Today’s sermon is in praise of pork.
Pork is what it’s called by the right-wing politicians and cynics of the political press. So I won’t try to end-run anyone by calling it “critical federal infrastructure spending” or some such noble-sounding thing.
No, “pork” is just fine. In fact, you can call it whatever you like. Call it chicken or beef for all I care. Just so long as everyone understands what’s about to happen now that we’ve reduced it in the public mind to a four-letter word that we can do without.
The federal budget contains huge amounts of pork, we are told. Every year conservative propaganda mills like The Heritage Foundation publish long lists of presumably unnecessary federal “pork” projects. But for clarity’s sake, let’s consider just one slice: the 104,435,000 federal dollars that Chicago is seeking to help repair its lakefront seawall.
This is the season to think about that step-stone wall, which winds for eight miles between Montrose Avenue to Fullerton Parkway on the north, and between 26th Street to 56th Street on the south. It’s what keeps one-third of Chicago’s lakefront park system from washing into Lake Michigan. Or at least that’s what it used to do, before 60 years of constant wave action and periodic changes in lake level undermined it to a point where the whole shebang needs to be replaced. Or else.
Last month’s wicked northeaster, with its 70 m.p.h. winds and 14-foot waves, was a preview of what’s ahead. The storm showered Lake Shore Drive with hunks of crumbling seawall and collapsed huge slabs of the concrete walkway along the water’s edge. The Chicago Park District cleaned up the mess as best it could, but unless the entire wall is rebuilt, and soon, large portions of Lincoln and Burnham Parks will be washed away. The Drive is also at risk.
This crisis didn’t pop up overnight. For the better part of 10 years the city, the park district and a blue-ribbon Shoreline Protection Commission have been measuring what needs to be done. After numerous bureaucratic go-rounds with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, it was decided in 1994 to present Congress with a $192.2 million plan to rebuild the seawall and other structures protecting the lakefront. The federal government was to pay 65 percent of the cost, the city and the park district 35 percent.
So an appropriation was included in the “Water Resources Development Act of 1994,” a national listing of projects to be undertaken by the Army Corps. It was a bill the cynics called “pork-barrel” legislation.
Chicago still has a few congressmen who know how to roll such barrels (Democrats William Lipinski and Sidney Yates) and the ’94 bill advanced to the Senate. But there, neither Sens. Paul Simon or Carol Moseley-Braun could overcome the gridlock (Remember gridlock?) that had overtaken that institution on the eve of the Republican takeover.
Now it’s 1996 and gridlock has been replaced by budgetary warfare between a GOP Congress and a Democratic White House. Another list of Army Corps projects is being put together, but this time the key committees are controlled by Republicans and Democratic pork barons such as Dan Rostenkowski and Marty Russo are no longer on hand to plead the city’s case.
Rep. Lipinski (D-Chicago) still sits on the key Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, though it remains to be seen whether, in the hyper-partisan air that has swept the House, he’ll be able to attach the seawall project to the committee chairman’s final markup later this spring.
On another front, the Army Corps of Engineers is looking to ease its own budgetary problems by closing its divisional headquarters in Chicago and relocating its functions to offices in Cincinnati and Omaha. Unless Chicago’s congressional delegation can block the move, the city might lose considerably more than 117 civil service jobs. Local problems like shoreline erosion easily could slip out-of-sight and out-of-mind once senior Corps decision-makers leave town.
None of which is likely to bother the politicians and pundits who never pass up a chance to bad-mouth pork.
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They are unaware, you see, that America was raised on a steady diet of pig meat. The original colonial charters were a form of royal pork; congressional pork would later cause the canals to be dug, the rails to be laid, the interstates to be paved. Many on the political Right now seek to deny it, but our economy still runs on a mix of public and private investment.
The Corps of Engineers, which is not known for hyperbole, estimates that the annual cost of not rebuilding Chicago’s seawall is $47 million in washed-out land values plus $22 million in lost recreational value. Left unchecked, the erosion eventually will claim the city’s South Water Filtration Plant, portions of Lake Shore Drive, Promontory Point, Adler Planetarium and the South Shore Cultural Center. The total potential loss, according to the corps, could run as high as $5 billion with a “b.”
So call it pork, if you will. Or chicken. Or beef.
But it would be a damned fool government that would let Chicago’s priceless lakefront slide into Lake Michigan. Even pigs have more sense than that.