Earmarks

post from DemConWatch on 08 April 2009 07:55:00 AM. © DemConWatch

We hear a lot about earmarks. But did you ever wonder who actually asks for what? Bill Allinson and Anapama Narayanswamy have done a bunch of work, and you can see their results here. Of note: John Boehner, Dan Burton, Eric Cantor, Jason Chaffetz, Mike Coffman, Jeff Flake, Virginia Foxx, Jeb Hensarling, Mike Pence, and Henry Waxman put in for no earmarks. There are others who may have not made requests, but it's not certain yet.

Take a list and find your Congressman/Congresswoman, and then use the comments to say if there is any local program you find of worth, or of no worth to you, as a constituent.

I've looked over the list from my Congressman. Buried at the bottom is this:

Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, Philadelphia PA - The extension would allow for the establishment of commuter rail service along the Route 422 corridor.

The actual plan (as it existed the last time I looked) was to run the line up the middle of the divided highway. The problem they run into is that the berm is isn't wide enough to support the lines in most of the places, especially if you have to add extra left lanes to allow people to slow down enough to make the turn into the parking lots. Then, because the road doesn't actually go through the center of a "place" (that is it isn't a city center-to-city center road) you'd still need to support transportation from the rail stations to work locations at either end. Thus, the need to establish additional bus routes, or more accurately bus routes, since they don't exist now.

I have a friend who worked on the original planning for this project. She told me about five years ago that if everything went better than expected, all the funding came through, and they ran into no environmental problems whatsoever, the line could be completed somewhere around 2035. Yup, let's fund that....