Press Room
News Stories
Clinton's taxpayer-funded 'Woodstock flashback?'
By Matthew Hay Brown
Baltimore (Maryland) Sun
October 19, 2007
It’s not just a Woodstock museum, Sen. Charles E. Schumer says.
The exhibition space set to open next year in Bethel, N.Y. – the site of three days of peace, love and music back in 1969 – will be a job-creating economic engine to arrest the long postwar decline of the once-thriving Catskills.
It’s to help turn around the fiscal fortunes of depressed Sullivan County in upstate New York that Schumer and fellow Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton are seeking a $1 million earmark in the 2008 Labor, Health and Human Services and Education spending bill, he said today.
A group of Senate Republicans isn’t buying it. The patchouli-scented pet project drew fire today from the fiscal conservatives who have been manning the Senate floor during the appropriations process.
"It seems to me that we do have to ask questions like whether it’s the will of this body to fund an earmark for a museum celebrating a weekend-long party that occurred 38 years ago," Sen. Jon Kyl said on the Senate floor today. The Arizona Republican proposed stripping out the earmark and shifting the $1 million to a health block grant program for mothers and children.
Earmarks account for less than 1 percent of the federal budget; defenders say they enable the lawmakers who know their districts best to direct federal funding to the projects that need it most.
But the increase in their number, from 4,126 in 1994 to 15,268 in 2005, and examples such as the Bridge to Nowhere – the $223 million span proposed to connect a sparsely populated island in Alaska to the mainland – have helped to focus public anger against the practice.
"The Woodstock Museum isn’t the problem," said Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican. "It’s a symbol of the problem."
The $100 million Museum at Bethel Woods is being developed by a foundation controlled by billionaire Alan Gerry, a Republican who has donated to Hilary Clinton’s presidential campaign and to Schumer’s Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The State of New York has contribued $15 million to the project; Schumer and Clinton are seeking $1 million in federal funds.
Coburn, who identified himself as "part of the hippie generation," called it a "taxpayer-funded Woodstock flashback." But Schumer said it was a good earmark, backed by a county in need of help.
"Until about 1950 the area boomed. And then the airplane was invented," Schumer said. "And all the people from New York City and Philadelphia and Boston who vacationed in the Catskills started getting on airplanes and going to Florida, California … so Sullivan County became one of the poorest areas in our state."
"When you ask the people, what’s the number one thing they need? It’s jobs. Jobs. Now in this bill, we talk about jobs. But I daresay that the people of Sullivan County, the economic development experts, the town and local officials, have a better idea of what would create jobs in Sullivan County than the senator from Oklahoma, the senator from Arizona, and, quite frankly, the senator from New York."
|
|
