Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Find your earmarks!

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sco points us to the porkfest/”necessary expenditures” of the earmarks list. Hey, it’s not so hard to navigate. Look up your state rep’s earmarks, and tell us if there are any real doozies.

Here are a few from my rep, Paul Donato:

MR. DONATO of MEDFORD moves that the bill be amended in section 2, in item 7007-0900, by adding the following: “; provided further that not less than $300,000 shall be expended for new seating in the historic Chevalier auditorium in Medford;”

(…) REPRESENTATIVES DONATO of MEDFORD and SMITH of EVERETT move that the bill be amended in section 2, in item 4800-1400, by adding the following: “; provided further that not less than $100,000 shall be expended for a domestic violence prevention program called `Teens-At-Risk’, operated by Portal To Hope for the communities of Everett, Lynn, Malden and Medford without the need of approval by the commissioner of public health;” [my emphasis]

(…) REPRESENTATIVES DONATO of MEDFORD, FALLON of MALDEN and SMITH of EVERETT move that the bill be amended in section 2, in item 1410-0010, by adding the following: “; provided further that not less than $200,000 shall be expended for the World War II Memorial at Bell Rock Memorial Park in Malden;”

And so it goes. Hey, the Chevalier Auditorium’s in my neighborhood. WWII Memorial — well, who would argue with that? $200k, though? Pretty stiff. But is the budget the best way to fund this kind of thing?

And is this really the best way to fund social services, by piecemeal? Or should there be a more coherent, centralized budgeting system, ideally more flexible and more accountable to tough, responsible administrators?

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Comments

  1. I hate everybody else’s, but tend to like my own.

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    My neighborhoods are slated to get more money for teen at-risk services, public parks, pediatric chronic and rehabilitation long-term care, fishing academy (?!) monies, enforcement of the mercury management act, operation of the natural heritage and endangered species program, etc.

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    It seems to me that if I were running a department or service, I’d privately contact the legislators who are introducing the earmarks, and ask them to move it into my general budget with the verbal (private) promise that I’d fund their pet project.  This way, my budget gets bigger, the legislator is happy, and they’re getting their pork.

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    It’s just so easy to load up with pork, and it takes a really strong leadership team to get them to knock it off.  Where’s the leadership?

    • I guess I missed a point of view in my earlier post found below. One way to do this would be to put the monies into the state agencies that oversee such projects.

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      That could either be the best approach or the worst approach.

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      If I was convinced that such state agencies could sort through the needs and dole out the money in the most unbiased and fair way possible, then I would support that position 100%.

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      I’m far from convinced that this would happen. I suspect that instead, a network of patronage would develop around public employees rather than elected representatives, one that would be far harder for the average citizen to either affect or monitor.

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      That scares me a little bit. It would be government purely by a semi-permanent bureaucracy. The pet projects would be determined by employees of the state, rather than representatives of the people.

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      But it sounds good in theory though.

      • Government bureaucrats answer to the governor.  They’re also more likely to be experts in their area of employment than legislators, and also more likely to see the benefits of a project when compared to others across the state, instead of simply in a particular district.

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        The legislator may well be an expert w.r.t. the needs within his district, so that’s certainly an argument for earmarks.  Still, the result is a patchwork of projects with no overall theme, and certainly not prioritized by efficiency, appropriateness, or usefulness to the community.

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        That ain’t so great.

  3. The difference between passing pork and bring home the bacon is whose plate it lands on.  The bad part is it gets slipped in with very little notice or debate and my rep lets your rep do it as long as they return the favor.

  4. In order to make searching easier, I ripped the entire website to my computer and can now use the basic explorer search function to find any search term I wish within the files.  Anyone want any terms searched?

  5. I’ll agree with you that this is pork, and that we tend to view our own pork as good and others pork as bad. But this isn’t graft or corruption — this is spending earmarked for pet projects.

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    Are people arguing that these projects simply have no business being funded by government (I’m sure a few will), or should these projects be funded via a different mechanism within government rather than earmarks?

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    Here’s one in my area:

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    Mr. Puppolo of Springfield moves that the bill be amended in section 2, in item 7004-0097, by adding the following, “provided further that not less than $400,000 shall be expended for the Town of East Longmeadow for renovations to the Senior Citizens Center”.

