The earmark debate, which raged during the 2008 presidential campaign, is back in the Central Texas House race between U.S. Rep. Chet Edwards, D-Waco, and GOP challenger Bill Flores, of Bryan.

Edwards is a so-called “cardinal,” chairing an Appropriations subcommittee responsible for billions of dollars in military construction spending.

This year he put earmarks into spending bills for projects to widen parts of Interstate 35 in McLennan County; improve water quality in Lake Waco; return an Army National Guard unit’s headquarters to its traditional home in the county; and fund research at the Baylor Research and Innovation Collaborative.

Bill Flores (left) has been sharply critical of the earmark process, which U.S. Rep. Chet Edwards supports.

A staunch defender of the earmark process, Edwards said, “I’m going to fight as hard as I can to bring our tax dollars back to Central Texas for high-priority projects.”

Flores hasn’t spoken ill of specific Edwards earmarks, but he’s been sharply critical of the earmark process.

He said congressional spending should meet two tests.

“The first test is that they have to be a critical national priority and that can include projects like research at Baylor (University),” he said. “Test No. 2 is it’s got to go through a transparent appropriations process.”

Flores would not define a “critical national priority,” but said if Baylor was seeking federal dollars for a homeland security project, “I’d do all I can to get that. But it’s going to be done in such a way that’s transparent.”

Every year, lawmakers in the House and Senate, as well as White House officials, set overall spending targets for the upcoming budget year.

Some portion of those totals traditionally has been reserved for members of congress to direct via earmark to back-home projects. Legislators with seniority or plum spots on the House and Senate Appropriations Committees typically get bigger hauls.

When lawmakers voluntarily stop earmarking, as House Republicans did this year with a self-imposed moratorium, and as the whole House did in 2007, the executive branch is left to decide how money gets spent.

Republican Rep. John Carter, who represents Bell and Coryell counties and sits on the Appropriations Committee, has warned that the ongoing GOP moratorium could have some unintended and negative consequences.

Carter points out that a pot of transportation money normally distributed via earmarks back in 2007 was doled out by the Bush administration’s Department of Transportation and went “to just five large cities.”

“There is a reason the Constitution assigns spending decisions to the U.S. House of Representatives, and this situation is a prime example,” Carter said.

Applying Carter’s logic, Edwards criticized Flores for proposing to get rid of earmarks.

“To eliminate earmarks is to say that the Obama administration should make 100 percent of the decisions about where our tax dollars should go and rural communities in Central Texas would end up on the short end of the stick,” he said. “The Flores proposal would be a boon for New York and L.A. and Houston.”

Steve Ellis, with the anti-earmark group Taxpayers for Common Sense, took a different view.

Instead of worrying that the executive branch might be bad arbiters for where to spend tax dollars, Ellis said, Congress should involve itself in decisions about funding formulas and other distribution methods.

Universities are typically big requesters of earmarks, and Baylor is no exception.

The push to attract federal and state dollars has increased lately as the school has taken up an ambitious project of creating a high-tech research park at the old General Tire plant.

The Baylor Research and Innovation Collaborative, or BRIC, is the first part of that process, and this year Edwards secured more than $3 million in next year’s spending bills for research efforts there.

Truell Hyde, Baylor University’s vice provost of research, said federal dollars can be hard to get through traditional grants, especially for new projects.

“When done correctly, (an earmark) can be a very good way to jump-start a new process that couldn’t be competitive in the peer-reviewed federal funding world, especially given how tight money is today,” he said.

But in the nearly 9,000 earmarks in the current fiscal year’s budget for projects across the nation, earmark opponents say examples of waste are plentiful.

Flores picked out two projects in particular that he said demonstrate the need to reform the system.

“There was over $1 million in the 2009 omnibus bill to combat Mormon crickets in Utah,” he said. “I ask the question: Is that a critical national priority?”

The answer: it depends on who you ask. The cricket eradication project was aimed at curbing the cricket in a remote swath of Utah ranchland that had been overrun by the voracious pests.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and comedian Jon Stewart, however, mocked the project.

Meanwhile local ranchers welcomed it, noting that the acreage infested by the crickets has dropped dramatically since earmarks targeting them began in 2003.

Flores also pointed to a $200,000 tattoo-removal program in California he called wasteful.

Flores’ campaign manager Matt Mackowiak said Edwards has had plenty of chances to target individual wasteful and “egregious” earmarks. He pointed to a list of 118 amendments stripping earmarks from spending bills that Edwards voted against.

Edwards’ campaign spokeswoman Megan Jacobs said it’s easy to criticize a faraway earmark as unimportant, but that assessment’s not always fair.

“The Waco Mammoth Site might seem unimportant to someone in New York or Pennsylvania, but it’s an important historic site and job-creating project for the Waco community,” Jacobs said.

Edwards noted that in recent years Congress has reined in the number and overall price tag of earmarks.

The amount spent on earmarks, he said, fell from $19.9 billion to $15.9 billion in the last two spending cycles, and at last count earmarks represented 1.3 percent of the part of the budget Congress controls.

Flores acknowledged that earmarks are a small piece of spending, but said the system needs to be overhauled as part of a broad fiscal overhaul.

“The broken earmark problem we have today is just the tip of the iceberg of a broken appropriations process,” he said.

mshapiro@wacotrib.com

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