Behold The Conservatives

LITTLE ROCK — A reader e-mailed to say that surely we would not be forced this year to endure the usual legislative raid on state surpluses for local projects.

After all, the recession has tightened budget screws and, more to the point, the recent election was all about smaller, less active and more austere government.

Naturally these tea party types would not want to engage in obvious contradiction, even hypocrisy.

I refer to reducing taxes and government spending on one hand while running home with tax money in the other so they could brag on themselves for delivering some inessential local play-pretty, be it a sidewalk or a street lightor community center or a rodeo subsidy or a roadside marker for B.B. King’s guitar.

We’ve even directed hundreds of thousands of these tax dollars over recent years to the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame. Can we agree that a shrine to great Razorbacks of yore ought to be able to raise its own money privately, and that, if unable, is one truly pitiable enterprise indeed?

This biennially orgiastic process is worse than congressional earmarking.

At least congressional earmarking is projectoriented and encompasses a member of Congress using leverage to pry money for a defined local project into some actual needed appropriation.

But what we have done at the state level inrecent years - on the bogus precept of fairness - is give every member of the Legislature an equal share of an allotted localproject pot. Some of these legislators have had to work hard to come up with some way to spend their share.

This is responsible?

This is efficient? This is strategically wise? This is accountable?

If it’s conservative, it’s a big-government variety.

Monday is the deadline for filing individual bills for appropriations for local projects from this General Improvement Fund. What began as a trickle had picked up steam by the end of the week, to the extent that the number of such bills this time could well rival that of more prosperous days less dominated by professed tea party frugality.

This GIF is made up of money that comes in over budget and, beyond that, of fund balances accruing each month since state agencies can’t spend their budgets to the dollar, and of interest earned thereon.

Not too long ago, this GIF contained a cool billion dollars. This year, with tight budgets and interest rates of approximately zero percent, we’ll be lucky to have $70 million.

Of that, $40 million is clearly obligated, including $23 million that we will need to meet payroll because, every decade or so, we confront an extra pay period because, after all, an annual payroll system based on 52 weeks actually covers 364 days, not 365.

Gov. Mike Beebe wants to use all the remaining $30 million, both for replenishing his “quick action” closing fund that is designed to nail down economic development projects and for whatever priorities emerge from a long list of state agencies facilities needs amounting to tens of millions, even hundreds of millions, of dollars.

But some legislators want a little something, anyway.

They come at this with a two-pronged essence. The first prong is that they feign austerity and fiscal conservatism by cutting taxes irresponsibly. The second is that they insist on going home with a check for personal and parochial aggrandizement.

All of this remains to be worked out. For now, consider yourself advised as follows: If your legislator lands some kind of local project, he is not really drinking the tea.

He actually is one of those big-government conservatives, hardly a rare breed.

JOHN BRUMMETT IS A COLUMNIST FOR THE ARKANSAS NEWS BUREAU IN LITTLE ROCK.