is rife with waste and abuse, partly because lawmakers do not typically have to justify their requests in grant proposals, hearings and the like.

But the moratorium about to take effect has transformed a largely abstract policy debate in Washington into something very tangible for people in Ms. Hayworth’s district.

Now, civic activists, local officials and residents are scratching their heads, unpersuaded about the soundness of scrapping a system that has provided the district with money for libraries, parks, roads, bridges and the like.

Ken Schmitt, the Republican supervisor of Carmel, supported Ms. Hayworth in her campaign. But he is among many in the district who can point to benefits that earmarks provided his town: nearly $150,000 to buy high-technology cameras for police cruisers in 2009.

“Do I support banning them completely? No, I don’t,” Mr. Schmitt said, adding that each project should be considered on its own merits.

Steve Axinn, the president of Lake Oscawana Civic Association, agreed. “Not all earmarks are the same,” he said. “There are some that are good and some that are clearly abusive. It is the responsibility of our elected representatives to know the difference.”

Mr. Axinn, a lawyer who is registered as a Democrat, knows a good bit about the subject. He was instrumental in persuading Ms. Hayworth’s predecessor, John Hall, a Democrat, to deliver $400,000 in earmark financing to reduce the high levels of phosphorous in Lake Oscawana in Putnam Valley.

“This was a good thing that could not have been done without that grant,” he said.

Ms. Hayworth is unconvinced. “I am not questioning the worthiness of filtering Lake Oscawana,” she said in a recent interview. But, she asked, “Is this a project to which federal tax dollars should be directed, or is this a project another authority should be responsible for?”

While earmarks have aroused controversy in the past, the drive to eliminate them gathered momentum in Congress this year with the arrival of newly elected Republicans like Ms. Hayworth, who campaigned on a platform of belt-tightening, including an explicit pledge to abstain from earmarking.

After Republican leaders of the House approved an earmark ban in that chamber, President Obama promised during his State of the Union address last month to veto any bill that contained spending for what are also called pork-barrel projects.

Initially, Democratic leaders of the Senate resisted following suit. But this week, Senator Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii, the Democratic chairman of the Appropriations Committee, announced that the committee would prohibit earmarks over the next two years.

“The president has stated unequivocally that he will veto any legislation containing earmarks, and the House will not pass any bills that contain them,” Mr. Inouye said in a statement. “Given the reality before us, it makes no sense to accept earmark requests that have no chance of being enacted into law.”

On Capitol Hill, though, many lawmakers remain opposed to the ban, including Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand of New York, who has long supported overhauling the earmark process and who was among the first lawmakers to place her own requests online.

“It’s shortsighted and misguided,” Ms. Gillibrand said, noting that such money is particularly important these days with local and state governments making cuts.

For all the debate that earmarks stir, the amount of money directed toward them is relatively small. For the fiscal year that ended in September, earmarks made up $15.9 billion of a $3.5 trillion federal budget, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, a government watchdog group.

But as political theater, earmarks provide a compelling story line, particularly with Tea Party loyalists like Ms. Hayworth seeking to root out waste and reduce the federal deficit.

In this case, it's 'absolutely required'

“Let’s say you have a honey-producing county somewhere in the United States and they want to set up a honey museum,” Ms. Hayworth said, offering a hypothetical example of earmarking run amok. “Fine. Go ahead. But use your money to do it.”

Over the years, the 19th Congressional District has done relatively well with earmarks.

Ms. Hayworth’s predecessor, Mr. Hall, secured nearly 70 earmarks totaling $51.9 million during the four years he was in office, according to an analysis by Taxpayers for Common Sense.

But Mr. Hall, aware of the controversy surrounding these spending items, put in place internal measures requiring any earmark his office sought to meet certain criteria, including that it create jobs locally or fulfill a public health and safety need in the district, according to a member of his former staff.

Mr. Hall also posted his earmark requests on his Congressional Web site, the former staff member said, and to allow constituents to comment.

Still, the programs, projects and services he helped finance were the kind of parochial initiatives that critics of earmarking criticize as pork: repairs to U.S. 6 in Cortlandt, teacher training in the town of Florida and flood mitigation at the parking lot of the Croton-Harmon train station. But as politicians in Washington like to say, one man’s pork is another man’s need, and even people in the 19th District who oppose earmarks in theory have a different view up close.

Charles Duffy, the supervisor of the town of Lewisboro, is a registered Conservative who campaigned for Ms. Hayworth. But he said he believed that local officials ought to be able to call on their Congress member for help with a local need, though he says the system could be fixed.

“You want your federal representatives to still be able to help your region,” said Mr. Duffy, whose town includes the hamlet of South Salem, where nearly $200,000 went to build a library.

That was also the sentiment in Dover, a town that received $250,000 to replace a century-old bridge that state engineers deemed unsafe, according to interviews and public records.

Ryan Courtien, the Democratic town supervisor of Dover, was one of the officials who sought the financing from Mr. Hall. He questions an outright ban on earmarks, saying legislators should be able to say how federal money is spent. A better solution, he said, would be to make the process more transparent.

Ms. Hayworth has supporters. Douglas Bloomfield, the Republican supervisor of the Town of Goshen, said he backed her stance, arguing that the federal deficit needs to be brought under control.

But he also told a story about one earmark he requested.

In 2007, he said, he went to Mr. Hall’s office seeking money to replace the main water line running into a subdivision with 160 homes. Mr. Hall eventually delivered, securing an earmark of nearly $400,000.

Mr. Bloomfield accepted it. Why? “Our particular one was great because it’s absolutely required,” he said.