Arsenal receives most of area's federal earmarks
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By Ed Tibbetts | Monday, June 09, 2008 |
Project Manager Terry Harris looks over a section of the new roof on Building 299, a warehouse on the Rock Island Arsenal. Buy this Photo
This is no small roof repair.
The 780,000-square-foot warehouse at the Rock Island Arsenal leaks.
It’s filled with asbestos.
In short, it needs to be fixed, officials say.
“I’ve been here for 33 years, and it probably needed to be replaced 33 years ago,” Terry Harris said.
Harris is the project manager for the roof replacement at Building 299, a cavernous warehouse where most of what comes out of the Rock Island Arsenal factory stops before being sent to its final destination.
The roof’s original price tag: $25 million.
This year’s federal budget includes a $6 million congressional earmark for the five-phase job. This is the second installment. The first was for $5.5 million.
Agencies on the Rock Island Arsenal are the Quad-Cities’ biggest recipient of congressional earmarks. They got $46.9 million in the fiscal year 2008 federal budget for the roof repair, refurbishment of the island’s public safety facilities and for titanium fabrication. That figure also includes $24.7 million for operations and maintenance of the Mississippi River in the Quad-Cities.
(A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spokesman said the money should not be considered an earmark because it pays for annual operations of the river. The White House Office of Management and Budget, however, said it considers the funding an earmark).
Outside the Corps funding, the largest Arsenal earmark is $11.5 million for the Arsenal Support Program Initiative, or ASPI. The program is aimed at renovating vacant space so
commercial firms can move onto the island, pay rent and aid the manufacturing center’s bottom line.
The Arsenal is a top priority of local economic development officials, and the congressional delegation has been supportive. The base, with 7,000 employees, is the Quad-Cities’ largest employer.
“If you believe as I do the Arsenal is not only critical for national defense but the economy, you have to make this investment,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said.
He added that military officials also will knowingly leave projects off its budgets because they have congressional backers.
Durbin has been instrumental in supporting Arsenal initiatives over the years. But he’s not alone.
“There’s a great amount of cooperation,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said. “It’s bistate, bipartisan and bicameral.”
Budget watchdogs say such earmarks distort the Defense Department’s budget process.
“It’s the job of the Pentagon to sort that out on a priority basis,” said Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste.
Otherwise, “why have a Pentagon budget at all?” he asked.
Police and fire station
Not far away from the warehouse is another earmark recipient: the Arsenal’s police and fire station. It got a $3.35 million earmark this year for a significant upgrade.
The total project, estimated at $11.7 million, will add 25,000 square feet to the existing 9,200-square-foot building, which was built more than a century ago, in 1874.
“Back in those days, fire trucks were pulled by horses. The fire chief’s office is in the old hay loft,” said Rich Todd, project engineer.
Todd said a risk assessment done five years ago showed several problems, some costly to repair. The building, he said, doesn’t even meet current fire standards.
He said funding was initially pursued through Army channels, but a capital project can take five years to get approved, and there are safety concerns.
The first phase of the project is mostly complete. The second phase still is in the design stage.
“If the Arsenal waited for the Defense Department to fund projects, it would take longer and might keep getting bumped by other priorities. Thus, the need for members to designate funds for necessary projects,” said Beth Levine, a Grassley spokesperson.
Schatz disagrees with that line of reasoning.
“Being impatient about the time it takes doesn’t justify getting an earmark,” he said.
He said the point of the budget process is to evaluate projects on a national basis, then make choices based on priorities.
Ed Tibbetts can be contacted at (563) 383-2327 or etibbetts@qctimes.com. Comment on this article at qctimes.com.
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