City Museums Stand To Gain Earmark Cash

WASHINGTON — Two city museums stand to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funding under a spending bill moving through Congress that disburses money for transportation, housing, and urban development.

New York lawmakers earmarked $170,000 for a renovation of the Brooklyn Children's Museum, and another $150,000 for a visitor's center at the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens.

Those items were among 28 highlighted by the advocacy group Citizens Against Government Waste as examples of "outrageous" pork-barrel spending in the final version of a $51.2 billion appropriations bill that passed the House last week to fund the departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development.

While the bill is likely to pass the Senate, those projects may be in jeopardy due to a veto threat by President Bush, who has said the legislation is over budget.

The bill also includes two major funding outlays for New York — $215 million to connect the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Terminal and $171 million toward construction of the Second Avenue Subway. But those projects have long been designated for federal support and have secured approval from the president.

While the anti-waste group questioned the earmarks for local museums, the lawmakers who secured the funding rose to their defense.

"Pork? Hogwash," Rep. Gary Ackerman said. The Queens Democrat, along with senators Schumer and Clinton, added the item allocating money for the visitor's center at the Louis Armstrong museum, which first opened in Corona Park in 2003. "Anyone who appreciates good jazz will love this museum to one of the greatest American originals," he said.

The project is being funded principally with local dollars, including $5 million from the state and another $5 million from the city. "This is not pork," Mr. Ackerman said. "This facility educates our children, promotes local tourism, enhances the economy, creates jobs, and is a national and New York City landmark."

Mr. Ackerman also secured $150,000 to create a quiet zone in Little Neck that will silence the blaring horns the LIRR has been required to sound each time it passes through the residential community.

The $170,000 for the Brooklyn Children's Museum will go toward what was initially a $39 million expansion begun in 2002. The construction will double to 102,000 square feet the size of the museum, which aims to expand its capacity to 400,000 visitors annually. While originally slated for completion in 2006, the museum is now expected to reopen next spring.

A sponsor of the earmark, Rep. Anthony Weiner, cited "a long tradition of federal support for the arts." "I am gratified that Congress is finally ending years of Republican hostility towards the arts and helping institutions like the Brooklyn Children's Museum," Mr. Weiner, a Democrat who represents parts of Brooklyn and Queens, said.

Another sponsor, Rep. Yvette Clarke, a Democrat of Brooklyn, said the expansion was a collaboration between the federal, state, and city government, along with private contributors. She said it also deserved funding because of its environmentally friendly building standards. The museum, she added, "serves as a model for support of children's growth and development to be replicated across this nation."

Critics of such earmarks say that though they may be designated for worthwhile causes, like a children's museum, they are added without debate or due consideration and are not subject to competitive bidding, as many federal funding grants are. "God knows how many pools of money there are to distribute to arts foundations," a spokeswoman for Citizens Against Government Waste, Leslie Paige, said.

"It can't be just because it sounds good," she said of earmarks. Lawmakers "don't discuss the merits when they grab the pork and run — only after the fact," she added.

The appropriations bill also included nearly half a million dollars for a September 11 memorial in Staten Island and $250,000 for a multipurpose center at City College added by Rep. Charles Rangel, a Democrat of Harlem.

The legislation includes funding for dozens of transportation infrastructure projects around the state, including improvements to ferry terminals in Brooklyn and the Nassau County hub in Long Island.

Citizens Against Government Waste is one of several advocacy organizations and a bloc of fiscally conservative lawmakers that have targeted earmarks for reform. Despite the persistence of what it called "outrageous" items, the group did find good news in the transportation and housing bill. The number of earmarks, 2,007, was 23% fewer than the number contained in the 2006 version of the legislation, according to a preliminary analysis conducted by the group, and the money spent on earmarks was down 55%, to $1.6 billion from $3.6 billion.

"It's a positive development," Ms. Paige said. She attributed the drop in part to new transparency rules enacted this year that require the names of sponsoring lawmakers to appear next to earmarks in the legislation. "The new rules may have had a chilling effect," she said.