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    Given that everyone is getting pork in this budget, the inclusion of this item seems reasonable, but if this was the only item that was proposed in the budget, I’d probably stand up and say “hey, wait a minute, why should the state be funding renovations to a senior center in a relatively wealthy town like East Longmeadow”?

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    However, I don’t doubt that the senior center needs renovations, nor do I doubt that the town can easily do this within the scope of its existing budget and its constraints.

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    It seems like there could be several camps here.

    • The “get rid of earmarks, cut our income taxes, let us individually decide how to spend our money” crowd.
    • The “put the earmarks into general government aid, let cities and towns decide how to spend the money” crowd.
    • The “keep the earmarks for pet projects, let our state representatives decide how to spend the money” crowd.

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    Am I missing any?

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    This state has taken on a very destructive mentality in recent years — no one wants to pay for things, but when conditions (not necessarily taxes) get bad enough people just move from the state. If every single government expenditure was voted on separately, I doubt we’d even have public schools in this state due to a very aggressive anti-tax crusade across the country. Yet taxes are clearly a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch your back” proposition — without that, very few itches would be addressed. If we could get past the meme of “government is our enemy”, we could actually have productive discussions on the services that we agree it should provide.

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    I would argue that if cities and towns were given ultimate autonomy as to how to get revenue, this kind of earmarking wouldn’t be necessary. Outside of state aid (including these earmarks), we have just one mechanism — the property tax. And with the artificial constraints put on by Proposition 2.5, coupled with serious economic segregation exacerbated by that law, there are huge differences in the amounts that can be raised via a local property tax.

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    There is little difference between a government and a corporation. Governments can’t easily go bankrupt and shed their liabilities, but governments are also more responsible to their shareholders because votes are apportioned evenly, not by wealth. Corporations have few restrictions on how to raise revenue, governments are shackled with them.

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    Would you invest in a business that had blunt governmental restrictions on how much it could raise its prices, and had specific mandates as to what services it needed to provide? That would be a sucker’s bet. But that describes a typical city or town in Massachusetts. No wonder no businessperson wants to be on the “executive team” of municipal “companies”.

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    If East Longmeadow had other revenue options available to them — perhaps a percentage or two of the income tax of their residents, perhaps a slice of the taxes on corporate profits of companies located within their border, perhaps a share of the lottery tickets sold at stores in their town — they might be able to renovate their own senior center.

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    It’s even possible that their government isn’t run very efficiently and that they could scrape up $400k to do it, although that’s what the anti-tax crowd expects us to believe all the time — which I’m sure is not true. That’s kind of a red herring anyway — does anyone think that any large corporation is 100% efficient? Yet they still raise prices when they feel they need to. Competition is the only thing that keeps them in check.

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    I think it’s time to stop tinkering at the edges. I think it’s time that cities and towns were allowed to develop revenue plans that work towards their individual strengths. Put everything on the table — tolls, income taxes, corporate taxes, meals taxes, property taxes, whatever — and let each town craft a plan that would get it what it needed to operate.

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    Let the state government police each city and town for unfair competition — for example, putting housing projects or homeless shelters on the border of another town to avoid the entire cost of it. Or by using zoning laws to ensure that more “expensive” citizens stay away, and “cheaper” citizens are attracted.

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    But until that day, and until cities and towns have enough revenue to offer a wide array of services, I suspect that some kind of earmarking will be necessary. It’s essentially legislative currency.

    • First – earmarks are ALREADY in the agency responsible.  The appropriation line number tells you which agency it is – and the MOTT lines are ALWAYS the most crowded with trefe.  As we ‘speak’, agency liasons are already in legislator’s offices, begging them to pretty please withdraw the amendment, and they’ll DO the project/enhancement/whatever, but they just don’t want their hands tied, dontchaknow.  REALLY.  (This is the time of year when you can remind them of all the phone calls they couldn’t be bothered to return when you called with a request/question from a constituent).

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      In the Finneran era, the House budget was often subject to a mechanism called the Holland Amendment – that is, if you had a cash earmark, you had to show WHERE in the budget that money would come from and what line would be decreased.  THAT was fun.  (Well, actually, it WAS fun – you’d search for one time capital expenditures in the prior year budget, and suggest THEY be cut this year – like your senior center upgrade – change East Longmeadow to Orleans in this year’s budgte).  The Holland Amendment has to be voluntarily adopted at the beginning of the budget debate, and I don’t know if it’s in force this year.  Another Tommy Taxes Trick was to insist on matching funds – East Longmeadow would get $50,000 for a $100,000 project, for instance.

