Stimulus Rebellion on the Eastern Shore
There is a brawl brewing in the bucolic fields of Queen Anne’s County, Maryland. The Obama Administration’s $862 billion stimulus fund, ostensibly targeted toward shovel-ready, jobs-producing projects, is going toward the construction of a decidedly non-shovel-ready 2,000-acre U.S. State Department security training facility that residents in the region neither need nor want. This tiny band of committed activists, comprised of Republicans, Democrats, private property rights advocates, conservationists, and small business owners, may go down in history as one of the only communities in the country to successfully reject a wasteful stimulus pork project.
The idea for a centralized national security training facility began in the 1990s and gained added urgency in the wake of al Qaeda bombings at U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya. In 2007, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) determined that the State Department’s 19 different training facilities for future diplomatic and embassy security personnel were too far-flung and inefficient and recommended giving serious thought to consolidating some or all of those facilities into one, located somewhere within a one-hour car ride from the nation’s Capitol. The concept lingered for several years without much forward momentum.
Along came the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Immediately after the ARRA bill was signed into law, the General Services Administration (GSA) and the U.S. State Department joined forces to begin vetting possible locations for the new Foreign Affairs Security Training Center (FASTC) and grasping members of Congress began lobbying to acquire the center, along with the $70 million in stimulus funds made available for it. A May 1, 2008 U.S. State Department report on the consolidation of diplomatic security training makes it obvious that the original location for the center was to be Summit Point, West Virginia, almost certainly supported by the King of Pork, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), who over the years has managed to force Congress to finance new government facilities and place them in West Virginia. The Summit Point location already offered many of the amenities necessary to accommodate the kind of hard-skills training necessary to protect embassies and diplomatic personnel. However, at some point in the process, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) advocated that the center be placed in Maryland. With the support of fellow Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), and Rep. Frank Kratovil (D-Md.), a so-called Blue Dog Democrat who represents Queen Anne’s County and whose House seat is widely-viewed as being in jeopardy in 2010, Sen. Mikulski finally staked a claim on the new center. She crowed about it in a press release, saying “This is a big win for Maryland. The training facility is good news for three reasons: jobs, jobs, and jobs.” The project was projected to create 400 permanent jobs.
Which is when the trouble began. In the 15 months since the ARRA bill became law, the President’s oft-repeated statement that stimulus expenditures would be timely, targeted, and temporary has largely gone down the collective memory hole, along with his promise that stimulus money would be given to shovel-ready infrastructure projects in order to jump-start the economy and create jobs.
At 8.4 percent, Queen Anne County’s jobless rate is well below the national average of 9.7 percent. In addition, $20 million of the $70 million is slated to be used to purchase 1,250 acres of farmland from a private seller, not a dime of which will create jobs. The $70 million appropriated through the ARRA will defray only a small portion of the center’s final price tag, estimated to be around $500 million.
The location chosen currently has no sewer or water lines, few roads, and would require tens of millions of dollars in additional infrastructure improvements to support major construction and eventually, a sprawling campus, complete with driving tracks, explosives and firearms training areas – hardly a shovel-ready project. Local residents believe the imposition of the unwanted facility will eventually lead to pressure for higher taxes, more congestion and, in due course, the obliteration of their local environment and pastoral culture. The other danger is that this cadre of pork-barrel-loving politicians from Maryland, unwilling to force already angry constituents to pay for the additional infrastructure, will simply use the partially-funded training center as a convenient rationale for snagging more federal earmarks. The project has been identified in both CNN’s list of most wasteful stimulus projects and Sen. Tom Coburn’s (R-Okla.) report on wasteful stimulus spending.
Residents in the sparsely-populated hamlet of Ruthsberg, many of whom chose to live there expressly because of its quiet beauty and wide open spaces, rose up and demanded answers. The Queen Anne’s Conservation Association submitted several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests demanding all documents related to how the Queen Anne’s County site was chosen; its FOIA submissions were summarily rejected with little explanation. GSA and State Department officials have indicated that they have no intention of releasing any documents related to site selection criteria, deliberations, even the identity of the decision makers for another eight to 14 months, hardly the sort of transparency that the Obama administration has so relentlessly preened over.
After residents of Queen Anne’s County forced the GSA and the State Department to stand and deliver at multiple town hall meetings, several of which became acrimonious and changed few minds, it became clear that GSA officials had misrepresented the true nature of the FASTC. County Commissioners, most of whom initially supported the training facility, have now withdrawn support. Local businessman and community activist Sveinn Storm recalls that during one meeting, when residents assailed the facility as wasteful and unnecessary, GSA and State Department officials claimed that it would yield huge savings to taxpayers by enabling the agencies to close the 19 other training facilities and consolidate their activities. However, at a later meeting, when residents reminded government officials that the ARRA was supposed to be creating jobs and then pressed them about how many jobs would be lost at the 19 facilities slated for closure, agency officials reversed themselves, admitted that the other facilities would not be closing at all, and that the savings extolled earlier were nonexistent. During the January 7, 2010 meeting, one angry resident asked “If this is such a godsend, why are they lying to us?”
Today, the final disposition of this $70 million pork-barrel stimulus project remains in limbo while the stakeholders await the outcome of an environmental assessment, which is already one month overdue. One Ruthsberg resident was quoted in the April 12 edition of Time magazine, saying, “They’re trying to ram this down our throats…I just don’t trust them.” Sounds eerily familiar.
