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Published in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner on March 2, 2008:

Earful of earmarks

Critics of Alaska projects are blaming the wrong people

Sens. Ted Stevens and Lisa Murkowski and Rep. Don Young have little choice but to push back in the public relations battle over earmarks, the individual funding items that are placed into federal spending legislation but which receive little, if any, public debate beforehand.

Their decision to begin publicly listing all the funding requests they receive is a fair response to the misplaced criticism the three have been receiving from Gov. Sarah Palin and many others who suggest earmarks are nothing more than pork projects being shoveled home by an overeager congressional delegation. Those critics say the continued earmarking of funds for Alaska harms the state's standing among its sister states.

People who think this, however, are mistaken in how those earmark requests originate. Sens. Stevens and Murkowski and Rep. Young steer money toward Alaska projects because people here ask for that money. Sen. Stevens, according to his Web site, receives many unsolicited requests for funding.

Some of those for the forthcoming fiscal year come from Fairbanks and elsewhere in the Interior.

Take a look:

* The Fairbanks North Star Borough School District submitted a request for just under $4 million to renovate the North Pole High School Career Technical Education Wing. The district would provide just $100,000 in matching funds.

If federal funding doesn't come through, maybe Fairbanks voters will need to pay for this project themselves if they really want it.

* The Denali Borough has asked Sen. Stevens to secure $400,000 so it can clear some firebreaks around its populated areas.

Maybe Denali Borough residents should pay this themselves.

* The Galena City School District has asked Sen. Stevens for $500,000 for its boarding school program.

Maybe the district should go somewhere else for the money.

* The Literacy Council of Alaska, based in Fairbanks, wants $82,800 for each of three years to hire a full-time staff for its used-book recycling program, which sends books to villages and to agencies in Alaska free of charge.

Maybe the Literacy Council should raise its own funds for this.

* Victims for Justice, an Anchorage-based nonprofit agency that aids victims of violent crime, wants $575,000 to expand it services to Fairbanks, Juneau and the Matanuska-Susitna Borough.

Maybe Fairbanks residents should take up a collection on their own if they want this service.

* The Great Alaska Boy Scout Council wants $7.5 million over two to three years to develop a "high adventure base" just south of Denali National Park and Preserve.

Maybe the Boy Scouts should go door-to-door selling candy bars more often to raise the money.

Get the idea here?

Some of these projects might not happen without federal support. But you don't hear that talked about in the criticism of earmarks, which are generally ridiculed as being for wasteful projects.

Gov. Palin has made much of being against the widespread use of earmarks and has said she wants the state to seek fewer of them from Congress. OK, but does the governor also intend for local governments to submit fewer requests to the congressional delegation? Surely the existence of so many earmark requests from local governments and other groups is just as problematic for her as the number of state requests seems to be. Does she find fault, for example, with the Fairbanks school district seeking federal funds for the North Pole High School project? Is she ready to provide state funding for the projects listed above?

Whether or not the federal government should be funding projects such as those requested of Alaska's congressional delegation is a topic of fair debate. It is not right, however, for people to blindly denounce earmarks as nothing more than the shoveling out of federal dollars to an unwanting populace back home when the opposite is true. It is Alaskans who many times are going to their members of Congress asking for money. That fact should not be ignored by Gov. Palin and other earmark critics.