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      The Great Borg Hive Mind is just beginning to come alive.  They will debate until 2 am for no reason, hours of inactivity punctuated with spurts of horsetrading, all headed for that final 12 o’clock gong on the last night.  Then leadership gives Academy Award-like speeches.  One year, Finneran cried at the fine job John Rogers had done.  (some of the audience was in tears, too, but it may not have been for the same reason). 

      • Although your insight is interesting, you didn’t address the point. Are you suggesting that no earmark projects are ever worthwhile? What state agency is responsible for upgrading senior centers?

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        Are you suggesting that if a town wants to do such a thing, they should either override Prop 2.5 or cut other services? I can see the sexiness in that position, but the problem is that barely works in non-diverse communities with a singular town identity. It doesn’t work at all in large cities with diverse populations and no one identity, because the “horse trading” needs to occur on far too large a scale (the voters), and most people don’t understand how it works — the group loosely known as “seniors” doesn’t get together with the group loosely known as “parents with kids in the schools” to pass both proposals, so neither pass, and the inevitable result is that no one gets anything. Usually the problems are more localized, like “seniors in neighborhood X versus school kids in neighborhood Y”. Or “Puerto Ricans in neighborhood X vs. whites in neighborhood Y”.

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        Such a mechanism seriously undermines representative government. Imagine what your town meeting would be like if there were 80,000 people at it. That’s a serious shackle on a city which can only govern via representatives, not by mob.

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        That leads me to a pet peeve — if the proponents of Proposition 2.5 were so much about local control, why did they write the law so that it was passed everywhere, even if a community did not want to follow it?

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        Anyway, if you’re of the position that government should do virtually nothing, and that people should pay their own way, then I think we can probably just end this debate right here.

        • Is that the budget would be better applied with fewer legislative requirements and more discretion given to various offices that receive the funds. Without earmarks, all the agencies could get giant wads of unrestricted cash, and more money could be given in local aid to take care of senior center repairs and gazebos.

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          At least, that’s the theory. But no one in the legislature is foolish/brave enough to say “sure I trust that my town will get just as much money if I don’t write it into law.”

        • And a close second in Economic Development – 7004-0099

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          Call up Ch. 139, last year’s budget, and plug these numbers into Find.  And read away.  And those are the ones that are EASY to find.

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          NoPol, Eury is correct.  That IS the theory of all the agencies – that they HAVE priorities, they KNOW what projects need doing, and getting moeny earmarked for a dance pavillion at the end of a road fallen into disrepair is just foolish.  Legislators want more glamour, and don’t want to be known as Mr. Pot Hole, but Mr. Pavillion.

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          It’s a natural tension (my favorite TV show of all time is ‘Yes, Minister’, a Brit-Com about the tension between elected and appointed officials).  Both sides are right, and both are wrong.

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          NoPol – I would never say that earmarks are of no value.  Often, they are the only way something ever gets done.  But too many are nothing but photo-ops.

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          BTW – when I was speaking of horse trading, I meant the Reps. saying I’ll vote for your gazebo if you’ll vote for my statue.

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          9110-1660 or 9110-9002 might be where to put senior center money.

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  6. My Rep (Mike Rush) has an even blend of district earmarks and general spending increases. He’s pushing more funding for DCR (good), Adult basic education (good), kindergarten programs (good), and public housing safety (good). Then he’s earmarking money for some West Roxbury projects.

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    The sad fact is that even though we rail against our legislators for “pork,” there are also plenty of people who want a state representative who brings home the bacon. If a Rep. opposed earmarks and didn’t fight for district projects, they’d quickly be voted out of office on the grounds of being ineffective. I’ve worked enough state campaigns to see how this plays out. Being tuned in to the needs of the district means knowing what needs to be fixed and getting the money to make it happen.

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    Can’t hate the player but love the game…

  7. I understand the point of the post, but I’ll merely amplify on points I have made elsewhere here.

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    Given the constraints that the state of MA has placed on the ability of a city or town to raise tax monies on their own motion, you are going to get “earmarks” like these in the state budget.  It’s inevitable.  The money is going to come from somewhere.

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    That doesn’t mean that removal of the constraints will eliminate the earmarks, but it might well reduce the decision to try to acquire them.

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