Tom Warne Report, 24 August 2012
The U.S. Department of Transportation has decided to give the states back $472 million in unused highway earmarks for projects to states to spend on infrastructure improvements and create jobs, Secretary Ray LaHood announced this week. The move comes 19 months after USA Today reported $7.5 billion in “orphan earmarks” for highway funding over the last 20 years.
“These idle earmarks have sat on the shelf as our infrastructure continued to age and our construction workers sat on the sidelines,” LaHood said. “That ends today. We can’t wait any longer.”
Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and every state besides Wyoming will immediately receive previously unspent funding. States must select projects to use the funds by October 1, and obligate them by December 31, or they will lose the funds, in the DOT’s “use it or lose it” policy. The unspent earmarks to be returned are from 2003 to 2006.
The nearly $500 million released includes $14.8 million unspent for the Memphis-Huntsville-Atlanta Freeway project, also known as the East-West Corridor. That project was stopped in 2010 after the U.S. Army raised security concerns with a bypass coming so close to the Redstone Arsenal.
Steve Ellis, of the anti-earmark Taxpayers for Common Sense, said the move is “more about the November campaign than about good policy. This isn’t free cash. This would be new outlays — kind of like spending the $20 you find in your winter coat the first time you use it again after summer,” he said.
$472 million out of $7.5 billion is just over six percent. There’s a lot of other money that remains unspent. If you look at the list of states and how much they got, the highest was $51 million for Alabama. The other amounts are relatively small. Something is better than nothing but a release of half would have represented “real” money. TW